Wednesday’s march by the DA on the ANC’s headquarters in Johannesburg was an abject and pointless failure. It achieved nothing unpredictable or unknown and it’s a miracle that no-one was killed. It was also an enormous public inconvenience to anyone working in Johannesburg’s centre, irrelevant to anyone outside the city and a considerable waste of public resources.
It was the great British politician, Enoch Powell, who said: “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and human affairs.” He was right and, more often than not, it’s because politics can be an exhausting, frustrating, shambolic business in which players run out of steam and ideas.
DA leader Helen Zille falls into this category.
With one catastrophic, recent decision under her belt – the DA/Agang fiasco – and a near-catastrophic one – imagine the headlines if anyone had died during yesterday’s march – Zille is displaying all the signs of someone who has not only run out of imagination, but also lost her political touch.
I’m certainly not the first commentator to point out that we already know that the ANC can be deeply intolerant of political opposition. In a previous blog, I’ve stated that they apply one law when marching in opposition in the Western Cape and another when people march against them in Johannesburg. This is common cause. So what did yesterday’s march achieve?
I cannot believe that a single non-DA voter would have been convinced to switch and vote for the Blue T-Shirts by this stunt. Certainly not anyone with ANC affiliations.
Contrast this with earlier DA successes. Their relentless pursuit of the decision to drop corruption charges against President Zuma, the wasteful spending at Nkandla, and the decision to appoint Menzi Simelane as head of the NPA are all excellent examples of sharp political instincts being applied in the public interest. They’re vote winners. So, too, is their administration of the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape Province. Voters can see clear water between DA-run towns and those administered by the ANC.
But yesterday’s march? Clog up the Johannesburg CBD with noisy demonstrators, provoke opponents into violence, engage the riot police (sorry – Public Order Policing Unit! Why use three syllables when nine are available?) – scare passers-by and disrupt trade, all in the guise of ‘freedom of speech’ or ‘freedom to march’. It’s straight out of the COSATU playbook and should be condemned as such.
Apart from an acid tweet or two, I refrained at the time from commenting on the DA/Agang disaster. Plenty of others were saying everything that needed to be said. But to repeat: Zille’s decision to go onto the stage with Mamphele Ramphela, and to announce the merger of the parties, without a signed DA membership form in her hand was rank amateurism. Zille is no political amateur, as the examples of DA success I’ve cited above demonstrate. Ergo, she’s either burnt out or has lost her political way.
Either way, it’s time for her to step down – or to be replaced. And that’s not a good place to be for the DA in February, ahead of an election in May.