I told you so

“I cannot remain in a party that has, through the actions of its current leader, John Steenhuisen, been captured by the ANC and other criminal interests. The result of this capture is that the DA has been completely muzzled [and has] lost its voice and its ability to lead in South Africa’s interests.”

Strong words indeed. The day after the debacle which kicked this off in November, I received a text from one of my Stellenbosch contacts, showing Steenhuisen and Aucamp, as well as Maimane and Ivan Meyer palling around having a jolly old time with a lot of well-known megaboers, stud-farmers and ANC-adjacents. A lot of her friends in the industry were worried about this development – after all, it’s common knowledge that stock auctions are a great way to launder cash. Just ask Cyril Ramaphosa’s staff at Phala Phala.

The specific details of the policy changes presaged by the firing of Dion George are handled well by Don Pinnock at Daily Maverick from the time, so I won’t go over it here. Rumour and speculation aside, we may see a few meaningful fireworks, as George has forwarded evidence of financial misconduct to the Public Protector now.

But suffice it to say, I had an inkling, long before the election, that this sort of reckoning would be coming. In late 2021, I had realised from following Frans Cronje’s writing on the precipitous decline of ANC electoral support that his 2012 prediction of the ANC’s loss of majority was coming to pass, and that soonthe temptation to enter into a coalition might tempt the DA. My counterargument is that this would not save the country, because the ANC would have all the leverage – fear of the EFF would mean that the DA would have to toe the ANC party line or risk putting EWC on the menu.

I intuited that, in government, the DA would be unable to hold the ANC to account for corruption, and wouldn’t have the leverage to change a thing. They would more likely become like the ANC, by being forced to defend the corruption, fiscal profligacy and racial policies, and eventually become corrupt progressive racialists themselves.

So I met with Helen Zille in January of 2022, and naively tried to convince her it would be a bad idea, and that at the end of the day, using their control of the province, and a drive for secession would be a far better lever – after all, if it went all the way, you’d get a free, nonracial and independent Cape, capable of ringfencing South African capital and providing a place for minorities to flee. And if it didn’t, it would create the leverage needed to force national reforms, and a road to federalism.

But she dismissed it out of hand, and said that they had preconditions for the ANC to agree to first – scrap BEE and EE, privatise the SOEs, and create an anticorruption body that had power over the presidency. This was such an implausible and impractical barrier that I reckoned it would never come to pass, and rested reassured that the DA would be forced into the secessionist corner by events.

But then she went to the BizNews conference in March, and gave her famous little “triangle” speech, effectively laying out the case for a coalition, just without saying the “c” word.

I got anxious and angry, and wrote a big essay on it on my substack – 6 000 words detailing the reasons why the DA couldn’t possibly do this. Zille of course was furious, and attacked me on twitter before finally cutting all contact. She continued insisting that a coalition with the ANC was off the table despite ample evidence, including leaked audio in which she trashed the notion of what would later be called the Multi-Party Coalition (or “moonshot pact”), saying she would rather do a deal with Ramaphosa’s ANC than any combination of the other parties, apparently regardless of turnout.

But my predictions in that essay were not so much about the coalition coming to pass as it was about what would happen to the ANC if it did. And sure enough, from the moment they got into power, they have been enthusiastically rubberstamping the ANC’s racialist and anti-Afrikaans policies, stupid educational reforms, and dangerous climate change legislature, and even photoshopping the largest representative of farmers in the SADC region from a press photo because he dared to criticise John Steenhuisen. At no stage have they even proposed their own departmental policies, choosing instead to carry through policies drafted by the ANC before the election.

And now there are corruption scandals to boot. I can’t say I am particularly surprised – after all, since that 2022 meeting, I have spent a lot of time digging into local corruption stories in the Western Cape, and as it turns out, the DA never discipline or prosecute any of their members or staff for any form of misconduct unless the police move on them first. Often, they just bounce them around from district to district, and if the scandal is big enough, promote them to parliament, where they do nearly nothing, stay quiet, and collect fat paychecks. They’ve sabotaged coalitions with their allies to work with the ANC, persecuted whistleblowers, and issued private threats. They’ve rigged contracts, funded private debt for companies owned by friends and family.

But never have they had access to the power and privilege afforded by national government. And now they are being sucked into the quagmire. The difference now, is that there are toothy fish in those waters – hardly anyone considers it sexy to look into waste-to-energy contracts in Drakenstein, tourism companies in Knysna, traffic ticket systems in Hessequa or discretionary budgets in Bitou. But now they are on the national stage, the usual fudge they pull on local journalists won’t cut it.

In response to the bombshell resignation statement from Dion George, Zille said George should have gone through the DA’s Federal Legal Commission process. But after having seen emails looping her into every single act of corruption or dirty backstabbing in the Western Cape over the past 15 years, I don’t believe that any DA member should bother with internal proceedings under any circumstances. If you want to see justice done, throw it to the press and the Public Prosecutor.

But another thing I have learned recently is that the DA have backed the ANC since Helen took control of the party.

She took credit for initiating the urban upgrading policy (free title deeds and utility connections for land invaders) in 2006, five years before it became a national policy. But it was in fact mooted in 2005, when the ANC were in charge of the Cape Town City Council. It has resulted in the Western Cape becoming the worst in the country for informal settlement rates, and the City becoming the second-worst.

In 2012, she gave an interview declaring her intention to merge with Jacob Zuma’s ANC to implement the National Development Plan, and the next year, had her party vote in favour of the new BEE and EE bills (and gave a public defence of the action reeking of bullshit), heartily defending the policies in principle, alongside some vaguely-defined form of acceleration of land reform.

This bears out some of the odd comments she has made over the years in various interviews, backing total global government, attacking the free market, celebrating the increase of “100% black spaces” and the odd choice of hers to elide the fact that she worked for George Soros for 13 years from her autobiography.

The choice of Steenhuisen as leader, a dense, facile man of incontinent passions and limited intelligence or courage, makes sense only as an extremely cynical move – the selection of a cuddly white face to reassure voters that they won’t be doing Maimane’s ANC-lite moves again (they lost a big chunk to the VF+ in 2019), while appearing friendly enough that they can still sell the rainbow nation.

Geordin Hill Lewis is lined up to replace him by all accounts, though when is a different question. Whether the public can stomach a man further to the left than Helen Zille, who has overseen the penetration of the numbers gangs into the City admin, allegedly abused his powers to settle neighbourhood disputes, and whose employees tried to expropriate land from both poor coloured and middle-class white suburbs to make way for “densification” projects, remains to be seen – his PR is excellent, though it will be tested when the public are more familiar with these criticisms, which we have covered at length on these pages.

I am willing to bet all of this will hurt them in the coming election, and they will deserve it.