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If I were in the privileged position to offer Geordin Hill-Lewis, the new leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), advice, it would be to study former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Not because South Africa needs British nostalgia, but because the DA needs the courage to stop apologising for the values that could rescue the country.

The real lesson from Thatcher, who was the UK’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990, is that reformers must not try to hide their beliefs. She did not present markets as a technical adjustment, ownership as an accounting device, or enterprise as something faintly embarrassing. She presented freedom, property, personal responsibility, and limited government as moral ideas that gave ordinary people power over their own lives.

That is why Thatcher’s language still matters. In 1988 she told the Conservative Party, which she had led since 1976, that “government is the servant of the people, not its master.” She added that Conservatives believed “the economic role of government is to establish a climate in which enterprise can flourish, not to elbow enterprise out of the way” and that “we hold by the principles we know to be right”.

That is the DA’s missing voice. Too often, the party sounds as if it wants to prove that it can administer South Africa more efficiently than the African National Congress, when it should be arguing that South Africa’s central problem is that too much power sits in institutions that have failed. A quote from Hill-Lewis’s predecessor, John Steenhuisen, in 2022 makes this point well: “The DA difference – the visible and tangible improvement in quality of life that can only be achieved through responsible, responsive and empathetic governance.” The DA should not merely say it can run things better. It should say that citizens, families, firms, communities, municipalities, and provinces must be trusted with more power because the central state has lost the right to monopolise governance.

Moving Power Away fFrom Bureaucrats and Politicians

Thatcher understood this. Her privatisation drive was not only about selling state companies. It was about moving power away from politicians and bureaucrats and towards consumers, workers, shareholders, and households. In the House of Commons in 1988, she put the matter plainly, saying that under privatisation, Conservatives were “privatising and taking powers away from the government and giving them to the people”.

That sentence should be written into the DA’s campaign manual. South Africa’s state-owned enterprises are not neutral institutions. Eskom has punished households and businesses through unreliable power. Transnet has weakened exporters by breaking rail and port logistics. The Post Office has collapsed as a public service. Many water systems and municipalities now exist as warnings against the idea that state control equals public good.

The DA’s answer should not be timid language about partnerships. It should be a direct argument that South Africans deserve ownership, choice, and competition where state monopolies have failed.

Eskom should be opened to deeper private generation, private transmission investment, and real electricity markets. Transnet should be opened to private operators in rail and ports. Municipal services should be structured so that capable private providers, communities, and local authorities can step in when central systems fail.

This is not an argument for the rich. Thatcher’s political genius was that her reforms spoke most powerfully to the lower middle class. Council tenants could buy homes. Ordinary savers could buy shares. Workers and families who had been treated as clients of the state could become owners with a stake in the country. In 1986 she called popular capitalism “a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation”.

South African Opportunity

That is the South African opportunity. The DA should speak to the aspirant middle class in exactly those terms. The township shopkeeper who needs cheaper electricity is not asking for socialism. The young worker who wants a first job is not helped by labour laws that frighten employers away from hiring. The family that wants to buy a home is not empowered by insecure property rights. The pension saver is not protected by politicians who eye private savings as a fiscal rescue fund. The small exporter is not liberated by a collapsing port.

The DA’s values can be made tangible because they describe the daily needs of South Africa’s aspirant middle class. Freedom means the right to work, trade, build, save, speak, own, and choose. Property rights mean that a family can accumulate wealth across generations. Enterprise means that jobs come from people who take risks, not from ministers who make speeches. Devolution means that communities should not be held hostage by a failing national state. Merit means that children and workers are not trapped by racial patronage systems that reward connected insiders while the poor remain outside.

Thatcher did not win because everyone liked her. She won because enough voters understood that she believed what she said and would act on it. In a 1989 interview she warned that “if you just set out to be liked” you would “compromise on anything” and “achieve nothing”.

That is the warning for Hill-Lewis and the DA. A party that trims its values until they offend nobody will also inspire nobody. South Africa does not need a polite opposition that manages decline with better manners. It needs a reform movement that tells the aspirant middle class that the route upward runs through ownership, work, safety, property, enterprise, and competent local power. Or, as Thatcher so artfully put it: “It doesn't strike them as a political dogma, but simple common sense, that people should want to buy their own home, set aside something for their old age, have shares in companies they work for or buy from, and do the best for their children.”

Thatcher showed that a party can win by making ordinary people the owners of reform. Hill-Lewis should learn that lesson and help the DA say plainly what it believes, why it is right, and how those values can make South Africans owners of their future.