In a scathing critique of media bias, RW Johnson sheds light on the unfair treatment of the Democratic Alliance (DA). Spanning decades, Johnson unravels a narrative of left-leaning journalism influenced by fear and a desire to align with power. As the ANC’s dominance wanes, the intellectual landscape shifts, yet challenges persist for the DA. With its diverse voter base, navigating racial sensitivities becomes a minefield, as past leaders’ missteps illustrate. Will current leader John Steenhuisen defy odds or repeat history’s mistakes?
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By R.W. Johnson
Have you ever noticed that the DA gets a raw deal in the press ? I am not a member of any party but I can’t help but notice it.  ___STEADY_PAYWALL___ Many commentators slip in a biting phrase or two while otherwise pretending to neutrality. The reason for this is simple. Ever since the rise of the UDF in the 1980s the atmosphere in which most journalists and commentators exist has been tilted to the left. Not to put too fine a point on it, many writers wanted to position themselves favourably with the new men of power – and in the early days particularly, many were frankly scared of the ANC. So, occasionally putting the boot into the DA was a way of establishing your bona fides with “progressive opinion” and with the new men of power.Â
I could cite many personal examples. When I was running the Helen Suzman Foundation I had frequent trouble with Tony Heard, then working as a hired gun in Thabo Mbeki’s office. Heard continued in that post despite Mbeki’s Aids denialism and his support for Mugabe’s election-rigging. Then, a little while after Heard retired I ran into him and he said, graciously enough, “You were right all the time”. What to make of that ? Or again, I remember Shaun Johnson telling me how Mac Maharaj had physically threatened him. A few months later Maharaj was Shaun’s invited speaker to launch his book. Similarly, when SWAPO dissidents returned to Namibia bearing the scars of their torture by their SWAPO jailers, Shaun covered that story for the Mail and Guardian by a flattering interview with the torturer-in-chief. Imagine covering a story about the torture of detainees in South Africa by a pandering interview with Major “Rooi Rus” Swanepoel. I could go on.
One of the major benefits of the collapse in the ANC vote is that we will doubtless soon see a change in this intellectual atmosphere. A realisation that their bread is no longer buttered on the ANC side will have a wondrous effect on many “progressives”.
But the DA has its own problems. Chief among them is that it is by far the most multi-racial party in the country. The ANC boasts of its non-racialism but its voters are 94.4% African. Contrast that with the DA electorate in 2024: 19.5% African, 44.2% white, 7.8% Asian and 28.6% Coloured. There’s no other party which remotely competes with that.
The multiracial nature of the DA’s electorate and the probably multiracial nature of the further constituency that it hopes to win over creates an acute difficulty for the DA leadership. Other parties may talk sentimentally of Rainbowism but the DA has to live it – and that’s not easy. It’s not just that the DA leaders have to avoid saying anything that might affront any of its constituent groups: they have to go much further than that and avoid any turn of phrase or gesture which, while not an affront in itself, might set off uncomfortable echoes or vibrations. And South Africans have become so over-sensitized about race that almost anything can do that. It’s a minefield.
Take Helen Zille’s famous remark that Singapore had built successfully on its colonial heritage and that’s what we should do too. In itself this remark is not only true but inoffensive. America, Canada and Australia were all British colonies and would all say they have successfully built on their colonial inheritance. Heavens, even Indians happily admit that had not the British united India into one country and bound it together with an integrated railway system and a single civil service, it could never have become the giant power of today. But the problem is that for many years African voters have heard “apartheid and colonialism” denounced as if they were the same thing. So, many assumed that Zille was praising colonialism and was thus close to praising apartheid. Guilt by association.
It was the same with Zille’s remark that the Western Cape was being flooded with “refugees from ANC rule in the Eastern Cape”. Again, it’s true enough that large numbers of Eastern Cape people migrate to the Western Cape because the schools and hospitals there work, while those in their home province don’t. But many people associate “refugee” with foreigners and given that under apartheid the state tried to insist that black South Africans didn’t belong here at all, this too hit a sensitive nerve. Guilt by association again.
It was the same with Mmusi Maimane. By his own account, he had been entirely happy with Mbeki as President and only turned against the ANC when Zuma took over. That is, he had been OK with Mbeki’s policies on Aids and Zimbabwe and his continual resort to racial mobilisation against the whites. In Maimane’s case this led to a casual siding against Afrikaners. Yet ever since 1999 a majority of DP/DA voters have been Afrikaans-speakers. This means that any DA leader has to be scrupulously careful and fair in dealing with any matter pertaining to Afrikaans-speakers.
Yet on one issue after another – the suppression of Afrikaans at Stellenbosch University, the mistaken allegation of racism against the young Afrikaans schoolteacher at Schweizer-Reinecke, even the rugby row of Ashwin Willemse against Naas Botha and Nick Mallet – Maimane, reacting like any ordinary ANC politician, unerringly took the “anti-Afrikaans” side. This was immediately noticed by Afrikaans-speakers, who defected from the DA in their hundreds of thousands, dooming Maimane’s leadership.
And now we are in the age of John Steenhuisen. Already it is clear that he is an accident waiting to happen. He is almost invariably aggressive – an old DA faithful in Durban first recommended him to me as “a good attack dog”. This extends to ringing up and shouting at any journalist who has criticised him: this has made him no friends in the media. Then we had the shocking incident of his referring to his ex-wife as “road kill”, something no one with any liberal instinct could possibly do. During the recent campaign he referred to Africans who responded to Panyaza Lesufi’s job schemes as drunks staggering out of a shebeen. And then there was the dubious decision of the burning flag….
Thus far Steenhuisen has just about survived these blunders. But they seem to come naturally to him. Back in my Durban boyhood I remember all too well the saloon bar racism of many United Party MPs, men who began sentences with “I know the Native and I can tell you…”. Typically such men were over-confident, over-bearing and rather over-weight – I think of Vause Raw, Douglas Mitchell and others. They represented a sort of crass and lazy-minded English-speaking racism. John Steenhuisen jogs my memory of such men. Last Sunday he walked onto the eTV set where my colleague, Wayne Sussman, had been analysing the election results. Steenhuisen immediately accused him of running “fake polls”. I couldn’t decide whether Steenhuisen was consciously imitating Donald Trump (who calls any polls he doesn’t like “fake”) or, worse still, was doing so unconsciously.
It is simply pretty tough being a leader of the DA, a more demanding job than being a leader of any other party simply because the DA is more truly a part of our multi-racial country than is any other party. But it’s not impossible. Tony Leon was attacked for the “Fight back” campaign simply because his opponents wanted to read that as “Fight black”, but it was an enormously successful campaign, multiplying the DP vote more than five-fold. And otherwise Tony avoided upsetting any group. Under his leadership his party added voters from all racial groups. I can’t help feeling that he might have been helped by the fact that he’s Jewish. Jews know they are always in a minority and that they must be careful not to offend others. Being Jewish carries with it a sort of born-in sensitivity training. The DA leadership can certainly use that.
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