Steenhuisen is an accidental leader. He did not so much win the DA top job as stumble into it.
Tis the season to be merry – a time of joy, love and generosity. Except in the political jungle, where compassion is always a scarce commodity and the pangas flash all year round.
John Steenhuisen is in the thick of that fray. The DA leader is under pressure on three fronts: a default judgment for credit-card debt; the withdrawal of his DA-issued credit card; and the true reasons for his subsequent sacking of forestry, fisheries and environment minister Dion George.
This week, the George saga got even murkier. Daily Maverick reports Steenhuisen’s first attempt to have George removed came at an unscheduled DA federal executive meeting on 15 October, the day he was in Shanghai signing an agricultural export deal.
George had been tightening protections around abalone and lion-bone trafficking into China. Daily Maverick sent six questions about this to Steenhuisen’s department but was refused an answer.
Stonewalling extends to the DA headquarters. After George was replaced by Willie Aucamp – a politician with ties to hunting and wildlife-breeding interests – the NSPCA asked the DA to explain his appointment. The DA refused. This, from the same party that took Jacob Zuma to court to force disclosure on the reasons for a Cabinet reshuffle.
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All this inevitably raises questions about Steenhuisen’s suitability as leader. BizNews commentator RW Johnson, former director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, penned a particularly scathing assessment last week.
He describes Steenhuisen as “the classic Durban chancer”. He disinters a radio interview in which Steenhuisen jokingly referred to his ex-wife as “road kill” and cites administrative chaos in Steenhuisen’s office.
With the DA doing well in recent polls, writes Johnson, the row over George comes at an awkward time.
“A major fight between its senior leaders is the last thing it needs. The damage to his credibility is already probably fatal and it is clear there is now a large section of the DA who are opposed to his leadership.”
In a fiery right-of-reply interview with Alec Hogg on BizNews, Steenhuisen has come out fighting. Asked whether Johnson’s criticisms should be taken seriously, Steenhuisen accuses him of “blatant lies and misrepresentations” and warns he intends to take “decisive legal action” against Johnson and others who have claimed he misused the party credit card.
Steenhuisen dismisses the concerns over his personal finances, which he says have long since been sorted out, as “a bit of a low blow”. People’s personal finances, he argues, are nobody else’s business unless there are issues of corruption.
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Steenhuisen repeatedly makes the point that he was elected DA leader in 2020 with the support of 83% of conference delegates. But on electoral performance, he has not exactly set the political world alight.
Under Tony Leon and then Helen Zille, the DA’s national vote almost trebled from about 1.5 million votes in 1999, to 4.1 million in 2014. It was only when Mmusi Maimane came on the scene that 15 years of robust growth stalled.
In 2019, Maimane shed roughly 470 000 DA votes, picking up 20.8% of the vote. It was then, in desperation, that Steenhuisen was drafted. In last year’s election, the DA lost a further 100 000-odd votes and barely budged the needle on the party’s electoral share, to around 21.8%.
Steenhuisen is an accidental leader. He did not so much win the DA top job as stumble into it.
It is true that the party’s electoral fortunes are now improving, but that’s less because of his leadership than because of the ANC’s continued self-inflicted decline.
Steenhuisen is fortunate indeed that the same drought of credible alternatives that catapulted him into the top job is now very likely to save him from the boot at his party’s April elective conference.
