Zille ahead of pack in leadership race

Cape Town mayor Helen Zille appears to be the firm favourite of most provinces in the race to become the next leader of the DA, to be elected at the party congress next month.

Party leaders say Zille has the majority support of Western Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Northern Cape and the Free State. They add that she may even have some support in the Eastern Cape, which is led by another contender, Athol Trollip.

The other horse in the race is party chairperson Joe Seremane.

One potential stumbling block in Zille’s path is said to be growing internal opposition to her remaining mayor of Cape Town while also leading the party in a drive to win black support and wrest control of the Western Cape government from the ANC in the 2009 general election.

Trollip told the Mail & Guardian he believed it ‘will be a tight two-horse race at the end” between him and Zille. He claimed to have had the edge, by virtue of having kicked off his campaign more than two months ago, and stressed that he was offering himself as a full-time leader.

‘I really have strong doubts that this job can be done part-time,” he said, referring to Zille’s mayoral responsibilities. ‘That is why I am offering to resign as leader of the party in the Eastern Cape. I promise delegates that I will lead the DA in Parliament, in elections, in chiefs’ villages, kings’ great places, and in cultural and religious organisations. I am not planning to have two centres of power, as I will lead the party at all levels.”

Trollip has been criss-crossing the country to address business dinners in all provinces, and claims to have addressed 30 gatherings since announcing his candidacy.

Zille has also set her election machinery in motion, and appears to be concentrating on winning over conservative DA members initially thought to be opposed to her.

Her campaign gained momentum this week when the DA in Durban launched a campaign to ensure she succeeds outgoing party leader Tony Leon.

John Steenhuisen, leader of the DA caucus in eThekwini municipality, which accounts for more than 10% of the party’s delegates to congress, said Zille is ‘the best thing that has ever happened to the DA”.

He said the tough-as-nails Cape Town mayor had the ‘tenacity and the capacity” to carve a new growth path for the party, and had shown this by warding off repeated attempts to undermine her authority in Cape Town. Since taking office on March 15 last year, Zille has survived seven attempts by the ANC to unseat her.

The leader of the DA in KwaZulu-Natal, Mike Ellis, said he thought Zille had the edge. He said her support was expected to come from the powerful provinces of Gauteng (30,3% of congress delegates), Western Cape (26,5%) and KwaZulu-Natal (11,4%). Most of the 1 141 delegates will come from these provinces.

The leader of the DA in Mpumalanga, Clive Hatch, said his constituency in the Mpumalanga Highveld was firmly behind Zille because ‘she has the oomph that the people need at the moment”.

Member of the Free State legislature Darryl Worth said: ‘Helen is very popular in the Free State; she is definitely a front-runner here.”

‘If she is appointed leader of the party, she cannot abandon the Western Cape, as we are approaching the 2009 election. We expect her to take up a seat in Parliament after the election,” said Worth.

All three candidates would be campaigning in the Free State on April 14, he added.

Last week, Zille took her campaign trail to Kempton Park, where she addressed members of the conservative Johannesburg North business community.

A businessman who attended the function said conservative DA supporters embraced her because they realised that the ‘die toekoms van die DA is in bruin hande [the future of the DA is in brown hands]”.

In her address, Zille assured business people that the future of South Africa looked bright and that the DA needed to foster relations with minority parties if it wanted to wrest control of the Western Cape from the ANC.

She spoke out against affirmative action and restrictive labour laws, saying she believed in an ‘open opportunity system” in which competent people were hired to provide services to the government.

To varying degrees, both Trollip and Seremane are campaigning on a black-support ticket. Seremane is the DA’s most senior black leader, while Trollip has emphasised that he is in fluent isiXhosa and ‘white on the outside and black in the inside”.

The Mail & Guardian has learned that Zille could make Seremane the leader of the DA in Parliament if she becomes leader.

Of Trollip, leaders said his relatively young age of 43 meant that he could be a party leader after Zille, adding that he also needed experience in the national Parliament.

He has been a member of the provincial legislature for nine years and leader of the DA in the province for five years.