RW Johnson: “Roadkill” Steenhuisen and Gouws – reflects DA fall from moral high ground.

RW Johnson reflects on the evolving character of the Democratic Alliance (DA) and its leadership, using two incidents involving John Steenhuisen and Renaldo Gouws to illustrate a shift in the party's values and behaviour. Johnson critiques Steenhuisen's controversial proposals and Gouws' repeated racist outbursts, contrasting the DA's current state with its more principled past. He questions whether the party's rise has come at the expense of its former liberal standards..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..Join us for BizNews' first investment-focused conference on Thursday, 12 September, in Hermanus, featuring top experts like Frans Cronje, Piet Viljoen, and more. Get insights on electricity and exploiting SA's gas bounty from new and familiar faces. Register here..By R.W. Johnson.Sometimes it takes a personal jolt to alert one to a broader sociological change. .___STEADY_PAYWALL___.On the eve of the 2019 local elections the then newly elected DA leader, John Steenhuisen, put forth the suggestion that several of Cape Town's golf courses should be turned over to mixed development including low-cost housing. I wrote a piece suggesting that this was a controversial proposal for a resident of Durban to make for Cape Town and was likely to create a local storm. Quite apart from the feelings of golfers, golf courses act as environmentally important green lungs in the urban environment. In effect they are a manicured (and unfortunately very thirsty) piece of parkland and their situation has a major effect on property prices. Since most golf courses are situated in middle class areas the effect of scrapping any of them to provide for new mixed developments would probably cause house prices to fall – in DA voting areas. As a means of undermining the DA vote the proposal was an act of near genius..Read more: John Steenhuisen: DA's weaver birds are building South Africa.A few days later I was woken by an angry call from Mr Steenhuisen. He told me that I had always been against him. I protested that I had never met him and that this article was the first time I'd ever even mentioned him. I also warned him that Mmusi Maimane had won no popularity contests in Cape Town for telling the DA that he was taking complete charge of the protracted dispute with Patricia de Lille. What was local politics for if it couldn't deal with its own mayor – or its own golf courses ? These sentiments were not appreciated by Mr. Steenhuisen who told me that South Africa's greatest problem was the deficiencies of its media. I said I thought it had many far greater problems than that. It was only later that I learned that Mr Steenhuisen was in the habit of making similarly aggressive phone calls to other journalists. A few days after his early morning call to me Steenhuisen was effectively reprimanded by the local DA which announced that no changes were proposed or intended for any of the local golf courses..More than three years slipped by when I was shocked to read that Mr Steenhuisen, over an open radio line, had referred to his ex-wife (and mother of his two children) as "roadkill". I was frankly astounded by the crass, loutish and misogynist nature of this incident (and in my own mind have always since thought of Mr Steenhuisen as "Roadkill"). When one considered that roadkill is a bird or animal that you kill without noticing or caring it was hard to accept Steenhuisen's suggestion that this was just a joke. What linked this incident to my earlier encounter with Steenhuisen was his self-pity: his marriage going wrong was all her fault, not his; he was sure I'd always been against him even though I'd never met him; and he seemed to believe that I should have supported him because we'd been to the same school. In every case the self-pity justified all-out aggression..Ultimately I wrote a piece for PoliticsWeb saying that although I had supported the Progressive Party/DP/DA since I was a schoolboy I simply couldn't vote for a list headed by Roadkill. So I happily voted for the DA provincial list and found an alternative for my national vote. I was unsurprised to hear that Roadkill had been accused of racism for suggesting that those recruited to Premier Lesufi's police force in Gauteng were simply boozers from a shebeen. .Then, last month came the case of new DA MP, Renaldo Gouws, suspended from party duties on account of a video in which he says "Alright, so there's a couple of things I want to say, kill the f**king k*****s, kill all the f****ing n*ggers. That's all I gotta f***ing say.". It turns out that there is also other content of an equally foul homophobic sort. All of which content dates from 2008 (when Gouws was 25) and of which Gouws says "I was young and immature, but I am not a racist". The DA had apparently not known of this video when Gouws joined the party in 2012 but its re-emergence in 2024 has led to the DA suspending Gouws from parliamentary duties – though later promoting him to be deputy spokesman for Tourism and Auditor General. The case proceeds though not very quickly and a Support Renaldo Gouws group has been formed. .The South African Human Rights Commission is always on the lookout for cases of white racism but is notably less interested in cases where whites are the victims. So the Gouws case was right up their street. They have taken Gouws to the Equality Court, arguing that his use of racially offensive terms like "kaffir" and "nigger" were in breach of his MPs' oath to uphold the constitution, human dignity, equality and non-discrimination. Moreover, the SAHRC points out that Gouws was taken through a further disciplinary process by the DA in 2013 after his conduct