John Steenhuisen needs to grow up or get out

Mushtak Parker 

IS THE DA wanting to have its cake and eat it? Is its establishment in 2000 and playbook a truly ‘Made in Africa’ construct in the morass of the post-apartheid dispensation and discourse, or a caricature conjured up from the melting pot of the losers in the majority struggle for freedom, equity and justice after over two centuries of colonial-cum-white supremacist rule?

At first glance, the DA, the second largest party in the GNU ‘coalition of the unwilling’ after the ANC, feigns the very epitome of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which would be anathema to the DOGE dinosaurs roaming the urban sprawls and steppes of MAGA America, its ally of ideological and race-based expediency.

Did you notice the callous coyness of John Steenhuisen, the DA leader and Minister of Agriculture in the GNU, in the oval office in the White House in May when President Trump and his sycophants literally ambushed and put the boot into a stoical and dignified President Ramaphosa with fake news about Afrikaner “genocide”, white victimhood, marginalisation and land grabs?

It was not the DA leader’s finest hour, but that coyness betrays a fundamental flaw in his and his party’s fit for purposeness in South African polity and indeed in the GNU, which under its current persona and profile together with the arithmetic of race makes it unelectable unless of course the country undergoes a seismic event very high on the Richter Scale of electoral politics. 

Fast forward to June 25, when Ramaphosa sacked his Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition Andrew Whitfield, a member of the DA, for defying protocol by undertaking an overseas trip without prior permission from his President as the rules clearly stipulate. One man’s “minor peccadillo” is another man’s ‘wilful defiance’. There are plenty of precedents as to the sacking of ministers defying their commander-in-chief. 

The question is not necessarily the act of defiance itself, but the motive behind the visit to the US at a time when the Trump administration egged on by a treacherous so-called minority ‘Afrikaner lobby’ had it in for the GNU and ANC.

Who did Whitfield meet and socialise with during his visit? That it could be construed as an act against the Constitution itself as Ramaphosa has alluded to should also raise alarm bells given that some on the neo-liberal right armed with the casuistry of supposedly legal technicalities are hellbent on tarnishing the Constitution itself as a “race law”.  

The puerile reaction of Steenhuisen to the sacking reinforces the notion that his days as the leader of the second largest party in the country and therefore the GNU ought to be numbered. Some say he has lost the plot. It’s more likely that he is out of his depth.

That a minor peccadillo has changed the persona and style of the DA leader in an instance from passive aggression to humiliating idiopathic juvenile tantrums competes as probably one of the fastest transformative acts in the GNU if not in three decades of democracy.

His resort to coalition politics of lawfare, ultimatums, fatuous brinkmanship is unbefitting a self-respecting leader of any national party which should have a contributing role (like others of similar weighting) in the South African political landscape. 

His antics smack more of the petulance of self-entitlement and the psychological trauma of loss of former privileges under apartheid. It is time that the DA leader either grows up or gets out. 

Frankly there are lots of actors across the political spectrum of which South Africans have had a gatvol. Polity is not only about government but equally importantly about opposition and political and civic culture. The paucity of credible opposition is a bane of South African politics which does not augur well for the future. Which means we are stuck with the current set-up.

The GNU has fizzled out as the great hope of a unified response to the country’s seemingly intractable socio-economic woes. That is why its first anniversary is a massive let down for which both Ramaphosa and Steenhuisen must shoulder the blame.

It’s one thing sacking a minister (from a coalition partner) for going on a free-range walkabout abroad. It’s another thing for the president to bask in the ambivalence of indecisiveness when it comes to members of his own party including ministers embroiled in allegations of scandal and corruption. 

The problem for the DA is its “genes stupid”. The DA has an historical and genetic disposition to being perceived rightly or wrongly as largely a party serving the interests of the rump white constituency leftover after the historic transition to black majority rule in 1994.

It is seized with preserving its privileges couched in the rhetoric of economic liberalism, the free market, the hegemony of the private sector, minimalist state intervention, with little empathy to righting the wrongs of centuries of oppression based on a bigoted weltanschauung of race-based superiority of the white race and its culture. 

In the topsy turvy world of South African politics, it’s never a case of a zero-sum calculation, given the numerous twists in the evolution of our politics. This applies to the ANC, Africa’s oldest surviving political movement and party, its current alliance partner the SACP, and to the motley of other parties across the colour spectrum that has since metamorphosed into our remarkable Rainbow Nation. 

In fact, it was the SACP that started organising workers and became the first non-racial political organisation in South Africa in 1921. Its extreme socialist ideology, however, was never a natural bedfellow of the social conservatism of the ANC nurtured by the Christian missionary movement. That’s why the two liberation movements never forged a formal coalition in the nascent struggle against white rule, until the historic democratic elections in 1994.

Deputy President Paul Mashatile addressing the 150th Anniversary Gala Dinner of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of South Africa in May could not have been more to the point: “I was fortunate to have been raised by a pastor and have held the values of Christianity close to my heart. The ANC was launched by believers and has throughout its 113 years of existence been guided by the principles that we have learned from our faith, the most important of these being the instruction to ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’.

Even today, in our democratic South Africa, the church remains an indispensable partner in addressing the challenges of poverty, inequality, crime, and social fragmentation. The ANC loves and appreciates the work that the Church and other Faith-based Organisations play in social cohesion, nation-building and moral regeneration in our country.” The dichotomy is the immaculate conception of the ANC/ SACP/Cosatu coalition that has ruled for the last 30 years.

The fact that the coalition now includes the DA et al like a second coming should be a pause for thought. The DA is the incestuous result of many parties and movements coalescing the remnants of the National Party of Verwoerd, Vorster and Botha, subsequently transformed into the New National Party (NNP); the Democratic Party; the centrist Progressive Party and the Federal Alliance, over the years and uniting around the apple pie vision of a one nation South Africa, only for the ultimate twist of the NNP jumping ship and siding with the ANC.

As for the DA having its cake and eating it is inconceivable. Its very evolution, the bitterness of being perpetual losers therefore irrelevant, its chauvinistic sense of self-entitlement are incompatible with the aspirations of a genuine GNU. No wonder it has opted out of the National Dialogue!

Parker is an economist and writer based in London