Storm forecast: Winde, with brighter prospects

[The_Right_Honourable_Brit]

The Honourable Mmusi Maimane should resign as leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA).

The DA is still reeling from its worst political performance in the 2019 elections. Electorally, this was of course not the worst performance of the DA in terms of numbers. The party actually won its second highest percentage of the vote in most provinces, and nationally. Electorally, it was a disappointing result for the party but not a disastrous one. Politically, however, it was a disaster. The party has now lost what I would argue is one of its two strongest narrative assets: the idea that it is on an unstoppable growth trajectory that will inevitably see it rise to become a party of national governance – the unstoppable government-in-waiting, deliberately marching to Pretoria. But the march has faltered.

Even worse than that, the party is in all probability in the early but dramatic stages of a steep decline.
There can be no two ways about it: the leader of the party is ultimately responsible for political failure. It might be cruel to place the blame squarely on Maimane, but that is the nature of political leadership. Political success has many parents, political failure has only one. The DA’s political failure in the 2019 elections has set off a chain reaction of crisis as evidenced by the party’s being forced to cut jobs due to donors abandoning the party, and by-election losses and disappointments stacking up. In the by-elections since the general election, as Gareth van Onselen points out, the party has lost 9 wards and held on to 20. This gives the party a loss ratio of 33%. The DA is losing people, money and voters.

More recently, a second narrative asset for the party has started crumbling: that of the DA’s being, despite any significant failings it might have, the only major party that has consistently been unscathed by the regular storms of corruption that almost permanently soak our politics. The truth about the precise nature of Maimane’s residence and the circumstances of his using a car gifted by Markus Jooste of Steinhoff infamy, is yet to come out. But what is now clear is that Maimane’s reputation and position is weakening perceptibly almost by the day. Any damage suffered by Maimane were he to lose his corruption-free status would in all probability cost him his position, but it will also cost the DA its reputation as a party uninvolved in the political game of corrupt and undue gain.

When David Mabuza labels someone a ‘very good man’, this might very well be cause for concern. Yet, Alan Winde seems to one of the few politicians who could reputationally survive such a brutal onslaught as the moral endorsement of the Republic’s Deputy President.

With a political career starting in the mid-1990s, Winde has steadily ascended from local politics to become the eighth Premier of the Western Cape. He has served with some distinction in various positions in provincial government. Most significantly, he oversaw as provincial Minister of Finance the Western Cape’s creation of approximately 508 000 jobs – the number of jobs created in the province between the third quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2018. At the end of Winde’s tenure as provincial Minister of Finance, the Western Cape boasted the lowest expanded unemployment rate in the country of 23.1% compared to the then national average of 37%. Considering the fact that job creation and unemployment consistently top the priorities lists of voters, any politician able to boast of this record on employment can go toe to toe with the best of them.

Electorally, Winde’s campaign to retain the Western Cape for the DA managed to win 55.45% of the vote. This is a decline from the party’s high of 59.38% in 2014, but, seeing as internal opinion polls for the DA mere weeks out from the election showed the party nudging just above or just below the 50% mark, and also taking into account the national weaker-than-expected performance of the DA, the Western Cape DA’s better-than-expected performance shows that the provincial party did something right. To have achieved anything close to 60% in the province would always have been well-nigh impossible, but there was a real possibility of the party’s having to go into coalition to retain the Western Cape. This would have been the crowning disaster for the DA’s 2019 electoral efforts. Yet, somehow, the steadiness of Alan Winde as the party’s banner carrier saw the DA winning the province comfortably.

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