The country’s former official opposition in parliament, the DA, held a successful elective conference in Midrand at the weekend.
At face value, it appears there was a real changing of the guard at national leadership level, but only time will tell.
For the first time in an eternity, former Cape Town mayor and Western Cape premier Helen Zille is officially without a post.
She has been replaced by Solly Msimanga as federal chair of the party, a position Zille had made the second most-powerful position in the party, after party leader.
Msimanga, Gauteng provincial leader of the DA, should, on paper, be the second most-powerful leader in the party to Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, who has chosen to remain in his current position instead of joining government as part of the government of national unity (GNU).
Hill-Lewis and Msimanga have set themselves the target of making the DA the country’s biggest party by electoral votes. Given this country’s fragmented electorate, it is not an impossible or improbable task.
But there are mountains the DA must climb to reach the summit. Outgoing federal chair Zille believes she has saved the party from “woke, left, ethno-populism”.
This is the first hurdle the DA needs to overcome to woo new voters. The voters that the DA will need to fulfil its hopes of becoming the biggest political party in this country are the black middle class.
Msimanga asked the right question in his campaign to be federal leader: why the country’s biggest political party, the ANC, shed close to 17% of its voters in the last general election, yet the DA failed to pick up any of the voters that its biggest opponent shed?
The answer to this lies in what Zille claims to have saved the party from, the “woke” crowd. The current Donald Trump-popularised Make America Great Again movement’s practices have somehow managed to turn being “woke” into a political insult.
Conservatism that says it is okay to hold a very narrow view of the world trumps wokedom. The US president has led people, such as Zille, to think saving a political party from being “woke” or its influences will help the DA.
Msimanga and Hill-Lewis better be woke to the realities that to increase the party’s electoral percentage, especially in trying to win over municipalities like the City of Joburg, it is the party’s appeal to the “woke” crowd that needs to grow.
Which leads to the second and, perhaps, most important hurdle the party needs to overcome: the label that it is a “white party”. Zille has correctly castigated parties like the Patriotic Alliance for being ethnically aligned but has managed to ignore that the DA has chosen a province as its home base.
Unlike KwaZulu-Natal, where former president Jacob Zuma’s MK party is primarily based, the Western Cape does not have that “ethnic” label attached to it. However, it is general knowledge that the DA has quietly created a mini-Europe out of Cape Town and the Western Cape in general.
It is not surprising then that murmurs of ”independence” have originated in the province. So much for saving the DA from ethno-populism.
Only time will tell if Msimanga, the new federal chair, will wield the same power over the party as his predecessor did.
Zille not only left her political DNA running through the party, but she ensured her imprint on it runs deep because there is no arguing that Hill-Lewis is her political product.
The DA might need to guard against her ruling from the sidelines if it is to grow.
