The first thing to say is to thank Geordin Hill-Lewis for taking on the job of leading the Democratic Alliance (DA). Hill-Lewis is a capable person and could have chosen to take an easier and more lucrative path through life. Ask anyone in a serious room if they would give up their careers and go into politics in South Africa and there won’t be any takers.

Hill-Lewis says the DA will seek to become the biggest party in South Africa. The current balance of power has sat at a very stable 40% for the ANC vs 25% for the DA since the May 2024 election. The DA commands the established middle classes, black and white. If you are a second-generation middle-class person who owns a home and a car and has some savings, then you are most likely a DA voter. Race does not come into it. That is because the ANC threatens the interests of that middle class and the DA has landed the message that it protects them. But that class cannot grow faster than the economy, which means the DA needs to crack an alternative market if it is to overtake the ANC.

The easiest is likely the aspirant middle class on the urban fringe. Its ambition is to join the established middle class and its policy interests are therefore aligned.

But the DA has gotten off to a false start of sorts, with its education minister proposing a mad nationalist history curriculum that will dumb down South Africa’s children and sabotage their prospects in a global world. Reprobates have sought to position that curriculum as a progressive attempt to water down a focus on Jan van Riebeeck – a clear attempt at racial nationalist fig-leafery (Van Riebeeck has hardly been a focus of the history curriculum for decades). What has actually been lost is everything from the key global events that shaped the modern world to, according to his former partner, the legacy of Steve Biko.

It is exactly this sort of thing that will worry not the whites as much as the aspirant black middle class, who cannot trust a party that would countenance such skullduggery aimed at the stupefaction of their children any more than they might trust the ANC.

To break through his party’s 25%-odd political ceiling, Hill-Lewis will need to stamp out that sort of thing, but the person behind it has now been elected to high office in his party – an early test of whether the new DA leadership has the ruthlessness to actually overtake the ANC.

Here’s a projection: if it is not dealt with firmly, and the minister countermanded so that the proposed new curriculum is withdrawn, then the DA will fail in its ambition to be South Africa’s biggest party, because the DA will ultimately be too weak to do the ruthless things that are needed to win. It is so important for the country and the lives of millions of the poor that it is ruthless.

It was amazing to see how seriously various important actors took the DA conference. Just ten years ago they couldn’t have cared what went down there. The media was also generous in its reporting. That shows how much the world has changed and just how very badly the ANC has done. Thirty and even 20 years ago, the DA was rubbished all around whilst the ANC was carried on the shoulders of the business community, diplomats, and the media. All that has changed.

But then, many of the political moves endorsed by the media and business in South Africa over the past 30 years have ultimately failed, because South Africa’s wealthy elites, especially the really rich whites, so struggle to understand the country – so quite what the latest endorsement indicates about the DA’s prospects for success is unclear.

That comment about the really rich whites needs some explaining. It is not that they’re bad guys. It is just that Bishopscourt, Westcliff, Melrose Arch, and Sandhurst are not in South Africa and have not been for many years. And it’s hard from those rareified perspectives to really know. The test is as simple as asking what a litre of milk costs – and whether the respondent knows the answer to within a rand. And no, soy milk, almond milk, pea milk, hemp milk, and “any of those other funny milks,” as a clearly bemused barista was overheard to have phrased it to a frustrated member of the elite on a Cape Town beach recently, when her obscure non-bovine alternative was not available, do not count.

A thought too about John Steenhuisen. Whilst he held the top DA job, the ANC got knocked to below 50%, the DA joined the government, and hit its all-time polling highs. There is a lot of credit to be taken for that. A pity that that all got messed up around a cattle virus.