A change of seasons for the DA
Tony Leon: COMMENT
One of the most extraordinary and amusing people I have ever encountered is the British journalist-turned-politician Boris Johnson, whose razor-sharp wit conceals a steely purpose. In July this year, I came across an article he wrote about the far more famous Tony (Blair), about whom he said: ”No day is more postponed against by a politician than the day of his own retirement.”
When I read that, it crystallised in my mind the objective fact that by the time of our next party congress I would have been leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and its predecessor for 13 very long and eventful years.
Perhaps it is easier for me to be objective about the state of governance than about the state of the opposition, because I am much more responsible for the latter than I am for the former — although the two do intersect.
There have been many crises, many challenges and some very significant high points. However, it seemed to me that in the period before the next election — coincidentally, in the same year that the African National Congress would choose a new leader — that the opposition should get a fresh start under a new person.
As my colleague Sydney Opperman said very lyrically, ”It is about seasons.” I have come to the belief that the DA must embark on its next journey with a new helmsman or woman.
There no doubt will be endless speculation about motives, reasons and timing, as there always is. The only thing that informed my decision to go was my own inner voice; although doubtless, there will be other voices that will now come to the fore, both affirming or, indeed, rejecting the decision that I have made.
I have been a public representative in South Africa for the past 20 years. In the same week I was elected to the Johannesburg City Council in a difficult by-election caused by the resignation of the party leader, Van Zyl Slabbert, the Weekly Mail, as it then was, published my photograph, hands in the air, and above it was an article by Van Zyl Slabbert stating he had resigned from Parliament and the party because he believed ”peaceful change is no longer an option in South Africa”.
He would have done well to have listened to the advice of George Eliot, who reminded us in Middlemarch that ”among all forms of mistake, prophesy is the most gratuitous”. It happened that the Parliament I was elected to three years after Slabbert’s departure saw the commencement, under FW de Klerk’s hand (forced though it might have been), of the very peaceful change that Slabbert had deemed impossible.
When thinking about my own departure as leader I therefore wanted to do it in the best way possible, without enveloping my party or its structures in any kind of gloom or a feeling of despondency about the future.
When I took over the Democratic Party leadership in 1994, it was an organisation that was in deep crisis, if not on life support, with half a dozen MPs, plus myself, and a total support base that was smaller then than the number of black Africans who vote for my party today.
Today the party is 10 times bigger, with more than 1 200 public representatives at three levels of government. Critics and commentators will argue that there has been a lurch to the right or I have cast away the party’s liberal democratic moorings. I believe this criticism to be misinformed, particularly since most of the critics intensely disliked liberal democracy and its ideology in the first place.
I do think for both South Africa and the DA there is — as they say in sporting parlance — ”everything to play for”. While the Economist is quite right to describe our democracy as ”defective”, the same could be said of opposition politics. The fact that we have a multiparty democracy and a national opposition is no mean feat given the stony soil on which it has been founded. The question is how we best keep moving forward.
For starters, Parliament needs to assert itself or run the risk of becoming nothing more than an expensive adornment — a democratic facade without substance.
Also, we need to realise that there are consequences for those decisions taken with only one view in mind. I think here of so many policies that have been pursued — no doubt with good intentions and with the necessary historical precepts — but that have landed up being more destructive than empowering. Transformation as a political tool to re-racialise our politics is just one example. These and other policies have had the net effect of incapacitating the machinery of state at a time when government expects most of it.
The opposition, too, needs to continue to contribute to the new democracy. There is not that much common ground between the politics of individual freedom and demands for group rights or entitlements. But what the next leader of the party needs to do is to take our durable principles into the thick of the fight for the new agenda that will service the widest possible interest in communities in which the DA voice has yet to resonate.
I have tried my best to lay a proper foundation. But the building has only just begun.
Tony Leon has announced that he will step down as leader of the Democratic Alliance next year