RW Johnson: Man in glass house decides to throw stones

Key topics:Steenhuisen publicly attacks journalist Peter Bruce over DA leadership critiquesDA’s GNU role seen as success, despite vote losses since 2014Steenhuisen’s leadership style seen as thin-skinned, aggressive, and divisive.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.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By RW Johnson.Politicians seldom make public criticisms of journalists. They may occasionally inveigh against “the media” but criticism of named journalists is exceedingly rare. To a limited extent this may be because they realise that journalists have a job to do, like anyone else,. They also know that they and journalists occupy the same public space and have to rub along somehow. And, more to the point, they realise that it is simply very unwise to make public attacks on journalists. Not only may some of the voters not appreciate this but it is extremely unwise to alienate and annoy journalists who, by the very nature of their job, will have plentiful opportunities to reply in kind. I well remember Harold Wilson becoming very annoyed with the Observer’s Nora Beloff because he would carefully leak key pieces of information to her which she would be too dense to understand that he had handed her a scoop. But Harold would merely grimace, mutter “silly cow” and give the leak to someone else. Wilson was a consummate professional and knew that many Labour voters were Observer-readers, so the last thing he wanted was a public spat with an Observer journalist.So I was surprised to read an entire article written by John Steenhuisen, attacking Peter Bruce. Peter’s offence is that he has several times alluded to the possibility of a leadership change in the DA and even written that Steenhuisen is not very popular. Peter is well able to look after himself and it is not my mission to defend him but, to be fair, anyone who takes an interest in politics knows perfectly well that many people in the DA are disenchanted with Steenhuisen and that there is much discussion of possible candidates to replace him. It seems absurd for Steenhuisen to attack Bruce for saying the obvious.But Steenhuisen is furious, claiming that Bruce is like “a broken record calling for leadership changes in a party that is ascendant”. For Steenhuisen’s claim is that no one should question his leadership because of the DA’s relative success in becoming a GNU partner: “Is it not the very same leadership team that delivered what was once unthinkable, by turning the DA into the second largest party of national government”.Steenhuisen then adopts a patronising tone and suggests that Bruce is dishonest: “Peter, it’s okay. We all make mistakes. I would bet that most readers would welcome a bit of honesty from the pundits…” And again, having predicted future big DA wins, Steenhuisen adds “When that happens, I certainly won’t be expecting any flowers from Bruce. But I would settle for some honest reflection.” Though he clearly despairs of Bruce: “Bruce’s writings are now so coloured by apparent personal animus”. This is fighting talk.Soon after Steenhuisen was elected as DA leader I spoke to an old friend who had spent his whole life in the DA in KwaZulu-Natal. He laughed at the mention of Steenhuisen (whom I had never met). “As an attack-dog, he’s passable. As a leader, you’ve got to be joking”. I also spoke to someone who held very senior office in the KZN DA. He had been offended by some of Steenhuisen’s private behaviour and said he could not vote for him. It surprised me that the DA caucus in Cape Town had clearly not made similar enquiries before electing him as leader..Read more:.RW Johnson: Crunch time for DA, big choice looms - Unless ANC changes, leave GNU or go down with it.My own introduction to Steenhuisen came during the 2021 local elections when I wrote a piece criticising his idea of selling off one of Cape Town’s golf courses in order to replace it with a mixed development including low cost housing. This seemed to me a deeply unwise thing for someone from Durban to advocate for Cape Town (and sure enough the DA completely disavowed this proposal). But Steenhuisen was furious and rang me early in the morning – he actually woke me up - to shout at me. I was struck by his strong vein of self-pity – he seemed to think that I “ought” to support him just because he and I had attended the same school. I cautioned him that interfering in Cape Town municipal politics was unwise: he must be careful not to have to follow Mmusi Maimane out the door. This didn’t go down well. “I reject your bogus concern for my career !” he shouted.I later heard that other journalists had had similar encounters. For Steenhuisen combines having an only-too-ready recourse to aggression with a very thin skinned sensitivity – a most unfortunate combination. Some see this as a sign of an inferiority complex. It has certainly made him no friends. Latterly, I had thought he might have softened his manner but his public attack on Peter Bruce suggests that he still can’t quite control his instinct for aggression.Steenhuisen’s extremely satisfied commentary on the DA’s rise to GNU status suggests that he is one of those