The Democratic Alliance is setting up an internal commission to deliberate on the diversity of its public representatives — an issue highlighted when four of its senior black MPs defected to the African National Congress and another left to start his own party.
The DA lost its court challenge against the five floor-crossers. The party had argued that the five did not constitute the required 10% threshold required as it had boosted its parliamentary seats from 50 to 52 by the time they defected on the last day of the window period on September 15.
But the Cape High Court ruled that the threshold should be calculated on a party’s number of representatives “immediately prior” to the window period. Anything else would lead to “unreasonable, unjust and even absurd consequences as members of a party who wish to defect would be confronted with an ever-changing (and possibly unknown) threshold requirement,” ruled Judge Burton Fourie.
DA chief whip Douglas Gibson said the party would not appeal the ruling and possibly get bogged down in court for months. “Our voters expect us to fight elections and to stand up for their cause in Parliament,” he said.
But with a local government election looming, the party also wants to ensure that voters can relate to its candidates. With the process to nominate candidates having been completely revised, the commission on diversity is aimed at delivering solutions to banish the “pale male” image that has bedevilled the DA.
“We don’t believe in quotas, but in diversity,” he added. “The wise women and men would look at all aspects of problems and challenges [around diversity] that we and every-one else faces.”
The DA is regularly criticised as being a laager for whites and “hostile to blacks”, most recently by some of the defectors. The influx of conservatives, largely from the now-defunct New National Party, but also further to the political right in the past two years, has not helped to dispel this view.
Admitting the party has made some mistakes, senior DA officials point out that 13 of its 47 MPs are black.
Meanwhile, not only does the DA’s court challenge come at a price — it has been ordered to pay all costs — it will also lose official party-political funding for three seats: while it had five defections, it gained a floor-crosser from the United Democratic Movement and the Inkatha Freedom Party respectively.