Whither the DA? Understanding its political landscape and future
THE DA must thank the ANC for its political fortunes since it was formed in 2000, including that it was the official opposition before the Government of National Unity (GNU) was formed in 2024.
Today, next to the ANC, which declined in the 2024 elections from obtaining 57% of the vote in 2019 to around 40%, it is the biggest party in the GNU.
Though formally a non-racial party, the DA is in fact mainly white-led. But more importantly, it is mainly a liberal centrist party, which is ideologically pro-capitalist and committed to a free market, individual freedoms, a non-racial constitutional democracy and what is called “the rule of law”.
But because of the population demographics of this country, it is very unlikely that it would win an election, whether national or local. The “Black African” majority, to use the terminology of Statistics South Africa (StatsSA), of around 81% of the total population will continue to dominate our constitutional democracy.
However, so hugely significant was it that the ANC, for the first time in post-apartheid South Africa, lost the 2024 elections that the DA hopes to become the governing party. But I am certain it would never happen because race will continue to dominate political sentiments and choices at election time.
On the other hand, I am as certain that the ANC’s stark decline will continue in the oncoming local government elections in November. I think that besides the disgruntlement of Black voters with the ANC, especially around service delivery issues in Black townships, the Phala Phala scandal, directly implicating President Cyril Ramaphosa, is most probably going to count against the ANC in those elections.
While I do not want to at all prejudge the outcome of the Phala Phala matters and particularly Ramaphosa’s request for a review of the Section 89 independent panel report which found that he had a prima facie case to answer regarding the February 2020 theft of $580 000 from his farm, I think it is going to negatively affect the ANC’s performance in the November elections.
I think so, even if Ramaphosa wins his review of the 2020 parliamentary panel report by finding that it was flawed in certain respects. Remember that a few years ago he himself said that people generally associate the ANC with corruption, which was a very significant statement by him.
I think that the Black electorate deep down believes that the ANC is corrupt, aside from governance issues and matters of incompetence and so on. That is why, which many people, including the media, forget, the ANC lost both the 2016 and 2021 local government elections in Gauteng, the powerhouse of production and nerve-centre of the economy.
But back to the DA. Even if the ANC loses the November local government elections, the DA, at most, will obtain around 30% of the popular vote. In 2021 the ANC obtained 45.59% of the popular vote and the DA 21.62%. But the point I am making is that whether it’s national or local elections, I don’t think the DA will ever win the total majority vote.
However, I want to focus on the Western Cape, where the DA has governed since 2009. There must be no doubt at all that it is the majority Coloured working class vote which has kept the DA in office there since 2009.
The key and critical question is: How did it happen that the DA has comfortably governed the Western Cape since 2009? This is such a crucially important political matter that nobody has ever really probed over the years.
To do this I need to go back to the 1994 elections. Do people remember that the racist Nationalist Party (NP) comfortably won our Uhuru elections in the Western Cape? Yes, it was the first time in the entire history of colonialism that an oppressed and exploited people for over three centuries voted for their oppressors and exploiters in their first-ever democratic and non-racial elections.
While I don’t have the space to interrogate why that happened, especially since Cape Town was the birthplace of the United Democratic Front (UDF), formed in August 1983, I think that it is also a reflection on the ANC itself and why the DA has been in power there since 2009.
But we must not forget that the UDF was effectively the internal ANC, which was banned inside the country since 1961. This was possible, to all intents and purposes, because the UDF supported virtually everything the ANC stood for and demanded.
However, there are some strategic political issues which are of key and critical importance. I have written about this before in the pages of the Cape Times in 2007.
The biggest mistake the ANC made was to have disbanded the UDF in February 1991. This decision was not driven by the UDF itself but by the ANC leaders, who had in 1990 returned to the country after the ANC and several other organisations were unbanned in February 1990.
The ANC suspected that the UDF would be a thorn in its side, especially during sensitive moments in the negotiations with the NP. Remember that the UDF was a militant front, with organisational structures across the townships of the Western Cape.
But by disbanding the UDF, I believe mistakenly and prematurely, a political vacuum was created in those townships, which the NP assiduously exploited. The result was that the NP won the 1994 elections.
The UDF should have been maintained intact until at least the 1994 elections. This would have hugely facilitated the ANC’s campaigning for those elections, especially since UDF community structures already existed in those townships.
But it is that situation and especially the background I have sketched, which the DA has itself exploited. There are several historical and political reasons why the ANC was never very strong in the Western Cape, even when it was not banned.
That is in fact why the UDF should not have been disbanded in 1991. But more importantly, this is partly the background to the DA’s ability to have remained in office in the Western Cape since 2009.
That background also has certain political dynamics which have turned out to be to the advantage of the DA. But it is also the ANC’s ongoing corruption in office which the DA regularly pounced on, and which won it many supporters.
Besides the corruption, it is the fact that the ANC abandoned what was effectively its election manifesto in 1994, which is the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). It did the same with the iconic Freedom Charter.
Furthermore, if the provisions and demands in both the RDP and Freedom Charter were adhered to and implemented, we would not have had such deep and widespread Black poverty, unemployment and inequalities in the country.
It is, however, such a tragedy which the DA will not be able to do much about. The serious problem is that, to a large extent, the ANC had much better policies and programmes to have made a big difference in the lives of Black people, but it effectively abandoned them.
But it is very important to also point out that the DA, both in the Western Cape and elsewhere in the country, has also been able to win over so-called “minorities” (Coloureds, Indians and Whites) over the years because of the growth of an Africanist majoritarian chauvinism inside the ANC.
This specific problem alienated many people who before were big supporters of the UDF and the ANC. Apartheid oppressed and exploited Coloured and Indian people too, though not to the same degree as “Black African” people.
But many or most of those people turned to the DA, which is why it has substantial support in these communities across the country.
Unfortunately, today most of the voter support the DA has at election time is drawn from those alienated communities. The ANC has itself to blame for those problems, which will most probably play itself out again in the November local government elections.
So much has the ANC alienated these communities that they would rather give their votes to the DA at election time, especially in the Western Cape. This is in many respects a political anomaly, especially since, as I earlier said, the UDF was founded in Mitchell’s Plain in Cape Town in 1983.
* Dr Ebrahim Harvey is a political writer, analyst, and commentator.
** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media, or IOL.
