EUSEBIUS MCKAISER | It's raining DA resignations - Hlanganani Gumbi is next

The DA is determined to not become the next government.

This is evident in how it responds to major resignations from the party. Instead of self-examining, DA goons double down, launching online attacks on former MPs who exit the official opposition. The latest resignation, according to a number of reliable sources, is forthcoming in the next few weeks, that of Hlanganani Gumbi, MP.

Gumbi’s political career has some parallels with that of former DA politician Mbali Ntuli. He entered politics in 2008 at Rhodes University when he was hardly 19 years old. He was one of the founders of the DA Students Organisation, motivated in particular by a concern for student safety, as well as engagement with the wider Makhanda (Grahamstown back then) community. He always speaks very passionately about issues of service delivery and structural justice, with a fluency and charisma that makes it hard to not be drawn to him, accompanied by his familiar and ever-present smile. Since then, he has notched up over a decade of experience at all three levels of government, first as a councillor in eThekwini, before spending time in the KwaZulu-Natal provincial legislature.

Since 2019, he has been a member of the National Assembly, serving on the tourism portfolio committee, while also assigned to the constituency office looking after the Inanda, Ntuzuma and KwaMashu areas of eThekwini. As with Ntuli, here you have a still young, yet already enormously experienced and politically senior, black opposition politician, fluent in the cultural grammars of many SA communities. That makes him an asset to the party just like those who have exited before him such as, among others, former party leader Mmusi Maimane, former executive mayor of the Midvaal local municipality Bongani Baloyi, and industrious former MP Phumzile Van Damme. According to the People’ Assembly website Gumbi’s committee attendance as an MP in 2022 has only been 42%. In the previous three years it was 84%, 97% and 100%. He has checked out politically and frankly should already have divorced the DA. They are, to put it in consulting speak, “no longer a fit”. But what is really going on here? And, importantly, should the DA be concerned?

For a party imagining itself to be liberal, it has way too many leaders in positions of important power who are decidedly illiberal.

I reached out to Gumbi. He denied he has resigned and added he is “not prepared to comment on this story”. I stick by the veracity of my projection that his exit is imminent. This is also why you are no longer likely to find him engaging in political discourse as often as he used to, updating his political blog, et cetera. If you do want to engage him publicly, you can find him at Umhlanga Arch later this month talking about “marketing over merlot” if the business poster he is punting on social media is anything to go by. He has devoted himself pretty much full-time to business as a “digital marketing specialist” punting an international app locally aimed at offering businesses online support of various kinds.

Unlike Maimane, Baloyi and Ntuli, it seems (though not yet confirmed) that Gumbi may be entirely lost to politics, such is the bitter aftertaste of the wrath of those you disagree with in the DA. For a party imagining itself to be liberal, it has way too many leaders in positions of important power who are decidedly illiberal. The one who thinks colonialism was not all bad is the worst of the lot but by no means the only one. She is just the most trigger-happy of them all.

In one sense, political resignations are not as dramatic as we sometimes render them. Scores of politicians have left the ANC , for example, and even formed political parties such as Congress of the People and the EFF . Yet the ANC is outliving COPE (is COPE still around?), it is still in power, and it is hardly threatened by the noisy EFF. People come and go, don’t they? Well, it is not quite that simple for the DA, and I will explain why shortly.

The other retort one might trot out on behalf of a DA trying to weather a season of resignations is to point out that those who left are a diverse bunch, and not a particular “faction” within the DA. Nicole Graham resigned last week as eThekwini leader, and praised her party in her resignation statement, making it clear she will remain a member. Athol Trollip, the DA’s former federal chairperson, resigned from the party before and he has very little in common with Gumbi and Ntuli in terms of political ideology. Many others, who were excellent at their job, like a Gareth Morgan, is no longer part of the DA. So, one can play example table tennis the whole day, which is unhelpful. It is important to not commit confirmation bias. That said, it is of course not much comfort that a diverse group of people leave your party now regularly. That raises a different question altogether: Does anyone feel at home in the DA these days other than the one who thinks colonialism was not all that bad and her sidekick who moonlights as a war correspondent?

But here is why the DA, in my view, would shoot itself in the foot by seeing all of these resignations in the same light, as simply part of what happens in politics. For the millionth time we need to remind the DA that we live in a country with a majority of black people. As black people, we know that the ANC-led government is not serving us, but we also know that our economic plight results from a mixture of ANC-enabled state capture, and legacies of colonialism and apartheid. We know that we are, as political analyst Aubrey Matshiqi memorably put it many years ago, a numerical majority but (in many spaces still) a cultural minority. We need a DA that is deeply committed to a diagnosis of our problems that start off with a recognition of the wounds left by white supremacy and anti-black racism. This is both institutional racism and social racism. It is psychosocial and economic. It is made worse by the ANC but neither starts nor ends with them.

I can promise you I have already made the one who thinks colonialism was not all that bad fuming with my description of the legacies of colonialism and racism. She refuses to accept that we need to define the end-goal as antiracism and not nonracialism. She likes to talk of nonracialism because secretly she translates it for herself into colour-blindness. So too does her sidekick who moonlights as a war correspondent. If they were American politicians, they would certainly be Republican.

Which brings me back to Gumbi. He gets this stuff. He took on the one who thinks colonialism was not all that bad in a blog entry in November 2019. He wrote very incisively on the issue, “The debate on whether race is a proxy or not for disadvantage in the DA is sadly back. Nevertheless it must be addressed. The simple answer is YES, of course race is a proxy for disadvantage. If we cannot accept that then we completely ignore the real effects of the migrant labour system on young black professionals called ‘Black Tax’. This additional expense on black professionals and families who send monthly cash to their families in the former homelands to survive is the most vivid burden on a group of South Africans by virtue of being black. This perpetuates unfair and toxic structural relationships which keep them poor and the face of poverty.

“Race matters. We must not romanticise the advances that a very small size of the black middle class has made to overcome poverty and empower their families. This should not cloud our judgment from the hard reality that millions of black South Africans are currently trapped in poverty and will be for the next foreseeable future. Not only does it matter as a proxy for disadvantage, but it also matters in decision-making, appointments and elections. Race matters just as much as experience, gender, skill, and perspective. It matters because it adds to the depth of our value of diversity. This is a value that we dare not undermine during this phase of fleshing out who we are and who we are fighting for.

“The fundamental is this — nowhere in the DAs constitution does it say that we are a liberal party. We must be careful to not allow ideology to make our party exclusionary and cold,” Gumbi wrote.

That is exactly the kind of rational analysis that the DA needed to speak to millions of black people who are unsure about whether to vote for them. Sure, the likes of Morgan and even Graham and many others over time, were industrious leaders. But context is everything. In a country where most of the electorate in 2024 will be young black disaffected youth, Ntuli, Baloyi, Van Damme and Maimane were going to be far more important to DA electoral fortunes than someone who does not get the pulse of our society, bathing in an ideology of whiteness. And if you think the examples of black politicians who left the DA are all middle-class, wait for a few more resignations in the near future from other black politicians with different backgrounds. They are coming. Of course, having written this 2019 blog entry, Gumbi defined himself there and then, like his friend Ntuli, as outside the dominant faction controlling the party, including its disciplinary processes which aim to nip deep disagreement in the bud.  

How will the DA respond? By attacking him as they did Maimane, Ntuli, Baloyi and Van Damme. They simply do not like admitting to any of their flaws. They prefer to psychologise those who left. Even the useless ANC is better at self-examination than the DA. And that is a scandalously low bar.

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