DA at cross-purposes with itself

The weekend’s DA political circus over the suspension of Helen Zille has exposed the fundamental problem with their federal structure, which is inevitably subverting a coherent party response. Federal organisations generally involve complex relationships between two (or more) levels of leadership, which can lead to tensions that require mechanisms for resolving them.

The first question that arises is who is officially mandated by the Federal Council to communicate its decisions. The second question is who is the council secretary who must then communicate the decisions of the council to the relevant people involved (in this case Helen Zille). It is improbable that Mmusi (Maimane) misunderstood the decisions of the Federal Council, which would naturally have been written down by the council secretary and read out at the end of the meeting.

For James Selfe, the chairperson, to be miles apart from the leader of the party on outcomes of the federal meeting speaks to more than just the dishonesty and Zille’s stronghold on the party, but to the fundamental problems with their federal structure.

The problem with having a federal structure, with a Federal Executive separate from the party’s government apparatus, is that it breeds arrogance and marginalisation from both ends. Federalism, by form and content, refers to a system in which there is constitutionally established sharing of authority between different layers of leadership.

Not managed well, there will always be a crippling tension between the sprawling bureaucracy of the federal executive and the party’s government apparatus.

Federalism is usually more than just a preferred model of government, but more often than not is as a result of pressures from minority nationalisms. It requires no stretch of imagination which group in the DA would push for federalism as a form of governance in the party.

If you look at the DA, in all the incidences that have involved disciplining party members, particularly the white minority old guard, the relationship between the two entities has proven to be uniquely ineffectual, protecting the wrongdoings of the minority class, and this is leading the DA into a party paralysis.

Mmusi Maimane, as the leader of the party, thinks he knows best the direction the party should be taking and finds Helen Zille’s comments inconsistent with that direction. Helen Zille, on the other hand, disagrees with this direction, accusing the DA under Mmusi’s rule as proving to be no alternative to the ANC, but almost a mirror image, and registered her worry about this direction. This poses clear challenges for James Selfe who, for all intents and purposes, is in his chairmanship to protect the minority nationalism.

If Maimane thinks he knows best, expecting the Federal Executive (FedEx) to take instructions from him, then that FedEx would be failing in its task of protecting minority nationalism. At best the FedEx role should be an advisory one, but one that respects Mmusi as an elected leader. That is, however, not how the DA operates.

FedEX has been turned into a power source to keep Mmusi in check and to keep the interests of the old DA white cabal protected.

The DA has no one to blame for this mess. It can, in fact, be argued that it is the same FedEx, then eating out of Zille’s palm (and do so still), with its staff working for Zille’s interests behind the scenes, which ensured that other candidates like Wilmot James or even Athol Trollip, who wanted to lead the DA, came up short in the DA elections.

This, however, is the second prominent misjudgement of young black leaders by Helen Zille.

She engaged in the same parachuting of a young black leader in Lindiwe Mazibuko, miscalculating the fire that was burning inside Lindiwe, waiting to explode.

Lindiwe took the opportunity and endorsement and rose to prominence - confident, articulate, black, excellent - and Zille suddenly realised that Lindiwe was capable of reaching the kinds of heights only a black leader could reach in a black majority country and, after a while, Zille would just be a has-been, running a province nobody really cared about.

Zille started to pull the ropes, and the house of cards came down on Mazibuko. Zille blamed Mazibuko for having an unquenchable thirst for power. Zille has insinuated, on SAfm, that she gave Mmusi a chance. Mmusi is about to head to Oxford for a PhD in theology.

Zille has abused the two layers of leadership in the DA structure in order to push her own agenda using, particularly, the FedEx. Now she is using the FedEx to survive.

Federalism, by its very nature, is never the primary form of organisation; it’s seen mainly as a response to political problems and seldom as a form of organising that will lead to Utopia.

The DA, an organisation that has kept reinventing itself, with occasional adoption of the exotic forces along the way, saw that, in order to protect itself, it must have a super-structure that will not change with the changing make-up of the organisation. Federalism was the answer. The alarming aspect in all my encounters with DA public servants is how little they know about

their party structure and party

dealings.

Federalism compromises unity of purpose. In terms of fostering a party identity, federalism will always largely fail to construct a political union within which both black and white, or young and old, members can live harmoniously.

With federalism, this will not be the last feud to erupt between the DA FedEx and the party apparatus and it will always seem like a brawl in a fractious family. The ruckus will most likely always be over rules, and who knows them better.

If Mmusi is in anyway interested in changing the DA, he must move to collapse this Federal Structure so that the organisation has one set of elected leaders to run the organisation. Until then, his puppet status remains intact.

Harold Meyerson, writing for The American Prospect in November 2009, said: “Federalism is more often the refuge of reactionaries than of visionaries, it has an even deeper flaw: setting an organisation at cross-purposes with itself,

and never more so than during changes.”

The DA is today an organisation at cross-purposes with itself.

Diko is an ANC-aligned thought leader and founder of PR firm

YD Media