Being a columnist like me, Helen Zille told a radio station the other day, “is the easiest job in the world. You just read a few headlines and then have an opinion without actually knowing what’s going on.”
Not only was the DA federal executive leader talking about me, she was talking to me on Clement Manyathela’s show on 702. To set the scene, he had invited me to talk about my John Steenhuisen column here last week. She called in and the host generously indulged her.
Nothing in my column last week was nasty about her. If anything, the opposite, but I understand I can be irritating. Like most journalists I don’t always know what’s going on but finding out has been the whole point of journalism for centuries.
If I were reporting about Steenhuisen’s future as DA leader I’d call the party and be given a statement that, it seems, I would be expected to accept as fact. Even as a columnist I’d be fed the same line: everything’s fine and we all “work well” with John and there’s a conference in April next year.
But it’s not my job to embed myself in the DA. I wrote last week that I expected Steenhuisen to go as leader this year or next because 1), it’s interesting; 2), I’ve been told that by someone to whom he said it himself; and 3), I’ve had conversations with party insiders who’ve made clear they don’t rate him.
“I know that I’m one politician,” Zille went on, “who gets into trouble for telling the truth … and I’m telling you what’s going on inside the DA because I know what’s going on inside the DA.”
Zuma and Zille always got on well though, his ethical frailties notwithstanding. We are all frail.
A ringing endorsement of the truth, then, which she instantly spoiled with an example of why the truth isn’t always complete. Mmusi Maimane, she argued with a second guest on the show, “was not asked to leave the party at all. He decided to resign”.
Seriously? George Orwell wrote about this. A DA panel investigating the poor result of the 2019 election concluded that “significant changes are required to restore functional and effective leadership to the party … Consequently, we recommend that those ultimately responsible for the leadership and management of the party — the leader, chairperson of federal council and CEO — step down and make way for new leadership [and] that a federal congress is held as soon as constitutionally possible to allow for the election of a new leader.”
Maimane was that leader. He had no choice.
Then she got onto whether leaders such as Maimane attract black voters, not something she or I support: “We’ve learnt that lesson and the DA does not make the same mistake twice,” she said but, actually, it does. It was Zille herself who tried and failed to hire Mamphela Ramphele into the party leadership before she hit on Maimane.
And of course there’s me, “always wrong about all your political analysis since you supported and plugged Bantu Holomisa, right through to Jacob Zuma who you thought would be a great replacement for Thabo Mbeki, and then to Cyril Ramaphosa who you thought would be the great hope for South Africa. So please, truly, get to your facts and please don’t thumbsuck your analysis.”
I’ve heard this often from her and apart from an isolated early hope that a charming and approachable Zuma might have been a refreshing change after an aloof and cold Mbeki, I can’t remember making a sustained effort to support him.
But she will have her DA researchers trawling the clippings so I’ll take the hit.
I also remember an attack on my house in Johannesburg by Zuma supporters not long before the picture, below, was taken, for writing an opinion they didn’t like, just like Zille didn’t like last Sunday’s. Zuma and Zille always got on well though, his ethical flaws notwithstanding. We are all frail.
What else can we all learn from this? Politicians hate critics? There’s truth and there’s truth? Journalists are always on the outside, trying to explain what’s going on? The latter as it should be.
Right at the top, though, is the future of the DA, the only party to come even close to a sustained challenge to the hegemony of, and the rot in, the ANC.
And you have to acknowledge Zille’s outstanding role in that endeavour. But unless it advances its vote meaningfully in 2029 it risks losing its central role in our politics, stuck at 20%.
So I have no interest in a fight with the DA. Rather, I’m going to fight for the DA. That means fighting to change the bits of its offering that don’t work. I’m big and ugly enough and, I’ve made enough mistakes, to know what they are.
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