As Steenhuisen Walks, the DA’s Next Leader Has a Lot to Think About

John Steenhuisen’s decision to not stand for leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) at its next conference in April followed sustained criticism from major donors and long-standing senior figures within the party who argued both that he was wholly inept and had become too close to, and too accommodating of, the African National Congress (ANC) within the Government of National Unity (GNU).

The complete chaos into which the Department of Agriculture’s response to the foot-and-mouth pandemic degenerated under his watch was a final straw of sorts, exacerbated by Steenhuisen’s extraordinary attacks against farmers and their expanded political constituencies who questioned his, and the state’s, approach. As one inside chap put it: “He’d become so angry we feared he’d bring the whole party crashing down on himself.” As a consequence, he faced an ultimatum to exit in a dignified manner on his own terms, that would allow him to claim credit for what had been achieved during his period as leader, or to be pushed.

On the first charge, that he was inept and without the temperament to lead the party any further, the evidence circulating in private conversations has been quite overwhelming. And it would appear therefore that the DA, in engineering his graceful exit as party leader yesterday, has demonstrated a completely justified case study of accountability – for which it must be congratulated.

On the latter, that he was too accommodating of the ANC and that the DA achieved nothing in government, the evidence is more complex and leaves a lot for whoever succeeds him to think about.

The DA was never fully unified around coalition government with the ANC and significant segments of the party remained sceptical of the arrangement or favoured a much more robust approach to the ANC, insisting on clear reform horizons as a condition of remaining in the GNU. That has some merit as a strategy, and from the perspective of accelerating reforms in the GNU has potential upsides. But in as far as it implies brinkmanship the risks are considerable.

To appreciate those, consider a bit of context.

Just eighteen months ago the DA ended the period of single-party dominance over South Africa’s government that had endured for decades even ahead of 1994. In doing so, the DA won more votes across the collective of Gauteng, the Western Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal than the ANC – three provinces that together account for roughly two thirds of South Africa’s economic output.

Political and economic risk

Crossing the threshold from single-party governance carried significant political and economic risk. The ANC, panicked and humiliated, might easily have doubled down to the hard left and sought to unify the party’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK) splinters. Many in the ANC advocated for that and continue to do so. Economic chaos would have followed and then political chaos and violence in the streets, as inflation wrecked living standards and investment fled. That relative calm and economic stability is the order of the day 18 months after the ANC defeat was not inevitable but rather the contingent consequence of the DA’s ability to find sufficient common cause with the ANC to form a government.

There is an argument for not having done that. Had the DA left the ANC to find its way back to the EFF and MK and trigger all manner of chaos, that might have further alienated voters from the ANC and the DA might have picked up the difference. There is some merit to that as strategy, but it is also very near to brinkmanship. At the time therefore the advice was to do a deal with the ANC and establish the principle of coalition government as part of a longer-term strategy to stabilise and reform South Africa. The admitted downside consequence of that strategy was the need for a significant degree of accommodation of the ANC that would necessarily result in the economic growth rate continuing to wallow at sub-2%.

The “safe” bet, therefore, was to go for a measure of immediate term economic and political stability, and try to lock that in, even at the price of slower-than-ideal reform and growth. Then, having locked the agreement in place in as far as that could be done, chiefly by establishing the principle of DA/ANC government as desirable and workable, a much longer-term reform strategy, albeit slow, could be built off that base.

The longer-term strategy drew strength from the fact that at its core the DA/ANC coalition is structurally very strong. The reason for this is that the DA brought the established middle class into the government and the ANC the aspirant middle class. These were the core voting blocs of the parties (the ANC rural bloc is invested in the success of the aspirant middle-class bloc) and their policy interests are essentially aligned, if not nearly identical. As a consequence, the natural drift within the GNU would be for policy alignment between the ANC and the DA rather than divergence.

To date, that alignment has been borne out in polling. Majorities of both ANC and DA voters support the idea of the GNU, have confidence in its success, and prefer each other as coalition partners over any other parties. That is a pretty solid base from which to build a successful future for South Africa as a unitary state.

