Amid the chaos, Maimane is reinventing the DA

I have to admit I am enjoying the way black-led opposition parties are beginning to squeeze the ANC. It just seems right. I love watching Julius Malema in parliament.

Even as he was spoiling the state of the nation address the other day, his demolition of Baleka Mbete, the speaker, was riveting, right down to where he reveals she slaughtered a cow when she thought President Jacob Zuma had promised her she would succeed him in leading the ANC and then the country.

Malema does insults and threats better than anyone I have ever watched in politics. He is eloquent and clear. The ANC must hate him, or at least the leadership must. I suspect the rest of the party feeds him his material.

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But there's no saving South Africa, righting our inequality or easing our poverty without careful and detailed economic and social policy planning. The ANC has stopped planning and the EFF is the political equivalent of the Impressionist movement in art in the 19th century. Crazy and fun. The real policy planning is going on in the DA under Mmusi Maimane.

It is increasingly clear that Maimane has control and that he is in the process of imprinting on the DA an entirely new political direction, one that recognises that if we are to survive as a market economy, we had better shape policy to our circumstances and not live on imported ideas and conventions.

If I were him, I'd change the name of the DA. It's an albatross. Get the word "Justice" into the name. It is what South Africa cries out for.

Maimane's reply to Zuma's state of the nation address was very good. But he had, earlier, made a much more important speech outlining what he called a "rescue plan for South Africa". It is, I suspect, the beginning of the policies the DA will be selling in 2019.

Some of it was old. "Our rescue plan will build a lean, efficient state tasked with creating opportunities for people, instead of the bloated, corrupt state that is only dragging us backwards," he said.

"Our plan will utilise a 'whole of society' approach, where we partner with business, NGOs and churches to find solutions to our many challenges."

block_quotes_start We will look to partly privatise state-owned enterprises by offering shares to employees and excluded South Africans, as well as to the private sector

And some was new, at least to me: "We will stop the nuclear deal, and open the electricity grid to more independent power producers. And we will invest heavily in broadband and integrated transport systems, as we are already doing in the Western Cape.

"We will look to partly privatise state-owned enterprises by offering shares to employees and excluded South Africans, as well as to the private sector. This will free their boards from capture by politically connected elites and improve the quality of service to South Africans.

"We will adopt a 'once empowered, always empowered' policy for the mining industry, and we will reject the investment-killing MPRDA [Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act]. We will be looking to win back investor confidence in this key industry for the benefit of all South Africans.

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"For us, black economic empowerment will be about mass inclusion, rather than elite re-enrichment. It will reward companies that put young black people through school, that mentor them, and that offer them apprenticeships to grow their expertise.

"Our rescue plan will empower South Africans by giving them ownership of the land they live on through the transfer of title deeds, and we will identify the vast tracts of government-owned land for redistribution."

OK, enough quoting Maimane, but he is really onto something. Ours should be a stakeholder economy where it should be impossible for a South African not to have a stake of real meaning and value in our country.

We cling to a capitalism handed down to us by Victorian England. Its primary feature is greed. It doesn't work. Let us reinvent our own.

The thing about the ANC is that it already knows everything. Maimane is saying, I think, that we can fix things together. Not by joining a branch, but by doing the work.

He obviously has a long way to go and there will be many hurdles. The mayor of Johannesburg is proving to be as inept a politician as I said last year he would be. Maimane has to fix that. But if you're looking for content and new ideas for a drifting South Africa, you have at least to give Maimane a hearing.