The DA flirts with polarisation in electoral review panel report

No sooner had the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) electoral review panel report been released this week, than Mmusi Maimane resigned as party leader, along with Athol Trollip.

Among the panel’s raft of recommendations is that the party convenes an early congress “to allow for the election of a new leader”; a no-confidence statement which undoubtedly secured Maimane’s resignation on Wednesday.

The report is a repositioning programme of action which is already having an impact on the party, as it will the tone and substance of South African politics.

Consider at least two issues – redress policy and the thorny subject of race and racism.

“Opportunity policies and redress policies,” reads the report, “can and should be pursued, provided they are targeted at individuals, not groups.”

The word “groups” is, in this context, a euphemism for “race groups”. Elsewhere, it bemoans so-called “race-based redress policy” and asserts that “the party has adopted certain policy positions [on BEE, for example] that compromise, or at least flex, a clear application of its core principles”.

Its nifty qualifications notwithstanding, the report gives with one hand and takes with the other. So, whereas “it doesn’t help to accuse black South Africans who want the material and emotional consequence of apartheid acknowledged and addressed of being racial nationalists”, which is precisely what the DA does, demographic representativity “is profoundly at odds with the DA’s philosophy in that it is premised on the idea that people are not individuals, but rather iterations of a larger entity”.

As a result, “it should have no place in the DA”.

The authors of the report counsel the party to aim redress “at people who currently suffer disadvantage as a consequence of past discrimination and does not use race as a proxy for disadvantage”. On the face of it, this sounds laudable. Except that ours is a country which, for more than 350 years, conferred privilege and disadvantage according to race.

For the majority of South Africans, privilege and disadvantage remain race-based, with gender, geographic location and class as accentuating factors. Public policy measures which, at best, gloss over this reality and deny it at worst, provoke suspicions about their real intentions.

They pretend that our fault lines have no historical origins, that we can construct the present and the future without consideration of the past and how it impacts on the here and now.

Like the proverbial ostrich, the DA review labours under the misguided view that the less historicised the fault lines, the faster they will evaporate like the morning dew. Or is it just ostriching?

In her 2001 US-published book, Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used To Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa, University of the Witwatersrand academic Melissa Steyn pointed out that the “desire to close the discussion on the past is one strand within a general pattern of denial. The appeal to let sleeping dogs lie hides the crucial issue of which dogs are still holding onto the bones”.

The report narrowly analyses racism in the DA and, by implication, society in general. “Many conflicts over race,” it asserts, “are a consequence of a lack of understanding and empathy.”

But, the lack of understanding and empathy is a manifestation of a racist socialisation; a feature of the ideational pillars of a colonial and apartheid political economy of white privilege, on the one hand, and black dispossession and disadvantage on the other.

There is required a no-holds-barred confrontation of racism at an ideational level and commitment to rewrite the unequal social relations that perpetuate two nations – one black and predominantly poor and the other white and generally well off – in one polity.

“Selecting or promoting people simply on the basis of their race or other demographic characteristics is a violation of the DA’s values; on the other hand, lists and caucuses that are not diverse and undermine the DA’s claim to be a party for all South Africans.”

An admission that in an attempts to project a nonracial image, the DA promoted people on the basis of race, perhaps?

Be that as it may, the challenge is that for its denialism of the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, which inspires a fightback against redress measures, the DA can only attract and retain black people whose pedigree is a continuum of past collaboration with the colonial and apartheid projects.

Despite the mistakes and excesses of the governing party, no political party can gain sustainable traction without committing to redress.

Maimane fell out of favour because he trod where angels feared to, upsetting the apple cart through calls for black economic empowerment, “confront[ing] white privilege and black poverty”, taking umbrage at the Schweizer-Reneke school incident and differing with the party’s knight in shining armour, Helen Zille, over her colonialism tweets. “How dare he?” is an obvious point of anxiety in sections of the DA’s suburban strongholds.

And disingenuity is galore. The report discusses the demise of the National Party (NP) with nary a mention of the fact that in the five years after 1994, the DA’s forerunner, the Democratic Party (DP), positioned itself to the right of the NP.

It consequently benefitted from the NP’s haemorrhage in the 1999 elections as supporters of the party of apartheid found a new home in a supposedly liberal DP.

So, when the Freedom Front Plus poached 2% from the DA’s support in the May general election, it was merely paying the latter with its own currency.

The report is a telling reset of the DA to its “fightback” posture of the era of Tony Leon, one of the report’s authors notes.

The DA must, as a consequence, mobilise white SA into a laager, with profound implications for the tone and substance of social and political discourse, practical questions of policy and consensus building on the pressing challenges of the day; especially on the socioeconomic front.

Viewed from this vantage point, the DA’s review is a dalliance with social and political polarisation; one which its authors might, in the fullness of time, come to regret.

Mukoni Ratshitanga. Picture: Neil McCartney

• Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator (mukoni@interlinked.co.za)

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