Policy wins and concessions

It is also untrue that the DA secured no policy wins or concessions within the government.

There are the clichéd examples of administrative changes at Home Affairs setting a model for the broader public service, and of fiscal restraint within the Treasury. Beyond that, and too seldom taken into account, the mere presence of the DA in the Cabinet has brought about, chiefly intangibly, a degree of moderation within the ANC – as best evidenced by the fact of the GNU existing at all as opposed to a straight-up hard-left deal with the EFF and MK.

But most important of all, on policy, and wholly overlooked in many current assessments of the DA, is that the party advanced proposals to revise empowerment frameworks by prioritising material disadvantage rather than race-based criteria. In response, the ANC has agreed to a formal review of black economic empowerment policy. That is extraordinary. Empowerment policy is post-1994 South Africa’s foundational policy, and its most important policy, as all other important economic and social policy flows from it. It is the means by which the government seeks to address the past and bring prosperity to the poor. It is therefore the essential and only point from which to start any diagnosis of South Africa’s weak economic performance and high unemployment rate and thereby also the point from which to commence any reform agenda capable of ensuring South Africa achieves a higher rate of economic growth. In that context, the DA proposal and ANC response is the most consequential South African policy development since 1994 – and can be wholly credited to the fact of the GNU.

It is so important to the future of South Africa that at this newspaper we might say it singly cancels out any other policy criticism directed at the DA in government over the past 18 months.

Amid that proposal, which ignorant analysts would routinely say must impede the DA’s growth prospects, the party reached an all-time polling high-water mark in closing the gap on the ANC to just five percentage points in 2025. Whoever comes to succeed Steenhuisen will be judged against that peak – a daunting high point to emulate, let alone exceed. When explicitly polled on the DA empowerment proposal, a majority of ANC voters said they supported it.

Good for the DA

Hence the record on the scoreboard, whether on the politics, government, policy, or polling, has been good for the DA in many respects since the formation of the GNU. It suggests that the long-term strategy of securing the principle of a DA/ANC coalition in government, and normalising that, has merit – even as it runs the obvious risk of delaying substantive reforms to a point perhaps where the public loses confidence in the GNU and lurches the ANC to the hard left, triggering exactly the economic meltdown the strategy sought to avoid – a not implausible risk.

In as far as there may be time to play out that long-term strategy, the accusation that Steenhuisen was too close to, and too accommodative of, the ANC needs to be thought about very carefully. To take that criticism to its inevitable conclusion, it says he became an ally of, and found common cause with, factions of the ANC. But by being so very accommodating, in as far as that is true, he became a useful ally for ANC factions seeking to moderate and manage the radicals in their own camp. He offered the ANC no hard compelling reason to break it off. His accommodation further had the effect of blunting suspicions and fears of ANC voters, and some leaders, that the DA was a hard-line, even supremacist group, that would seek to roll back the many social and democratic gains secured by South Africa after 1994. Those fears polled acutely in the ANC camp ahead of the May 2024 elections. In as far as Steenhuisen personified his party, what people saw of it in government came across very differently, even to the point of being disappointingly underwhelming and centrist – about as extreme a contradiction of the supremacist caricatures conjured of the DA in the legacy media as one could wish for.

In an odd sense therefore, certainly for Steenhuisen’s critics, it was his manner of interacting with the ANC in the government that might have been for the DA, the country, and the GNU, perhaps accidentally, one of the collective greatest and most stabilising strengths of the past 18 months. The sense, however, plainly became that, even where that were true, it had run its course, the broader downsides were becoming too great, and so an ultimatum had to be issued.

This all offers the DA’s next leader a lot to think about – central to which is the balance to be struck between pressing for reform while maintaining the degree of current internal economic and political stability that attaches to the GNU, and then, in the event where that is no longer tenable, how to play a situation where the GNU breaks up and the ANC and the DA again face each other purely as adversaries.