“Weakness is provocative” is perhaps our favourite political idea. Attributed to Donald Rumsfeld from a swansong address to his State Department, it holds true time and again. Be strong and your enemies will be wary. Be weak and you invite attacks. Last week the DA voted with the ANC in Parliament to save the latter’s speaker in the legislature, even as the ANC's chief whip, Mdumiseni Ntuli, accused the DA and its leadership of aiding a scheme to “defraud” South Africa of R4 billion, claiming the transactions were “depleting the resources that are required for us to engage in both import and export in terms of the foreign exchange reserves of the Republic of South Africa” and damaging “our ability to grow our own economy”.

In response to that the DA’s chief strategist said on social media that by using the DA’s logo on accompanying communication the ANC may have committed a brand infringement! It all reminded of a Far Side cartoon which read, “There has been a change of plan, the meek shall inherit the moon.”

Doubling down the meekness was the DA’s deputy federal chairperson and basic education minister, Siviwe Gwarube, who confided in the press that the DA has an ethics and malfeasance problem. She told News24, “As the party grows … we’re going to be stretched a lot more … we are fallible like any party other political party, and political parties are made up of people, and people make mistakes” and that “some people are unethical, some people should not be trusted to lead, and I think the more the party finds itself in positions of leadership and positions where we are leading, the scrutiny is a lot harsher on a lot more of us”. That newspaper then went on to report that Gwarube believes there will be many more people found wanting. She would not mention who these crooked and corrupt DA leaders were, however, and was quoted as saying instead, “I can think of many people whom I would rather not mention. People have had to lose positions they have had because they are being held to account.”

There are some ANC people around, you actually feel for them, who say, “Are we seriously losing to these guys?”

That does not seem to have deterred donors, or has it? The Common Sense reported last week that the DA had received the lion’s share of recently reported private political donations, in other words, lawfully declared funding. Note three things from that. First, the smaller parties got almost nothing. The donor elite have given up on them. Second, the donor elite who turns out for the DA is a very small group. There are really three private political donors in South Africa, the broader Oppenheimer family, Michiel le Roux, and Martin Moshal. And the amounts they give are, in reality, quite modest, collectively perhaps enough to buy a nice home in a nice part of London. South Africa has not generated a culture of private political party giving. Third, private donations are dwarfed by the near R2 billion a year that political parties pay themselves with taxpayer funds.

What about “other” donations that pass neither through the books of regulators nor Parliament? No one really knows the extent of this. That was, of course, the purpose of party funding laws that South Africa adopted a few years ago, to limit and deter lawful formal funding of political parties in order to increase the relative influence of illicit funding, which in a fundamentally corrupt society is easy enough to source.

It’s all kind of pointing somewhere, the weak DA, the pathetic ANC needing the weak DA’s help to bail out its speaker, the fractional contribution of a small handful of private party funders to essentially one party. It’s like formal politics is ever less where the real action lies in terms of who and what is shaping South Africa.

Read that against AfriForum and March and March getting together. These guys are not weak. They’re tough as hell. Quote Rumsfeld at them and they get it instinctively as the most elementary basis of strategy. A wandering albatross says March and March was thrilled when a recent meeting with AfriForum started with prayer. The white and the black hardliners praying together for the future of the country, that’s quite an image. But South Africans will like that. It’s who and what they and the country are. That’s what draws people to them, the projection of strength. In her interview, Gwarube said that to grow, the DA needed to show more compassion, that people would be drawn to that. In that moment, the detachment of South Africa’s political elites from the people on the ground had never been greater.