The DA, despite its attempts to iron out the splits within the party in the past five years, remains dogged by factionalism.

Last week, this played out in two connected scandals - the signing of the BELA Act, and the firing of Roman Cabanac. These hiccoughs we have been seeing recently have revealed a split, between those who wish to maintain control, and those who wish to accelerate the merger with the ANC.

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Undermining Steenhuisen

The key man here was John Steenhuisen, who backed AfriForum and Solidariteit’s push for the President to hold off on the promulgation of articles 4 and 5 of the BELA Act, which would strip school governing bodies of their powers to set language and admissions policies.

Steenhuisen had been suffering from attacks from within his own party, which has a rather close relationship with News24, which relentlessly drilled into his chief of staff Roman Cabanac for his failure to adhere to the official state ideology. The irrelevance of Cabanac’s philosophical perspectives to what is in effect a rather boring administrative position was not important.

What was important, was weakening Steenhuisen. With Zille reaching the end of her career, and the young replacement leaders all sitting far to the left of either of these two nonracialists, any attacks on the party leadership clearly benefit the up-and-coming socialists.

Chris Pappas chose a real moment of weakness for his criticisms against his own party, and tried to leverage it to argue for a return to the Maimane-era majoritarian racialism. While other socialists, like Leon Schreiber, have been shrewd enough to tweet out support for John Steenhuisen’s role in getting the Solidariteit movement in the room with the president, Pappas has been conspicuously silent in the customary round of cheerleading for a victory like this.

Siviwe Gwarube, the DA minister of basic education went full-bore in praise of the BELA Act in an official presentation, telling the crowd to disregard criticism, and appeared to imply that the courts are meddlesome outsiders who shouldn't be a part of the process, because we need a central policy not subject to piecemeal adaptation to fit realities on the ground.

While News24 has spun this as a DA victory, it seems more clear to me that the Afrikaners have been the real muscle here, and that Steenhuisen is acting with little support form his own party by siding with them.

While Helen Zille is adamant that the party has strictly opposed the BELA Act’s more pernicious aspects, and has had a real intention of fighting it, Solidariteit had a prepared court case strategy ready for launch the moment the Bill was signed, and the DA have ended up merely taking credit for their heavy lifting, as a friend of mine in AfriForum readily predicted weeks in advance.

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A weakened position

So the press and the juniors in the party have managed to bully their leader into ditching his chief of staff, and he has been forced to bring in AfriForum and Solidariteit to find serious resistance to the BELA Act. This is a dangerous position to be in as a leader. And while Zille may have pushed out most of the old racial redress crowd, they retain an impact in their absence.

The party itself has found a compromise to paper over the cracks - the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These are essentially a constrictive central planning doctrine aimed at limiting economic growth, redistributing resources, and curtailing those of European descent. They sell it as "economic justice" - a transparently progressive slogan. The "diversity, equity and inclusion" schtick so maligned by more sensible elements of political society is the key organising principle behind the entire UN policy edifice.

This allows the DA to please the left-leaning members of the party, while appearing to be bland, sensible and centrist to the base, since after all, who pays attention to the UN anyway? Aren't they those useless people who pass all those empty-gesture human rights motions and do famine relief?

But it has led them to enthusiastically support the ANC's Climate Change Act, a totalitarian document which empowers the minister to set near-arbitrary targets for each and every business, region and economic sector in the country, down to the individual level.

The way in which the DA has gone flaccid on ANC policy since the election makes something of a mockery of their blustery rhetoric before it. I suspect that the centrists under Zille have little juice on their own, and struggle to sell a sensible approach to domestic affairs to their progressive allies in the West, upon whom they rely for a great deal of support.

On this note it is worth looking at Steenhuisen's press conference on the BELA Act, where the Press Club was stuffed with foreigners, a good deal of them from the German government-funded NGOs which influence DA policymaking - the Friedrich Nauman and Konrad Adenauer institutions.

In this speech, Steenhuisen showed a great deal of weakness, and affirmed that the only real red lines the party had with regard to ANC behaviour were the changing or disregarding of the constitution, and an economic decline. Well, this basically means they will refuse to fight until it is too late.

Good thing Solidariteit is around to fight their battles.

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The strong inner core

To understand the DA of the present day, one must look back five years. The main factions which emerged at the time of Mmusnoi Maimane were between those who desired a pivot towards majoritarian racialism, and those who wished to preserve the party’s nonracialist liberal values. The nonracialists won resoundingly in 2019.

At the time, there was a fifth column of posh private-school black nationalists being drawn up through the ranks by Maimane, including Lindiwe Mazibuko and Mbali Ntuli, backed by the politically promiscuous Patricia de Lille.

