Not many publish the ravings of RW Johnson, whose vitriol frequently screams louder than his facts. But, when he launched an all-out assault on DA leader John Steenhuisen last week, he found unlikely admirers.
Not since he compared African immigrants to baboons in 2010, has Johnson enjoyed so much attention.
The Daily Maverick took the article down after 73 prominent authors and academics wrote to say: “We find it baffling that you continue to publish work by RW Johnson that, in our opinion, is often stacked with the superficial and the racist.”
The general tenor of Johnson’s writing, for example in his book How Long Will South Africa Survive?, has been that black people cannot be trusted to run the country. He predicted that “within two years” South Africa would be at the IMF with a begging bowl, committing the school-boy error of making a prediction which would be disproved. What he did prove was that he should keep his toffee-nosed commentary away not only from politics, but also economics.
Johnson proved a surprisingly quick learner after the baboon episode and, after some time in the wilderness, came to realise that the old jingo nudge-nudge-wink-wink take on politics was no longer viable. Like other pseudo-liberals seeking to “white-wash” their racism, Johnson has now hit on the idea of attacking Steenhuisen to prove that he is an equal opportunity offender.
Johnson has never liked Steenhuisen, who he believes to be of a lower class because he does not have a university degree and, instead of being anointed to leadership by bogus intellectuals such as himself, worked his way up the party ranks by proving his mettle as a debater and, later, an extremely competent chief whip in parliament.
Johnson has never liked Steenhuisen, who he believes to be of a lower class because he does not have a university degree and, instead of being anointed to leadership by bogus intellectuals such as himself, worked his way up the party ranks by proving his mettle as a debater and, later, an extremely competent chief whip in parliament.
It also doesn’t help that Steenhuisen was born without a decent Oxbridge accent and did not subscribe to Johnson’s nasty vitriol.
This is not Johnson’s first public assault on Steenhuisen.
Last year, he criticised Steenhuisen’s “dubious” decision to air an advertisement in which copies of the South African flag were burned, disregarding the fact that this was, in fact, a statement that the flag should be protected from the very real prospect of it being “burnt” if an MK-EFF doomsday coalition were to take power.
It is a metaphor that has been entirely vindicated by the decision of the ANC and DA to form a government of national unity to avert such a scenario.
In the words of Hermann Pretorius of the Institute of Race Relations about his contemporary critique: ”This is not the first time that Johnson has allowed his personal obsession with Steenhuisen to cloud his faculties.”
On that occasion, Johnson revealed his personal bias by stating that among Steenhuisen’s sins was that he was “overweight”. Leaving aside for the moment that Johnson is hardly a walking Calvin Klein advertisement, this remark stoops so low that it ought to have alerted all that Johnson was pursuing a vendetta against Steenhuisen with the purpose of “whitewashing” his racism.
Which brings us to Johnson’s latest assault on Steenhuisen. What appears to have exercised Johnson is that Steenhuisen is now part of the GNU and a successful minister, with the DA’s current popularity among voters unparalleled in the party’s history.
The results of a Social Research Foundation poll published last month showed that the party had gained a full 10% since the 2024 election to come in at 32% of the vote, just 5% shy of the ANC’s 37%.
For Johnson, the fact that South Africa is turning the corner economically and has its most effective post-apartheid government since the DA entered the GNU is horrifying.
His entire pseudo-intellectual edifice, built on the assumption that South Africa, like “the rest of Africa” doomed to failure, is in danger of collapsing because of the success of the GNU that Steenhuisen helped form.
Johnson claims, against all the evidence, that Steenhuisen is unfit to govern because of claims surrounding a credit card. There is no evidence of corruption, fraud or the breach of any law, and Steenhuisen has pointed out that there were no irregularities in the use of the card and the two occasions that necessitated using the card had been reimbursed.
In an unlikely political swerve, Johnson then emerges as the champion of the former environmental affairs minister, Dion George, whom he suggests was fired by Steenhuisen because he opposed canned hunting and because he questioned Steenhuisen’s credit card spending.
There are no facts to back this up. Moreover, the DA has, just a few weeks ago, adopted a comprehensive policy view on the environment and continues to advocate strongly against environmental degradation. Steenhuisen is all too aware from his agriculture portfolio that the degradation of the environment threatens livelihoods and species diversity.
But actual policy and facts are anathema to Johnson, who has embarked on an ill-advised personal vendetta with the aim of proving himself to be on the side of the politically-correct angels.
In the process he has exposed himself once more for an attack, in Pretorius’ words, notable for “personal animosity and ad hominem”, leading him once more into the analytical gutter and intellectual notoriety.
This is the only defence he has against a leader who has doubled his party’s popular support in the polls since he took over in 2019 and who has led it into the GNU.
Herein lies Steenhuisen’s greatest sin in the eyes of Johnson. The success of the GNU is itself an existential threat to his incessant doom-mongering. The same risk applies to those others who see the only possible trajectory for South Africa as down, and compromise and recovery as political anathema and disappointment.
Despite the criticism of those who would like to see South Africa fail out of pure bile and bigotry, the DA will continue to contribute to the GNU, and to expand its brand of good governance, putting people, not prejudice, at the centre of its politics and policies.
• Jan de Villiers is DA national spokesperson
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