Though truth is said to be the daughter of time, it often happens that a revelation about some critical aspect of our past, which would have been front-page news had it come out contemporaneously, will slip by largely unnoticed when it emerges many years after the fact.

The Daily Maverick has been publishing extracts from the unfinished memoirs of James Selfe, the veteran Democratic Alliance (DA) politician who served as the party’s Federal Chairperson from 2000 to 2019, and who passed away last year. The excerpt this week contains an explanation of two of the most inexplicable actions taken by the Democratic Alliance under Mmusi Maimane’s leadership: the failed effort to drive Helen Zille out of the party in mid-2017, and the Laerskool Schweizer-Reneke debacle of January 2019.

The background to Selfe’s revelations is that in 2013 the American electoral strategist Stanley Greenberg was recruited to assist with the DA’s 2014 election campaign by his old friend Wilmot James, the academic and former head of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, who had joined the DA and been elected an MP a few years previously.

Greenberg first made his name as the pollster on Bill Clinton’s victorious United States presidential campaign in 1992. He was recruited from there to serve as the pollster on the 1994 campaign of the African National Congress (ANC), where he took a leading role in conceptualising the: “better life for all” slogan.

He returned as pollster for the ANC’s 1999 campaign, where the liberation movement sought to win the two-thirds majority it believed it needed to implement its racial nationalist agenda: “unfettered by constraints.”

Maimane

In 2015 Maimane was elected DA leader and Greenberg was brought back as electoral strategist as the party began its preparations, in late 2016, for the 2019 national elections. The DA’s external and internal strategists now came up with a plan for: “Project 2019”, which rejected the incremental approach to winning support and that had served the party well thus far.

Instead, such was the threat posed to South Africa by the Zuma-ANC it was necessary to leapfrog two election cycles, secure the DA 39% of the vote in 2019, and bring the ANC’s support to well below 50%. However, to do this it was imperative for the DA to make a decisive breakthrough into the black electorate. What was needed was for the party to capitalise upon a series of: “disruptive moments” which would prove, once and for all, that the DA was no longer a: “white party.”

This was the period in which: “state capture” was reaching its zenith, and to draw attention away from what was going on various malign actors – most infamously, Bell Pottinger – actively sought to stoke racial discord within South African society through one orchestrated race campaign after another.

Rather than pushing back against these propaganda efforts, directed as they were in large part against the DA, its leaders, and its supporters, the plan was now for the DA to try to ride the resultant waves of racial outrage and thereby (somehow) catalyse an electoral breakthrough among black voters.

Singapore

After Western Cape Premier Helen Zille returned from Singapore on 16 March 2017, one such opportunity presented itself. Zille related the lessons she had learned, including how that country had dealt with the contradictory legacies of colonialism. Though Zille’s remarks were commonsensical and in line with the DA’s founding liberal values, she was wildly attacked by the racial mob on social media. In response to comments such as: “South Africa would be better if all your people left and we drive forward Africa instead of embracing colonialism heritage” and: “There was nothing valuable in the colonisation of South Africa... NOTHING!”, an exasperated Zille replied: “For those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc.”

Instead of the party defending her, as it previously would have done, DA representatives were directed to go after Zille, with Maimane then going on to Eusebius McKaiser’s Radio 702 talk show to describe her remarks as: “indefensible.” Selfe alleges in his memoirs that at a planning meeting – the date of which is not given – Greenberg said that although the DA had huge potential Zille had: “done serious damage to the DA. It changed the way Mmusi was viewed: many people believed that he was a puppet of, or a front, for whites, and that the moment the DA won power, the whites would remove him.”

He went on to flatter Maimane that he could be the next president if he just positioned himself correctly. “All he needed was to find a disruptive moment that would prompt dissatisfied blacks to vote for the party. Stan suggested that the one thing he could do was expel Helen.”

In early April the DA announced that following an investigation it was bringing disciplinary charges against Zille. As the Western Cape Premier continued to fight her corner on this issue – both politically and legally – she was then suspended from party activities in early June. This effort to drive Zille out of the DA inevitably caused huge ructions and unhappiness within the party.

Eventually a mediated settlement was reached in mid-June 2017 whereby Zille: “apologised” so that Maimane could back down, without losing too much face. This was not the end of the matter, however, as the DA’s strategists in October 2017 again pushed for an: “early exit” for Zille, although this proposal seemed to have gone nowhere. By this point the DA’s (white) strategists had become obsessed with proving Maimane was not a: “puppet” and were determined to pull every string they could to dispel this perception.

All these awkward and illiberal contortions – including that the DA needed to be: “radically transformed” – could be: “sold” on the basis that desperate times called for desperate measures.

Jacob Zuma was such a threat to South Africa’s polity that all this was necessary to achieve the ANC’s defeat in 2019. However, in December 2017 Cyril Ramaphosa narrowly defeated Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to become ANC president, which meant that he (not a Zuma) would be the ANC’s presidential candidate in 2019. This removed the threat argument and meant that many ANC supporters who had detested Zuma and the Guptas intensely would return home to the movement at the next election.

Changed reality

This fundamentally changed political and electoral reality did not see any adjustment of approach. Instead, the DA’s strategists continued the self-wounding approach of trying to position the party against its own support base. This eventually culminated in the Laerskool Schweizer Reneke incident in early January 2019. A photograph which appeared to show a segregated Grade R classroom on the first day of term at the Afrikaans-medium primary school was sent viral on social media, provoking mass outrage.

In his memoirs Selfe relates: “Our colleagues directing the election campaign latched on to this as [another] ‘disruptive moment’.” Maimane concurred. The consequence was that the (black) DA politician directed to front the party’s response was then blamed for the enraged racial mob (made up of ANC and Economic Freedom Fighters supporters) that assembled outside the school gates the following day, and which then invaded the school grounds, terrifying teachers and young children alike. When the truth emerged the following week –that there was an innocent explanation for the photograph, and it had been taken by a warm and compassionate teacher, beloved by the young children in her care (black and white) – the DA were left, as Selfe notes, with: “egg on our faces.”

Far from Stan Greenberg’s: “disruptive moments” strategy unlocking an electoral windfall of 6.8 million votes – as envisaged – the DA won only 3.6 million votes in the 2019 elections, down half a million votes from its 2014 performance. Many Afrikaner voters, appalled at the party’s conduct in Schweizer-Reneke, defected to the Freedom Front Plus (FF+).

The losses among minority voters would likely have been even greater had many discontented English-speaking voters been able to find the FF+ on the ballot paper. The DA meanwhile gained zero new black support.

This electoral setback set in train the events that led to Helen Zille’s return to frontline DA politics and now to her nomination as the DA’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg local government elections in 2026. The most compelling argument for her candidacy? She is the person best placed to restore reliable supplies of piped water to the long-suffering residents of the suburbs and townships of the metropole.

James Myburgh is Director of Bremen Democratic Research (BRE-DE-RE), an initiative to identify and counter threats to the liberty, comity and prosperity of democratic societies through historical and comparative research.