Their main backers within the core of the party were led by the late James Selfe, who led the charge to have Helen Zille removed from leadership following her comments about Singapore (namely, that colonial heritage has some institutional benefits). Most of the leaders in this faction have either died, retired, or joined Tony Leon’s lobby group.

Zille, being the leader of the alternative faction, has an extraordinary stamina and attention span, and has commanded the party ever since Maimane was ejected. She groomed Geordin Hill-Lewis and Gwen Ngwenya, and kept close council with the country’s best pollsters Frans Cronje and Gareth van Onselen, as well as Ryan Coetzee, who has just returned after mixed results running a private UK-owned government consultancy in the middle east.

Zille’s most powerful allies include the Oppenheimers, the oldest and most powerful of the old oligarchs in South Africa after the Rothschilds; Tony Leon, who runs Resolve Communications, a lobbyist and PR group which helps nurture ties between JSE-listed companies and government departments; and Adriaan Basson, who is in charge of editorial policy at News24.

The past five years, which has seen the news outlet love-bomb Cyril Ramaphosa, has (according to insiders) been a concerted strategy in connection with the DA to prepare for the post-2024 election merger between the ANC and the DA.

The campaign she has run these past five years, to get the DA to form a coalition with the ANC, has been an astonishing victory, even if it can largely be attributed to the sudden emergence of the MK.

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Castles made of sand

But Helen Zille is reaching the end of her career, and her friends in senior party leadership lack the potency and charisma she possesses. Despite having groomed a number of capable young party leaders, the stability of her faction’s chosen position on race into the next political cycle seems somewhat rocky.

I have little doubt that Zille is sincere in her opposition to majoritarian racialism as a legal policy; she’s just too smart not to. But her juniors seem extremely loathe to serve in any respect the interests of their voter base, except by accident.

They are around the same age as I am, and have passed through the new dispensation’s aggressively ideological school curriculum and a radical left wing curriculum at university, and so are unlikely to be informed by a serious sense of minority interests, having been taught that this is an evil and racist stance to be in, and even if they don't quite believe it themselves, would rather go with the flow of "progress" than be dragged "back" to nonracialism and liberal economics.

And it is indubitable that the NGOs backed by Europe and American governments here support the ANC's policies, as long as they don't threaten to tax their investments too much or nationalise key economic sectors. Anything else is up for grabs. Just look at the funders for Section 27 - an organisation with hardcore support for the BELA Act, and Bill Gates' foundation literally drew up the NHI themselves.

That means that those in Zille's mold will not just be swimming against the ANC, but also Western state power.

Schreiber is a socialist, Pappas is heavily pro-black. Gwarube appears to support whatever the ANC supports. Ngwenya, a fan of Francis Fukuyama and a pragmatic nonracialist, left the party because she much prefers writing policy and not being bothered by infighting or backbiting. Also, the private sector pays more.

Geordin Hill-Lewis, rumoured to be quietly gunning for Steenhuisen, has hired an EFF supporter as his PR agent to take credit for the actions of his civil service staff in Cape Town, and has become difficult to read, but generally promotes a pro-black policy stance (though this could be chalked up to normal politicking, I suspect he is happy to play for power rather than principle).

Dean McPherson has been placed high due to his general competence, but has little charisma. Ashor Sarupen is rumoured to be quite left-wing by DA standards, but has made no comments in public that would suggest any opinions one way or the other. He has however a very influential position, and appears to be on good working terms with most of the party, as an indispensable public finance expert.

There are a couple of talented and charismatic youngsters who aren’t of the leftward persuasion, like Cilliers Brink, who unusually, does actually demonstrate a capacity for thoughts deeper than budget analysis, and is a fan of Francis Fukuyama, particularly his focus on institutional development.

But Brink is very white, doesn’t have the squishy bleeding-heart tendencies that would endear him to white leftists, he doesn’t have the gone-native accoutrements of Chris Pappas, nor does he have the Father Christmas/Mr Beast aroma of infinite freebies that Geordin Hill-Lewis gives off.

Ian Cameron would be grand if he had the clout within the party to steer it, given that he is experienced, serious, allergic to corruption, and relatively conservative. But he would have few allies in the aftermath of a Zille-led DA - after all, he is a very recent addition.

The few youngsters that are in the limelight today - Schreiber, Pappas, Hill-Lewis - appear to have little resistance to the notion of steering the party hard to the left, and burying themselves in the bosom of the ANC.

While most major features of the DA federal leadership are well within the Zille faction, it seems to me that her days at the helm are numbered, and without her, Steenhuisen’s leadership position will have little support, and the other oldheads may go with them.

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