TOM EATON

Geordin Hill-Lewis, chosen over the weekend to be the new head prefect of the Democratic Alliance, says he believes the party can “win power” in the 2029 general election, and, at the risk of enraging the DA’s multifarious critics, I believe he’s right.

By all accounts the DA’s elective conference was a happy and smoothly-run affair, with the affable and popular Capetonian winning not only the support of the tuck-shop committee and the History And Current Affairs Society but also the endorsements of the captains of rugger and cricket, which means he is now entitled to wear a blue blazer with gold piping around both sleeves, and is also allowed to take possession of the ceremonial stuffed hadeda that represents the DA’s traditional ethos of being small but loud.

I’m teasing, of course — the hadeda is never removed from the saferoom in Helen Zille’s house — but I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that the DA has, over the years, sometimes come across as distinctly high-school-ish, with its eternal headmistress giving one the impression that she regards almost everyone in her world as a juvenile annoyance to be disciplined and then moulded into the image of her institution.

To be fair, John Steenhuisen did try to escape Zille’s shadow, but once he stopped being a combative and sharp-tongued chief whip, he often had the air of a Pietermaritzburg estate agent who’d fallen on hard times and was now trying out his life coaching material on increasingly uncomfortable captive audiences.

It remains to be seen what, exactly, Hill-Lewis’s bedside manner will be once he becomes a senior statesman, but as mayor of Cape Town he has so far projected the sort of earnest, patient willingness to engage you’d expect from someone who’s spent 30 years smiling and saying “Geordin. No, Geordin. Like Jordan, but with — no, not Gordon …”

Still, for all his ebullience, Hill-Lewis faces some tough challenges.

Boosters and yes-men will now flock around him, but no matter how they flatter him he will understand that no party is going to win an outright majority in a general election in this country for many years to come.

The first will be to his personal politics. Last year, when a documentary about Cape Town referred to the lingering legacy of apartheid town planning in the city, Hill-Lewis responded by calling such references “propaganda language”. It was an oddly emotional response, not least from someone whose job it now is to try to woo the people who still live where they live because of apartheid.

(As an aside, I also hope his handlers have explained to him that when he defends the breakneck development currently making it impossible for Capetonians to afford to live where they were born, he doesn’t again speak in aspirational terms about Dubai, a city built by de facto slaves for money launderers and tax dodgers, as he did on Voice of the Cape radio at the time.)

There’s also the Patriotic Alliance, which is making strong gains in DA strongholds, and that’s to say nothing of DA voters’ conflicted feelings about the government of national unity, as decades of Britain Stands Alone bloody-mindedness have left many confused about the difference between co-operation with a colleague and collaboration with a criminal gang.

Finally, there is the mounting evidence that South Africans have lost faith in electoral politics, as three decades of ANC rule have slowly entrenched the belief in the electorate that a vote is, at best, an unanswered prayer: almost 4-million fewer votes were cast in the 2024 general election than in 1994, despite South Africa’s population having grown by almost 20-million.

At first glance, it might seem hopeless for Hill-Lewis. But as someone who’s been crunching the political numbers since he was a child, he will know that it is in those dismal numbers where his future success lies.

Boosters and yes-men will now flock around him, but no matter how they flatter him he will understand that no party is going to win an outright majority in a general election in this country for many years to come. That, I would guess, is why he told his followers that the DA could “win power” and not “win an election”.

But this wasn’t sophistry: Hill-Lewis knows that the DA can, in fact, win power — or at least more than the DA currently has — simply by remaining more or less on its feet as the ANC, MKP and EFF fling themselves down in flailing heaps; every year making small, incremental gains towards the mid-30-percent region where its duel with the ANC will be decided.

Slow and steady wins the race, and Hill-Lewis has time — and the tuck-shop committee — on his side. Just as as long as he stays away from that propaganda language …