In 2013, Helen Zille used the phrase “plane crash” after her party’s parliamentary caucus voted in favour of black economic empowerment and employment equity legislation in Parliament that was at odds both with the party’s historical positions on non-racial policy and the interests of the South African economy. It is time to dust the metaphor off because her hand-picked candidate for Democratic Alliance (DA) leadership, Geordin Hill-Lewis, is crashing the fleet.

Last week this newspaper devoted a series of editorials to DA plane crashes. That was not its intention, but the planes just kept dropping out of the sky. This week it had hoped to write on other matters, but the crashes have kept coming.

Consider this list:

• •After a court found that the DA’s John Steenhuisen, as agriculture minister, had acted shamefully and unlawfully in denying access to foot-and-mouth-disease (FMD) vaccines to farmers, the DA, instead of holding him to account, sought to pick a fight with the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) in the hope that public attention would be drawn away from what their minister was up to;
• •In doing so, the DA lied to the public in suggesting that around 30 000 convicted criminals had escaped from custody under the watch of the FF+’s Pieter Groenewald, who serves as prisons minister;
• •The party then contrived a campaign online to suggest that it was pressuring the government to do more to release vaccines to farmers, when in fact, by covering for Steenhuisen, it was doing the opposite;
• •Amidst rising xenophobic tensions, the party spokesperson took to social media in the most inflammatory and irresponsible terms in an effort to ensure that the DA did not miss out on what votes it might draw from the rising tide of hate in the country;
• •Subsequently, the DA’s de facto CEO, Ryan Coetzee, took to social media to mock and demean a Cape Town residents’ association that was lobbying for the city to retain its open green spaces;
• •After that, an email emerged in which Steenhuisen’s chief of staff mocked farmers who had pleaded to meet with the government over the FMD crisis, describing their pleas as “some amusement” and echoing the contempt with which Steenhuisen has treated farmers broadly; and
• •After that, the DA’s Education Minister Siviwe Gwarube drove a proposal that Model C schools should not be allowed to use academic or sporting excellence or the financial ability of parents to determine admission to South Africa’s top government schools – a proposal that would wreck the only option for a good education open to many struggling middle-class parents.

In 2013, one failure was enough to prompt an emergency intervention. The list above is just from the last week; each incident is as serious in what it bodes as that of 2013, but it just continues with no intervention or accountability.

Meanwhile, leaks are abounding out of the DA alleging behaviour that would meet with snorts of derision as being completely impossible, except that the sources are so numerous and so widespread.

By the count of this board, five senior figures with direct donor or similar ties to the broader DA universe have now privately raised concerns about what is going on, who is in charge, and where this is all leading.

The answers are not encouraging. It cannot be coincidence that so many acts of failure and questionable ethics follow one after the other. With this much smoke there must be a fire somewhere in the party that, if not extinguished, will burn the house down. There is a lot of fear in the middle classes at the thought that President Cyril Ramaphosa may go down for Phala Phala and be succeeded by Paul Mashatile. That is likely useful in holding support for the DA up. But that is very different from the sincere belief that the DA can do better at governing South Africa than the African National Congress (ANC) has done. If the party continues as it has over the past week, it will never be able to build that latter belief, and people will come to think that both the ANC and the DA are fundamentally unable to protect their interests and help them raise their aspirations – and people will then struggle on, on their own, as best as they can, as many are already doing.

In the view of this newspaper, a point has now been reached where there are grave doubts about whether the DA, as it is, can govern the country better than the ANC has done, and that the odds of turning macro-South Africa around rest at least as much on whether the ANC can pick Patrice Motsepe as its leader and replicate the investment and growth track it recorded in government between 1994 and 2008. If neither side is up to the job, then an enclave future awaits.