The DA have begun to go a bit goofy lately.

Of course their administrative track record is good, and Hill-Lewis seems to be injecting real dynamism into the Cape capital, with new KPIs for reducing the price of procurement contracts. Alan Winde’s project WESGRO has reached maturity, and is getting a lot of provincial investment in.

But their political strategic thinking doesn’t seem to have the same quality as their acuity for managerial bureaucracy.

‍

The Business candidate

One would think that prior experience of parachuting in an outsider to run the show (Mmusi Maimane, Mamphele Ramphele) would have taught the DA a lesson, but apparently three times is the charm - the awareness of the electorate’s broad refusal to vote for minorities (particularly whites) seems to be rattling the party ahead of the general election.

They are toying with the idea of placing an old ANC government appointee and current big businessman, Roger Jardine, at the head of the coalition as the faction’s presidential candidate.

The MPC involves seven parties, aiming to unseat the ANC in the 2024 elections by increasing support for opposition parties within the coalition. However, they are still trailing behind at roughly 35% in the polls, with the Charterist bloc (parties based on the Freedom Charter - EFF, ANC, PAC) still taking up a supermajority together.

Jardine comes from a UDF activist family, was educated overseas, was appointed director-general of the department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology at the age of 29 in 1994, and later served as CEO of Kagiso Media, Aveng Group and Primedia before becoming the chairman of FirstRand. A stellar CV on paper.

DA leader John Steenhuisen has been characteristically ambiguous, saying that they are “open to the idea” of a "like-minded" individual from the business sector becoming president in a multi-party coalition government. From all accounts, this is a demand made by the DA’s corporate donors.

The DA of course, receives the most financial backing of any political party at the moment, much of it from legacy oligarchs like the Oppenheimers. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but South African business leaders are notoriously ignorant and naive about politics, as the NHI debacle has shown us (imagine being surprised that the ANC would pass destructive legislation).

Letting SA business pull your strings is not a recipe for inspired ideas or clever machiavellian maneuvers.

And it appears that, as usual, the DA has not consulted its coalition partners on this issue. The DA stands accused of collapsing several metropolitan coalition negotiations in the past over differences in policy, where the position seems often to be the DA’s way or the highway.

And this new high-handed leadership maneuver with Jardine seems to be rattling cages again.

Dr. Corné Mulder (VF+), Michael Beaumont (ActionSA), and Velenkosini Hlabisa (IFP), criticize the idea of parachuting an outsider into the presidency, with Dr. Mulder offering his usual manner of polite and subtle understatement to make his criticisms known:

"This whole idea of a face for the MPC has not been discussed anywhere. Because we don’t have a presidential election, this becomes a non-debate. There will not be a ballot paper with Roger Jardine or Cyril Ramaphosa. You cannot parachute someone from outside into the political system that is going to be the president. I will bet my whole political career and say that the DA won’t win the election on their own. Roger Jardine will have to convince other parties to become president, if we as a coalition get the right support. We have not even spoken of such moves yet.

"I appreciate the help that the business community wants to give, but we have to do this the right way. You firstly need to understand politics and leave it to the people that deal with it. The biggest problem is that we do not have a presidential election system. We don’t have a [United States] electoral system of a Biden versus Trump situation where people vote for either of the two. We have a parliamentary system where people vote for political parties.”

IFP President Velenkosini Hlabisa and ActionSA spokesperson Michael Beaumont have both agreed with Mulder’s position on the matter, stressing that the MPC parties are contesting the 2024 elections independently, each with its own presidential candidate, as decided by their structures, and must, in case of a national coalition, follow the internal party lists and electoral results to guide placement in any future cabinet.

Steenhuisen of course downplayed the rumours, by saying that, at the moment, there are no formal talks about a presidential candidate for the MPC, just a lot of informal talks.

‍

Strategic tunnel vision

But this seems to be a pattern of late - four major leaders in the DA (Zille, Steenhuisen, Msimanga, Hill-Lewis) have in the past suggested a coalition with the ANC as a vital alternative to the so-called “moonshot pact” - an internal name for the coalition which illustrates its low likelihood of success.

On several occasions, these leaders have advertised this idea as “the best worst option”, and a necessary alternative to an EFF coalition government.

While most polls now put the ANC at a hair below 50%, the DA’s internal polling is increasingly dreamy and optimistic, claiming near-parity with the ANC, at 32% to the ANC’s 39%.

However, the new electoral reforms, which introduce a mixed system with 200 district-based candidates and 200 proportional representation (PR) candidates, will almost certainly upset this calculation - while a PR election gives you what it says on the aggregate, a constituency-based system rewards the largest party with several more seats, effectively eliminating the value of millions of votes which cannot achieve a majority in that constituency.

This arrangement is seldom discussed by national pundits, though election fundis like Michael Atkins have been keeping a close eye. For those who have the appetite for a long dry report on electoral reform, you can see his excellent contribution here, at the IRR.

The legal challenges to the current electoral reform act have delayed the election, and currently the IEC cannot say when the election will occur, or whether it will occur within the constitutionally mandated time frame.

While Maimane’s BOSA and independent candidate and veteran leftist Zachie Achmat have brought challenges, the DA has been comfortable sitting on the sidelines offering lip service criticisms.

After all, the biggest beneficiaries of the new system will be the two largest parties, and the biggest hurdles have been placed in front of new parties and independent candidates, and the DA has been attacking the idea of voting for small parties for years now - famously calling a vote for anyone other than the DA to be a vote for the ANC

Clearly this antagonistic approach wasn’t doing them any favours, or they wouldn’t have switched over to the MPC plan. But the party seems a little unclear on exactly what its priorities are, what its Plan B is, and whether they really want what they say they do.

A more moderate strategy, but one which could win them much bigger in the long run, would have been to focus on the three big provincial races (WC, KZN, GP), and use those provincial gains to redraw municipal boundaries and keep the ANC out of vital metropoles and mid-sized towns.

This would be an achievable aim that all opposition parties could benefit from, and would make it less likely for the ANC to be able to sabotage coalitions in the future.

They have also been characteristically uncooperative with the Cape independence movement, which has spent two years offering them compromises, with several options for devolving power and achieving autonomy without secession. They rejected the People’s Bill and the use of any referendum to achieve control, while ignoring legal advice against the utility of their much-touted Provincial Powers Bill, which is completely toothless.

This may harm them next year in the Cape, where the new Referendum Party has a specifically targeted campaign to poach specifically Liberal DA votes, while the VF+ and PA eat away at their base from the right. This could have been contained if the DA were a bit more serious about their "federalism" instead of waiting for Cyril's permission to operate the heavy machinery.

It seems the DA is moonstruck, and can’t see the R200 notes lying on the ground between them and the distant Union Buildings.

If they don’t look out soon, they might trip.