online had given rise to complaint. Gouws had apologised for his "angry, hostile, confrontational and crass message" but had nonetheless denied being a racist..Gouws' behaviour seems, indeed, to have been a recurrent problem. His outburst in 2008 had been followed by a complaint against him (by Andrew Whitfield, the current Eastern Cape DA leader) in 2013 (the case cited above) and then again for his online conduct in 2020. The DA had reprimanded him on several occasions, both verbally and formally by letter. In other words, there has been a regular pattern stretching from 2008 to 2024 of complaints against Gouws for racist behaviour of one kind or another. ."A fish always rots from the head down", as the old saying goes, so what does Gouws' parliamentary leader, Roadkill, have to say about it ? He sort of half-excuses him – "he was young and irresponsible", using almost Gouws' exact words. This is a remarkably exculpatory attitude for the leader of a party which claims to be non-racial. How do you think Jewish DA voters would feel about being represented by a DA MP who, at age 25, was an outspoken Nazi calling for the Holocaust ? Is it really possible to regard that as just a youthful misdemeanour ? But note that Roadkill's comment covers only the remarks Gouws made in 2008 whereas what really needs to be explained is how the DA has overlooked Gouws' behaviour over a twelve year period, repeatedly promoting him through various electoral roles all the way to MP and even after that as a parliamentary spokesman. .Need one go on ? Already there are far too many words here (even leaving out the obscenities) which ought to have no place in a piece about DA leadership politics: crass, loutish, racism, homophobia, aggression, genocidal threats and misogyny. Judging from this it sounds as if the selection process for DA MPs resembles a saloon bar punch up somewhere in the outback..Perhaps I am too impressed by the fact that an altogether different set of moral standards was exhibited by DA leaders of an earlier generation. You can't imagine Jan Steytler, Helen Suzman, Van Zyl Slabbert or Tony Leon using the same language as Gouws/Roadkill. But then I couldn't imagine any of the above waking me up in the early hours of the morning with an aggressive phone call. They just weren't that crude or that aggressive. In part the difference seems to have been that those early Progs regarded themselves as part of the South African liberal tradition while there is no trace of that liberal inheritance in the saloon bar style of Gouws/Roadkill. But it was also a matter of manners. The Prog generation all saw themselves as gentlemen or gentlewomen and behaved as such..The fact is, after all, that the Progressive Party of the 1960s and the DA of today are very different parties. The Prog electorate then was almost wholly white and English-speaking and it was both better educated and more middle class than its United Party rivals. The fact that for thirteen years its sole seat was Houghton – the most affluent and (as Verwoerd noted) the most Jewish constituency in the country – was a sociologically striking fact. .The DA electorate today is much larger, is less than half white and perhaps only half made up of English-speakers. It is also much less middle class and less well educated than its Prog forebears. So it is hardly surprising that the social profile of its leadership has mirrored those changes. Even the social meaning of racial terminology has changed. To say "I'm not a racist" in 1959, when the Progs were formed, was a bold statement of personal morality. But things changed: "natives" became "Bantu" became "plurals" and finally "blacks". By 1990 even the Nats denied they were racists and by 2008 denying one was a racist had become merely a self-protective formula like saying you were not a flat-earther. Even so, that doesn't quite let Gouws off the hook. Even in the bygone days when I was a schoolboy words like "kaffir" and "nigger" were regarded as racist and insulting. Even then no one would have attempted to excuse their usage as just a youthful misdemeanour. .Read more: John Steenhuisen: DA's dual Election'24 objectives achieved; now hard work begins.It's complicated. The DA's success in rising to be part of the GNU has apparently been accompanied by a vulgarisation of its leadership which is now more "man in the street" than before. And part of that "man in the street" profile is a cruder, less intellectual style which is far more willing to make rude remarks about, for example, users of shebeens or PEP stores. And which, of course, is far less shocked than the Progs of yore would have been by the use of the old South African gutter language of racial abuse. Where once the use of the k-word or n-word would have brought forth horrified condemnation, it now merely elicits a tut-tut..Is the DA's success bound to be accompanied by this slump in standards ? We don't yet know. The ANC and SACP, of course, are much exercised by the sight of the DA in government, which they record as the appalling progress of neo-liberalism. I've never been sure how to deal with that because I've never met anyone who calls himself a neo-liberal – it's like pseudo-intellectual or fellow-traveller, a term used only in abuse. But if there are any ordinary liberals left in the DA it would be good to know what they think about all this..Read also:.Coalition struggles: ANC and DA's significant challenges over ideological divides – Corrigan"Leveraging, not growing": The DA's path to real power – Martin van StadenDemocratic Alliance initiates talks to form new government

RW Johnson: “Roadkill” Steenhuisen and Gouws – reflects DA fall from moral high ground.

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