The DA Agang Merger Was Always Doomed

 

Last night The Daily Maverick posted a press statement from Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille explaining that the DA’s big announcement from earlier in the week – that Agang leader Dr Mamphela Ramphele was to be the DA’s new Presidential candidate – was no longer going down as planned. But here’s the thing, this was never going to work out.

Like many others, I was excited by the DA’s announcement that Dr Ramphele would assume the role of Presidential candidate in the next South African general election. And then, with the help of some prompting from wiser friends, I remembered that this is the freaking DA we’re talking about. How on Earth was this going to be anything else but a clusterfuck of awkward moments worthy of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm?

I tend to be quite critical of the DA (and no, that doesn’t mean I’m pro-ANC and we have to talk about their failings now) because I feel that their political agenda is at times pretty vague bordering on mystifyingly unclear in its attempts to appear promising, and on other occasions, awkwardly and unintentionally racist in its attempts to be inclusive and accepting of all people while also damning itself with high-fives for just not being the ANC.

And let me tell you, in a country where the ANC is still mostly known for liberating the majority of the population from apartheid, ‘unintentionally racist’ and ‘not the ANC’ are two things you don’t really wanna swing for.

Still, I dream of a politically dynamic South Africa in which all people (except racists) are represented and can participate in and share in the triumphs of the nation’s many leaders as they attempt to work toward some form of positive change for the nation’s people. Maybe they can even aim for restitution for the generations of people who were wronged alternately by government, colonisers and, you know, racists.

It’s because of this desire that I was pleased to see Agang and the DA form an alliance of sorts. Unfortunately, this thing was a series of mistakes pretty much from the word go.

Firstly, what did this new decision actually mean for our political landscape, and what did the appearance of such sudden and dynamic change actually say about the DA and how it built its political strategy and took steps towards achieving its goals?

 

On the surface, this decision seemed coldly logical – I even checked with some people at my office, who agreed that South Africa is a state where race (which for some reason always means the same thing as “being black”) matters a lot and so it made sense for the DA to put forward a black candidate as a means of acknowledging the majority of South Africa’s population. On the other hand, everything I just typed sounds like pretty much the most racist, reductive thing I have ever heard.

But who cares what a handful of people in my office think, right? They’re hardly representative of what the majority of South Africans think. Hell, they basically disqualified themselves when one of them said they were offended by ANC spokesperson Gwede Mantashe calling Dr Ramphele the DA’s “rent-a-black” because the ANC always plays “the race card” (it’s 2014, you guys – that’s still not a thing that exists). This in a conversation in which we acknowledged that perhaps race plays an important role in South African politics.

But again, this isn’t a conversation with the DA and so it’s difficult to determine if this handful of people are actually reflective of what they stand for as a party. But what exactly do they stand for? This is a question I’ve found it very difficult to answer despite a decade-long fascination with South African politics and the sense of meandering disinterest with which most middle class, wannabe-politicos like myself approach it. What does their party want to achieve beyond its idealistic goals of ‘no corruption’ and ‘better leadership (than the ANC)’?

Mind you, those are some beautiful goals, they’re just also incredibly ill-defined. It’s like stating your campaign goal is to ‘end all crime’, which is the same thing Batman swore over his parents’ graves, and like him you could use billions of dollars to fund your late night assaults on the poor and mentally ill.

Thankfully, I don’t have to look too far to find out what the DA is about, because Ms Zille included that at the end of the press release I mentioned earlier. You know, the one where she implicates herself in “cronyism”, that dreaded practice of the ANC, while saying her “friend” Dr Mamphela Ramphele “has demonstrated – once and for all – that she cannot be trusted to see any project through to its conclusion”, implying that the DA almost bet the bank on a leader they considered unstable to begin with (note that “once and for all”).

In that same release, Ms Zille defines the DA’s ongoing campaign as a “historic mission to build a non-racial political alternative in South Africa”. Firstly, the term ‘non-racial’ is so loaded that I can’t let that one just slip by without quickly addressing it. While it is ostensibly a term meaning ‘not racially focused or defined’, our popular narratives in media, politics, history and life have taught us one thing, and it’s that ‘non-racial’ often means ‘not about race’ which also means ‘white’*. And I mentioned earlier how ‘race’ always seems to mean ‘black’ for some reason, right? That’s because our master narratives define normal as ‘straight, white male’, automatically other-ing everyone else. The DA’s aim for a non-racial South Africa is sweet but, considering the party’s primary leadership at the moment, it seems like an awkward misstep – a statement that doesn’t need to be said because it’s too loaded with meaning for everyone who isn’t the DA’s leader.

*You may argue otherwise but perhaps that’s largely because you grew up consuming media that implied that straight white dudes were both society’s average and its apex, implying that everything else was a lesser ‘other’ figure with a very specific role and/or function to fulfil. We know, dear reader, that you’re tired of hearing that but believe me, it’s even more boring to receive subtle suggestions that you’re not doing it right until you’re doing it straight, white and male.

The other half of Zille’s closing statement is even more puzzling.

She adds: “We have the values, we have the structures, we have the machinery and we have the depth of leadership to succeed”. Excuse me but how does a party that has never won a national election attribute success (and value in general) to its (“historic”) political mission, as well as the success of its values and leaders when, in the same press release, it says that it just thought choosing a whole other party’s leader to its top position was for the political good of the country and its people?

Did she mean to say the “derp of leadership”?

Zille herself states earlier in the press release that, with the decision to elect Dr Ramphele as their Presidential candidate, “[the DA] believed this move would be in the best interests of South Africa”. How then does the same party get to say, now that what they originally believed would be in our best interests hasn’t worked out for them (and by their own implication, for us), that they have strong enough leadership to do the same thing they’ve been effectively failing at on their own?

Since when do you get to tell people that what they’ve come to expect from you is wrong, that you have a brand new solution for them that will change everything for the better, and then when it fails, turn around and tell them the thing you said was wrong is actually not just right, it’s also going to work better than it did before?

Nothing actually sums up my issues with the DA better than the image above. Because it is a political party that attempts to operate like a brand without understanding the hard work that goes into constructing a strong brand identity and narrative for itself – one it can stick to but that allows it to adapt to the changing times. And the times do change. The brands that remain eternal are the ones that recognize how much of the past to carry with them into the future, and how much to discard on their way forward. But perhaps this isn’t how politics should work. Maybe there should be more investment in the people, not in the bitter, self-involved machinery of marketing stunts and gimmicky posters that claw for our attention rather than tap into our inherent desire to achieve shared success.

And that is really what South Africans, what human beings want, from the ground up. We are an organism designed to achieve survival and success and everywhere around us our old systems of doing so are collapsing, or changing, because they can no longer support the success of the few at the expense of the many. They can no longer bring the revolution to people from so high up that the people themselves cannot hear the words of the manifesto. Perhaps next time the DA chooses new leadership for an election, it can do it not out of the desire to win at any cost, or to bolster its political force with whoever will say yes no matter the consequences, or to just beat the ANC. Perhaps they could do it by finding out what it is the people on the street really want from them and providing that.

Had the DA Agang merger gone through as planned, maybe Dr Mamphela Ramphele could have been the force for that new direction that the party needed. To be honest, and because it was the DA, I doubt it.