Bongani Baloyi, the former mayor of Midvaal who joined ActionSA this week, says he left the DA after the party became toxic when Helen Zille was elected federal council chair in 2019.
Baloyi told the Sunday Times this week that after the departure of Mmusi Maimane the party lost direction, and leaders made decisions and utterances he could not defend in public.
Before leaving the DA, Baloyi was touted as a possible candidate for Gauteng premier, given his successful stint as mayor of Midvaal. The DA rejected this as a rumour, but insiders said Baloyi stood a very good chance. Now he is tipped as a possible premier candidate for Herman Mashaba's party in 2024.
Baloyi said that although the successes of Midvaal have been attributed to the DA, he thinks it was his personal leadership style of protecting professionals from politics that made the difference. He said he ran Midvaal with an iron fist, a trait he learnt from the book Power: A New Social Analysis by philosopher Bertrand Russell, which outlined how to use it for the greater good.
“So I was a very stern leader, I did not hesitate firing people or swapping MMCs. So I really had to protect the centre and ensure that people appreciate that there is a centre in this municipality and that power resides in one place, it's not an entity that’s loosely passed around. So in those nine years I really was the centre, I held it firm, I did not play around with [power]."
Baloyi said that even though he had successes under the DA, he could not see himself representing a party he longer believed in.
“I don’t believe in whatever the DA is trying to do at this point in time. I don’t have anything personal against Helen Zille, or John Steenhuisen for that matter, but the entire body [of the] DA and what it has become today is a space that’s foreign to me and I want to go elsewhere.”
Though he only officially left the party in December, Baloyi revealed that he ceased being a member of the DA two years ago, following the departure of Maimane and Mashaba. He said these two men, and others, had also left because of the way the party became “extremely toxic” when Zille returned to a top post following a brief period of semi-retirement from active politics.
“The DA I think, as Mmusi said, ayisafani [it’s no longer the same] and I was comparing the DA of 2011 and 2017, it was a fundamentally different DA, the energy inside of it. We got a sense that we’re really moving into a different direction when it adopted redress policy.
“We adopted policies on BEE as well under Helen Zille in 2013. And you got a sense that they understood our background and where we are going as a country and the type of future, the type of shared future we want to co-create with every South African,” Baloyi said.
A black person always carries an albatross in the DA. When [black voters] see you they think ‘Ja, but Helen Zille said ...’
— Former DA rising star Bongani Baloyi
“Along the way there were many things that really affected the performance of the party and the attractiveness of the party to a black young person like me and I suspect many other black people as well.”
The party also started struggling to define itself and what it represents, he said.
“I mean we are the Democratic Alliance but alliance of who? So we were trying to respond to this question in this time we find ourselves in, so there was an issue about the soul and direction of the party that probably Mmusi was embodying that resonated with many of us.
“And then there was an issue about who is more liberal than the other — who is a classical liberal, who is a neoliberal, who is a nationalist liberal — and many people were termed different things. Sometimes in its expression it's very exclusionary… it felt like that at times. So it's a number of these things happening at the same time.”
There was also the issue of comments Zille made about colonialism, which left Baloyi continually having to defend himself and the party to prospective black voters.
“A black person always carries an albatross in the DA. When people see you then they think ‘Ja, but Helen Zille’, ‘We hear you, but Helen Zille said … what did you say?’, ‘Tony Leon said … what did you say?’" Baloyi said.
“So even though you have mentioned this all the time you must still explain the same thing and I don’t think there’s a level of appreciation how much the clumsiness of these things, whether unintended or otherwise, has an effect on black people.”
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