who feels that this is a good in itself. This is a major trap for the DA. The fact that a few of its leaders are now enjoying ministerial status and much higher salaries plus perks can only too easily lead them to forget that they have previously declared that the GNU has to justify itself by achieving economic growth and a fall in unemployment. In fact there is virtually no growth and unemployment increased by 291,000 in the last quarter alone. This is already leading to growing cynicism that some in the DA have been seduced by “blue light privilege” or “ministerialitis”, as it’s known.But the big question is whether the DA’s relative success is, as he claims, a vindication of Steenhuisen’s leadership. It is a difficult argument to make given that in 2024 the DA gained only 1.04% and actually lost nearly 117,000 votes compared to 2019. Moreover, the DA was still 586,000 votes below what it had achieved in 2014. The real reason that the DA is in the GNU has nothing to do with Steenhuisen but with the collapse of the ANC vote and, particularly, with the rise of the MKP which took nearly 15% of the vote from the ANC.To be fair, Steenhuisen refers to “the leadership team”, meaning himself plus Helen Zille – and he is also basing himself on his confident prediction that the DA is still rising in the polls and may do even better in future. All I can say is that in the polling we did for eTV in the run-up to 2024 we detected no sign of a positive “leadership effect” in the DA vote or even in its wider image. Steenhuisen seems to think that nobody but him foresaw the collapse in the ANC vote but I plead not guilty: the eTV poll was almost spot-on in predicting this.In fact it makes more sense to see the DA’s evolution as a composite achievement. The true fundamental remains the great leap in support from 1.7% to 9.7% achieved by Tony Leon’s “Fight Back” campaign of 1999. This catapulted the DA from being a minor “also ran” party to being the Official Opposition. Moreover, Tony then cemented that with another large gain to 12.4% in 2004 (to go from 9.7 to 12.4 meant increasing the DA vote by nearly 28% in one election). .Read more:.Mailbox: DA’s diversity dilemma – calling out media bias.Given the long-established traditions of South Africa there was then a degree of inevitability about the gradual consolidation of opposition to the ANC around that Official Opposition. As the ANC committed blunder after blunder and became increasingly corrupt the DA consolidated further. Three things were important, that it maintained high visibility as the most active and important opposition party, mounting a coherent liberal critique of the government, that it remain completely non-corrupt so as to strengthen the comparison with the ANC and that it was rigorously non-racial, allowing it to retain and grow its own multi-racial composition.. These three attributes were fully maintained under the leadership of Helen Zille and the party’s vote continued to climb upwards until 2014. Then the party made a serious misjudgement by electing Mmusi Maimane as leader despite the fact that he had openly declared that he had been fully supportive of the ANC until the advent of Jacob Zuma. In effect this meant he had supported President Mbeki over Aids, Zimbabwe, BEE and despite ever-growing ANC corruption. This was a clear sign that he had swallowed all manner of ANC attitudes and assumptions. This should have disqualified him from consideration as a possible DA leader.Sure enough, Maimane soon showed that he shared the ANC’s anti-Afrikaner prejudices and he also displayed considerable hostility to Helen Zille herself. In the circumstances the DA was lucky not to shed even more of its vote in the subsequent 2019 elections, after which Maimane left the DA leadership. Crucially, though, Maimane had broken the DA’s upward momentum and thereafter the party has merely trod water. In fact its 2014 result remains its peak and it has still not entirely repaired the damage done by Maimane.Thus it seems unwise of Steenhuisen to boast that DA “success” has somehow been achieved under his leadership or that of his “team”. There is still no evidence that he has had any impact at all. His record as a minister has been completely marred by his ridiculous (and still unexplained) appointment of Roman Cabanac as his chief of staff and his appointment of various others who all failed the government requirements for their jobs. And Steenhuisen’s earlier faux pas of referring to his ex-wife as “road-kill” has not been forgotten. And personally I do not recall Steenhuisen giving any speeches hailed as inspirational or even just interesting. Perhaps I missed them. And what of his “team” ? At 74 Helen Zille remains far smarter, better educated and more dynamic than Steenhuisen and has had occasion to pull him back from making unwisely pro-ANC statements, a key sign of “ministerialitis”. But, judging by the article he has written Steenhuisen is extremely confident of triumphing over Peter Bruce. I’m not so sure. Peter has been around the block far more often and managed to make his mark in the First World environment of the Financial Times. I can’t but feel that he may still get the last laugh.