Roman’s recent adventures in the agricultural department have been entertaining to watch, even if they aren’t as much fun for all involved.

At this point, the story is fairly simple - Steenhuisen hired Roman, as a trustworthy and competent acquaintance, to run his office, a relatively easy job for a competent fellow, which has no basic requirements for technical expertise in areas like engineering or particle physics.

But after years of teasing the liberal and left-wing media in the country from his fairly successful social media platform, Mr Cabanac was bound to attract some ire.

And indeed he did, as journalists from almost every publication worked doubletime to dig up as much dirt and politically incorrect utterances as they could from his entire online history.

The DA, having recently dealt with a similar sort of scandal when the media managed to coerce them to let go of another edgy social media personality, Renaldo Gouws, from their members list.

According to Gouws, the process of his removal was irregular and confused, and the DA appear not to have ticked a lot of the correct procedural boxes as they went, which may open them up to a longer headache for their disloyalty to Gouws, who would now be well motivated to kick the party for other indiscretions too.

For Roman’s part, the party having utterly abandoned him for little more than entertaining ideas outside of the extremely narrow progressive ideological boundaries the party operates within, and entirely on the media’s say-so, has chosen not to cooperate.

This tests a rather fundamental question of power - if the party reacts to everything the media tells them to, then it is the media who is in power, not the party leadership.

The DA have a rather poor track record in this regard - they have demonstrated no capacity for independent thought or action, and have spent the entirety of their existence taking cues from donors, journalists, NGOs and anyone else rattling a can. They have buckled to every policy proposal from the ANC, and have shown no real capacity for backbone.

But what Roman is demonstrating, by refusing to resign from his contract, is that the media don’t really have this power at all, not unless you willingly hand it to them.

He has refused to leave office, forcing the DA to fire him. But he has not in any way contravened his employment contract or been found guilty of even the pettiest of  misconduct. His party have openly declared that he passed their own vetting process, meaning that Roman’s background and character were known to them, and can’t be construed as having been concealed.

This places Roman in a very strong position - the Labour Relations Act places the burden of proof in any labour dispute on the employer, and does not allow for “arbitrary” dismissal.

This means that Roman can theoretically stick this out until the DA accept him and work with him, or else break the law to remove him, costing them a great deal of legal fees going forward.

While they have shown extraordinary cowardice, this may change for the better if they are forced to take charge of their own decisions and shut out media criticism.

After all, how much do the media bother with lambasting the ANC for their various crimes and misdemeanours? When ranting about corruption and majoritarian racism achieve no result, they don’t bother hanging on any more.

But the soft underbelly of the DA means that it can be quite rewarding to bash them, since they will always inevitably cave, even in the case of their own leadership, like when they forced the party to discipline Helen Zille for saying that colonialism may have benefitted Singapore (which even her accusers admitted was literally true).

Roman Cabanac may end up forcing them to grow up and tell the media to piss off.

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