By: Clyde N.S Ramalaine
Federalism contends a mode of ‘political organisation that unites separate states or other polities within an overarching political system to allow each to maintain its own integrity. Furthermore, federal systems do this by requiring that basic policies be made and implemented through negotiation in some form so that all the members can share in making and executing decisions.’ South Africa’s number one opposition political party, the Democratic Alliance, a claimed federal party, this weekend concluded its federal congress.
We are also told that a federalist believes that a nation’s government should consist of semi-independent states with separate authorities from the central government. Then again, ‘a centralist believes in a strong central government with weaker local governments. It would then lead to federalism imbibing the principle of democracy as the base.
However, I will postulate that there is nothing democratic about the Democratic Alliance except referencing such in its name. I do not say this in a narrow cheap attack or in shedding any crocodile tears referencing a black Phalatse’s defeat but in recognition of the DA’s ideology, politics, and praxis which has a white identity of race as its principal, irrevocable and primary interest. We are told delegates elected the leader [John Steenhuisen] for a second term, federal chairperson [Ivan Meyer] also for a second term. And three deputy federal chairpersons, while federal council members voted for the council’s chairperson and three deputy chairpersons [Anton Bredell, Solly Malatsi, and Jean-Pierre Smith] and the federal finance chairperson [Dion George] who ran uncontested.
The DA claims its 2023 Congress election of leadership outcome marks the most inclusive ever. It would be interesting to understand the key indicators in the differentiation of its previous congresses’ outcomes for such a claim. If more than half of the key positions were uncontested except for John Steenhuisen who squared off against Mpho Phalatse what was so different this time that this claim is made?
South African political parties in structure and focus are, by design and life essentially, race-based, race-dictated, race-defined, and race-constricted. Regardless of whether the black voters in the DA will ever eclipse its white counterpart denotation, the central interest of the party will never change because it cannot change. It is the inescapable identity of all parties from the ANC to the slightest semblance of one person in the presentation in the legislature opposition party. The DA, therefore, is a white race party regardless of how Zille or anyone will protest. I am advancing Afri-Forum, or Solidarity could be DA entities. There needs to be more to choose between the agenda of the DA and these entities at its cardinal interest level. Furthermore, the DA, similar to the rest of South – African political parties, believes in multi-racialism, meaning it derives its meaning from an acceptance that South Africa details a variety of races. The ANC ruling party and all opposition parties spend no energy to critically engage this notion, perhaps because it prefers to see SA as a quilt of many races since that affords it its relevance to contend for its primary interest race group.
In this sense, the election outcome, in particular the win of John Steenhuisen, must be understood. It is almost similar to a misplaced expectation that the ANC or EFF will ever produce a ‘Coloured’ or ‘white’ President when it exists for what they define as black [African], the myopic, less critically engaged apartheid social construction of identity marker in the distinction of others to identify those it never extended full humanity status. Anyone, including the youthful and misplaced in ambition Dr. Mpho Phalatse, who ever thought she would be preferred to the white John Steenhuizen is a political novice high on the household detergent handy-andy.
Most still need to get who the DA is at its fundamental level. Understanding the DA at its core is to appreciate its essential interest group. And group details an uncritically accepted white race. The DA is not just a white race party but contrary to popular belief of it being a liberal party, it is, in honesty, a conservative party anchored around white interests and fears as its central concern. The DA is hardly a constitutional expert or guardian to keep this compromise of a Nordic-birthed constitution sacrosanct for its self-serving and myopic interest, namely the unfettered posterity of whiteness in South Africa.
It is not a party convinced of and betrothed to any form of true equality of equal-created human beings or in pursuit of conviction of a justified economic redress. Nor is it remotely interested in social and economic justice but the pretentious self-appointed guardian and modern enclave of white hegemony of dominance in the exceptionalism of an anchored tenant of historic white superior identity. You understand this better when you hear Zille’s statement on economic refugees in reference to South Africans that migrate to the Western Cape and her antics on the benefits of colonialism. Juxtapose this with Kallie Kriel’s defence of apartheid, and you appreciate the conservative nucleus of DA’s fundamental ideology.
Where it deceives the ignorant is with its purporting to be a liberal party. I would contend it is through a type of manufactured consent aided by the miserable failure of governance by the African National Congress to deliver on the transformation imperative for its black constituency that the DA has now succeeded in getting support from elite blacks. The same elites somehow assume they, as individuals, will alter the interest nucleus of the DA. For this, it evidences a translucent membrane-thin layer of liberalism, deceiving South Africans into claiming to be a liberal, liberal party. This notion of liberalism, while conservative in central ideology, is not unique to the DA in SA but borrowed from the UK.
It is essential to appreciate that the party is Helen’s personal possession, just like the EFF belongs to Malema, UDM belongs to Holomisa, COPE belongs to Lekota, IFP belongs to Buthelezi, the ACDP belongs to Meshoe, and the PA threatens belonging to McKenzie. It’s been Helen’s personal party since the death by asphyxiation of the Democratic Party. The DP originally was the Progressive Federal Party under apartheid. The stomping grounds of Colin Eglin, Sam De Beer, and Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert arguably detail this party’s last batch of serious politicians in its protracted past. You cannot count Tony Leon, whom Helen outsmarted since history dictates now that Leon oversaw the death of the Democratic Party. Helen would fashion the DP into an Alliance party, but it’s an alliance-of-a-special type, Helen Godzilla style.
