Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis wasted no time declaring on Friday, as nominations for new leadership of the DA opened, that he would be standing to replace the outgoing John Steenhuisen.
Importantly, Hill-Lewis was nominated by two popular party figures: Tshwane mayoral candidate Cilliers Brink and basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube. Brink could quite credibly have contested for the post himself, and as a black woman, Gwarube’s backing was a substantial signal of intent to an electorate sceptical of the DA’s enthusiasm for black voters.
Hill-Lewis, not yet 40, is going to need to unite the party and “renew” it at the same time. Electorally, it is stuck and losing ground in some key local by-elections, but a sense of renewal is inescapable. Hardly had Hill-Lewis accepted his nomination than deputy finance minister Ashor Sarupen, who is just 37, put his hand up for the job of chair of the party’s federal council, the most influential job in the party machine. Helen Zille, the current federal council chair, is campaigning to be the next mayor of Johannesburg.
I suspect Hill-Lewis will engineer a job as deputy leader for Gwarube and make her the DA point person in the government of national unity while he remains mayor of Cape Town.
Within just a few hours the shape of the DA promise had changed — a young, new leadership holds out at least the prospect of new thinking and an invigorated appeal to a much wider audience than Steenhuisen, or Zille for that matter, had felt comfortable enough to risk pursuing.
There’s no point fiddling with BEE or the ANC’s destructive determination to occupy the centre of the economy. Rather, he needs to find ways to persuade South Africans of the liberating benefits of looking after themselves
A very good new book out soon, Where To From Here by Business Day’s Tara Roos, neatly captures the rut the DA is in. Writing of its underwhelming performance in the 2024 election, she notes that the DA’s message “had insufficient emotional weight to resonate with an electorate experiencing acute social and economic distress”, the party being “caught between the expectations of its traditional base — supporters who prize fiscal discipline, constitutionalism and market-oriented reform — and the demands of a broader electorate living with the legacies of inequality and exclusion".
That raises, obviously, the acute dilemma Hill-Lewis faces in local elections later this year and the next general election in 2029: the only way for the DA meaningfully to grow is to persuade more black voters to support it. But does he do it by becoming an “ANC-lite” and risk losing conservative white support, or can he cut a path of his own that does neither?
Accepting his nomination on Friday, Hill-Lewis didn’t answer the question. But neither did he dodge it, making clear he wants the DA to be “a party for all” and that he wants to win over “more people who have never voted DA”. Those are loaded statements from the get-go.
Solly Msimanga, DA leader in Gauteng, will probably be the next federal chair, and deputies to that position and in the new federal council will most probably reflect both youth and a better racial mix in the leadership too.
Quite how Hill-Lewis packages this for the electorate shouldn’t be too difficult. There’s no point fiddling with BEE or the ANC’s destructive determination to occupy the centre of the economy. Rather, he needs to find ways to persuade South Africans of the liberating benefits of looking after themselves.
The field is open for a truly alternative political proposition. There’s no revolution brewing here, no matter how often the parties of the Left try to make us believe there is
That means crafting workable policies to encourage people or communities to start their own businesses, however trifling, and to emphasise the fact that to create employment you first need to create employers. Starting a business should be seriously easy. Regulations everywhere must be swept away and the rewards of merely trying to stand on your own feet need to be immediate and irresistible.
In encouraging an enterprise economy, the DA’s biggest advantage is that South Africans are largely conservative and God-fearing. They want to be taken seriously and to belong — how hard can that be? The field is open for a truly alternative political proposition. There’s no revolution brewing here, no matter how often the parties of the Left try to make us believe there is.
In 2024 the ANC vote dropped 17.3 points and the DA grew by just over one, writes Roos, a stunning reminder of the DA’s political ineptitude. To do better, Hill-Lewis will need to make his base understand that he cannot make them safe by remaining a small party with a province here and a metro or two there.
The only bastion that matters is national power, or at least a much bigger slice of it. He is going to reach for it, and it’s the right thing to do. Obviously there are risks, but the risks of not reaching are much worse.
The DA will soon have, finally, a genuinely charismatic political talent at its head — and it’s about time.
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