It’s been a long time coming but this might be the year of big change in the DA. And when it happens, the unseating of John Steenhuisen as leader will be cold-blooded and swift.
Steenhuisen, first elected leader in 2020 and again in 2023, is now the minister of agriculture in the government of national unity.
Low expectations notwithstanding, the GNU is an early success by both local and foreign measures of confidence and despite persistent attacks on the ANC and President Cyril Ramaphosa by ANC allies and others on the Left, for entertaining the DA in government.
That confidence is a delicate thing though, especially inside the party itself. You can sense a real anxiety in the DA in the frequent expressions of conviction and triumph from the few DA ministers in the cabinet along with Steenhuisen. They’re not talking to you and me.
They’re talking to a growing number of fidgety DA MPs who have lost their role as opponents of endless ANC governments.
Almost none of the confidence shown in the GNU has rubbed off on Steenhuisen himself, despite it having been him who drove the DA into the government. His popularity in the party is low and while I’m no DA insider I have heard from enough people who are in it, and who fund it, to convince me he will not see out this parliament, or perhaps even this year, as leader.
A first-rate chief whip, Steenhuisen has been a very ordinary leader
The party is due to hold a federal congress in 2026, but I’m told it may happen earlier. Whenever it is, Steenhuisen will either have to put up a fight, which he would probably lose, or strike a deal in which he steps aside with a provison that keeps him in the government long enough to attract a ministerial pension.
A first-rate chief whip, Steenhuisen has been very ordinary as the leader. He is driven by no central political creed.
The DA vote in local elections in 2021 was well down on 2016 and in last year’s general election he made only marginal gains from the 2019 results that got his predecessor Mmusi Maimane fired. While he built a strong team to take the DA into the current coalition, he badly fumbled his own arrival in office with poorly judged appointments.
It is his general inability, though, to make clear electoral progress for the DA that has done for him. In a leadership election tomorrow he would almost certainly be replaced by the current mayor of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, with former Tshwane mayor Cilliers Brink an outside runner. No one wants a fight though, and Hill-Lewis and Steenhuisen are friends. But this isn’t personal. Steenhuisen has simply lost the confidence of too much of his party.
Elections matter and while the DA might be determined to avoid the crude politics of racial redress, it also needs to find at least another eight percentage points in the national vote.
It is a 20% party that needs to get closer to 30% to cement a robust place in the coalitions of the future. It can only do that by attracting more black African votes and it needs to do that by itself. There are no more deals to be done, no more pacts.
Steenhuisen can’t do it and even young Hill-Lewis (he is not yet 40), successful, tough and magnetic though he may be, would struggle. But the attempt has to be made and it needs to start now. The DA needs to find a way to appeal to what I suspect might be a useful vein of black voters desperate for leadership in enterprise, economic common sense and individual independence.
Steenhuisen’s departure would also ask questions of the head of the party’s federal executive, Helen Zille. She is far more central to the functioning of the DA than its leader but, in some measure, as big a barrier for those much-needed black votes as he is. Hill-Lewis has been a Zille project but it may be that her biggest blessing to him when he becomes leader would be to allow him the political space to propose a candidate of his own.
Zille has been immense for the DA and people worry that without her the party machine would collapse. That’s a dangerous legacy, though. The current DA deputy finance minister, Ashor Sarupen, is a popular choice for that top job and there is plenty of work still available for Zille if she’s up for it.
The DA has to grow if our politics are to stabilise. It needs to be big enough to block or enable constitutional change and it needs to be big enough to deal with, or benefit from, the further disintegration of the ANC.
Mainly, it needs to be big enough not to be afraid of losing white votes if it pitches at black ones. Whites surely know by now that they are safe here only when prosperity spreads everywhere. A DA clinging to those who don’t is a hopeless cause.
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