I have elsewhere argued that the DA under Helen Zille had political one-night-stands with everyone that is remotely opposed. If I could jog your memory, Helen killed De Lille’s ID in a mayoral chain ceremony. She kissed Ramphele’s Agang into stillbirth of death. Zille flirted with Zwelenzima Vavi’s empty-power presidential ambitions for a while. She had a coffee date or two with lost in translation UDM’s Holomisa and the coffee became cold. Aunty Helen smooched with Malema’s EFF, and the date went awry. She double-dated the confused COPE’s Lekota, and one of her most recent affairs, while Athol Trollip was still DA leader in Qeberha, was with the PA’s McKenzie. Helen is always busy with form alliances, yet they all are of a special type in which her will and no one else’s is paramount. Helen even flirted with the infamous Guptas and thanked them for their contribution. So, Steenhuisen and the new team, of course, 90% white, serve not at the will of the people but the benevolence of Zille.
An alliance is a union or association formed for mutual benefit, especially between countries or organisations. Yet Helen’s DA prism of alliance constitutes an alliance that could never sacrifice the centrality of white interests. As its many love affairs have shown, anything remotely opposed to white interest is opposed, demonised, and ultimately demolished. It’s this notion of the most significant opposition that lends itself to the oppressive nature of DA in relationships with others. Helen’s politics of alliance-of-special-type sees her DA benefitting alone, thus proving to abuse the historical white superiority and her majority opposition slice, reducing smaller parties to mere rubber stamping the DA’s agenda. This idea sees her rejecting whatever is tabled by others because they merely fill numbers. I am not a spokesperson for any of the self-serving race constricted and personality-driven fragments of opposition parties. This is what I postulate about the Helen Zille alliance of-special-type politics.
We also know that an alliance is also defined as “a relationship based on similarity of interests, nature, or qualities.” It is right here that the DA’s claim of alliance proves vacuous since whomever it enters relationships with does not share its similarity of interest. It then becomes the DA’s practice to engage in an alliance-of-special-type where special connotes it’s either in the DA’s interest or no alliance. Its behaviour in the COJ and Tshwane elections attests to a party willing to do anything with anyone to get the mayoral seat.
I have elsewhere contended that the DA will enter with anyone into political affairs, provided it remains the archaic patriarchal dominant male in the relationship. I would go further and argue it, in this sense, can be accused of being guilty of a type of gender-based violence in all its relationships because its alliance-of-a-special-type of politics cannot escape the socialised male dominant figure dictating to the female identity whom it expects to be subservient and in submission at all times. Helen’s alliance politics evidence the typical male chauvinistic, teetering on misogynistic, and oppressive candour.
Perhaps more significantly, it is and remains a party representing the last bastion of whiteness, in which black faces are mere objects and a means to an end. If only blacks could learn this – but they don’t and won’t because Helen will play them like a puppet master.
You recall Helen returned from her twin country visits, the UK (Kirsh) and the USA, where she was instructed to leave office and make way for the then Obama project – Mmusi Maimane, who needed R100m to become the DA failed leader for Gauteng Premiership. Helen returned furiously and convened a meeting with Renier Schoeman lamenting the funders’ decision. She assumed this was wrong, but they had no choice because the funders would withdraw their money.
At the time, she rejected former IDASA manager Wilmot James who she thought was a little too independent – until James is today plying his trade as a professor in the USA. So she birthed Maimane at the expense of James and then, at the right time, made Maimane a political eunuch. Maimane remains a confused pastor and politician undeniably banished to a political cemetery as a, in recent times, pretentious civil society guru. I wonder why every failed party leader assumes they are automatically the natural new voices of civil society movements as if we are ignorant.
Helen went on to raise Lindiwe Mazibuko to be her tea-girl, and when Mazibuko became too tjatjarig or clever to ask the DA for its honest views on the business case for EE and BEE policies, Helen sent her permanently to school in Pensylvania, Harvard, which became her political wilderness.
Mpho Phalatse is, therefore, lightweight and was never any match since she is too fragile to attempt way-laying the seasoned, crafty, and slew mind of Ouma Helen Zille. Helen even dealt with ambitious Mazzone, who at some thought herself ready to become Helen. So the outcome of the DA Federal Conference was never a subject of any surprise.
As I always say, everyone needs a mirror to see their actual size, Mpho Phalatse saw her real size, and the DA remains what it always will be the nucleus of conservative politics contesting with the Freedom Front for the Afrikaner verkrampte vote. Mpho got her mirror, and Helen walked on because she could; it remains her Democratic Alliance.
You bet she is busy with a private affair dining the failed ANC leader Ramaphosa into an alliance for May 2024. Let us not forget that while Ramaphosa has spectacularly failed to prioritise the rightful economic emancipation of the ANC’s primary constituency, the black masses, as white monopoly capital’s 40-year-old product and choice buffer-zone since his adoption in the Urban Foundation in 1978 has in the last five years done excellent work for the DA’s white agenda hence Steenhuisen’s blunt expression of a willingness to be in bed with Ramaphosa, not necessarily the ANC.
Kudos to Helen with Jacob Zuma. You are arguably the only true politician in South Africa. The rest are mere chihuahuas making noise because you have put many in the political cemetery regardless of age.
Political Analyst, Theologian, Lifelong Social and Economic Justice Activist, Author, Published Poet, and Freelance Writer.
