Cape Town mayor Helen Zille says she will stand for the post of Democratic Alliance (DA) leader at the party’s federal congress in May this year.
She made the announcement at a Cape Town Press Club dinner on Thursday evening, a year to the day after being elected mayor of Cape Town.
Other contenders so far to replace outgoing DA leader Tony Leon are the party’s Eastern Cape leader Atholl Trollip, and its national chairperson, Joe Seremane.
”I am here tonight to tell you that, as I’ve said before, I will not be leaving the mayoralty … but I will be standing as a candidate in the election race for leader of the Democratic Alliance.
”I have decided to do that after many requests, after much cajoling, I think it would be fair to say after a lot of pressure … but I wasn’t going to make myself available for election until I was sure that both jobs together would be manageable.”
Zille said she had put an enormous amount of time and effort into determining how both jobs could be done.
”There is going to have to be a complete redesign of the job of the leader of the DA in particular. I have been working on the job of redesign for some time with [management] experts… people in the city and the DA.
”We have a management model in draft form that I believe can and will work … It is going to be very important to discuss that and test it in the days and weeks ahead.
”Should I be successful … because this is a leadership race with two other outstanding candidates … it will be a major challenge to put that management model into operation.
Zille, who turned 56 last week, said she had ”enormous support” both within her party and the mayoral committee of the City of Cape Town.
”We’re going to be interrogating the model I’m proposing … and we’ll be decentralising and diversifying leadership across the entire Democratic Alliance.”
Responding to questions, Zille said she thought the major challenge facing the DA was to retain its current support base while growing it among new voters.
”That is an enormous challenge, It is a challenge we have to get right.”
The DA had always underestimated the power of identity of group and race politics.
”We have to face that squarely and we have to find a way of dealing with it.”
Growing the DA’s support base among black voters was not going to be a rapid process.
”The big challenge is the power of identity … I think the strong identity with the party of liberation is a very, very powerful one, something that we have always underestimated.
”But I think that over the next five or six years the push factors away from the ANC will grow. The divisions, the alienation, the internal conflict, and then we have increasingly to present a palatable and viable alternative.
”Our greatest challenge in South Africa is to break free from the shackles of race. So many people cannot believe that a white person can be as passionately committed and interested in the well-being of a person of a different background — ethnic, racial, religious or whatever.
”We have to break through that barrier so that we can be passionately interested in each other’s welfare,” she said.
Zille said that in the longer term, she saw the ANC splitting.
That moment would be a ”watershed” in South African politics.
”We could then hold the balance of power… a split in the ANC will open up huge possibilities,” she said. – Sapa