The DA is becoming the ANC before our eyes

The Democratic Alliance’s recent wave of ANC defections including Banele Majingo, formerly the ANC’s Leader of the Opposition in the City of Cape Town, and Neville Delport the ANC’s former Western Cape secretary, signals not merely a shift in political allegiance, but a deeper ideological convergence.

Far from demonstrating the DA’s ascendancy as a liberal alternative the trend suggests that South Africa’s largest opposition party is becoming a refuge for displaced ANC insiders, importing both the culture and contradictions of its rival.

Majingo’s resignation from the ANC and subsequent embrace of the DA was framed in moral terms, a move toward “clean governance” and “economic growth.” Yet such rhetoric mirrors the very language used by successive ANC reformers who promised renewal and accountability while presiding over bureaucratic decay.

The DA’s willingness to absorb these defectors implies less a commitment to ideological purity than a strategic embrace of the ANC’s personnel.

Neville Delport’s defection is even more revealing. A former provincial secretary ousted in the ANC’s internal reconfiguration, Delport joined the DA alongside several other former ANC figures. His justification is that the ANC no longer represents the will of coloured communities. This taps into the same ethnic and populist undercurrents that have long shaped ANC factional politics.

The DA’s decision to platform him prominently, flanked by Helen Zille and Tertuis Simmers, marks a symbolic fusion: the party that once defined itself in opposition to liberation politics now courts its disillusioned veterans.

For the DA, these arrivals are being marketed as a “realignment.” Zille describes them as evidence that South Africans are abandoning the ANC to support the DA. Yet this framing obscures the ideological cost.

The more the DA recruits from within the ANC’s ranks the more it inherits its rival’s political instincts such as its patronage networks, its moral ambiguity, and its preference for power over principle. The DA, long reliant on managerial credibility and middle-class stability, risks transforming into a repainted ANC: a party of incumbency rather than conviction.

The ANC for its part seems content to portray the defectors as political debris. Its national spokesperson, Mahlengi Bhengu, dismissed them as opportunists purged by the renewal process.

If the DA can absorb ANC cadres without ideological friction it suggests that South Africa’s political spectrum has collapsed into a single, self-replicating establishment.

Political analyst Sipho Seepe has argued that “politicians are expedient,” and that the defections reflect a loss of faith in the ANC as a vehicle for reform. The problem is that those same politicians are now finding a comfortable home in the DA, a party that increasingly resembles the one it claims to replace.

Managerial language and liberal branding conceal a growing sameness: two parties, both committed to socialism, reliant on the same state structures, and largely disconnected from the restless electorate below.

Mr Ramaphosa’s recent declaration that the Government of National Unity meeting was “excellent and meaningful” captures the broader mood of South African politics: consensual, technocratic, and uninspired.

Beneath the surface the ideological distance between the ANC and DA narrows with every defection. In a sense the realignment Zille celebrates is not a victory for pluralism, but its quiet end. South Africa’s opposition is not replacing the ANC, it is becoming it.