John Steenhuisen has come in for a tremendous amount of criticism and mockery for going on a “fact-finding” trip to Ukraine, but I suspect he’s sleeping relatively easily in his bunker in Kyiv.
By now you will have heard many of the loudest objections, ranging from accusations of selective, Eurocentric concern — he hasn’t gone to find facts in any African or Middle Eastern wars — to dereliction of duty, travelling to the other side of the world while the Cape Flats remain racked by violence.
Some have also expressed bemusement over his decision to appoint himself as a sort of roving correspondent specialising in reporting facts covered a month earlier by actual journalists. Others have wondered about his peculiar foregrounding of the price of chips at school tuck-shops as a major consequence of the Russian invasion.
Steenhuisen’s supporters, of course, will point out that there is no winning in cases like this, no doubt arguing that if he’d gone to an African war zone, he would have been accused of exploiting the suffering of Africans for political gain.
As for the price of chips, well, it was a particularly badly worded version of a solid argument for why Russia is making life harder for South Africans.
Some of the criticisms of Steenhuisen also seem ignorant of the fact that there is a well-established tradition in politics whereby, if Government X is an ally (or client) of Government Y, the official opposition of Government X will meet and exchange comradely words with people opposing the government of Government Y.
There are arguments for and against Steenhuisen’s field trip. But I’m not sure any of them really matter. All that mattered this time, I suspect, was moving the needle.
This also explains why Steenhuisen hasn’t visited any of the other war zones his critics demand he travel to: the ANC hasn’t taken sides in any of them. Were the ANC not a client of Vladimir Putin’s regime — or at least the beneficiary of cash from his inner circle — and had it taken a genuinely neutral position on Ukraine, Steenhuisen wouldn’t have gone to Kyiv either.
Some of his more pragmatic and less naive supporters might even argue that, even though it was clearly little more than a photo op, it was at least vastly more impressive than the similar stunt arranged by the EFF, who merely nipped across town to get patted on the head by the Russian ambassador rather than committing to spending six days within range of Russian missiles.
In short, there are arguments for and against Steenhuisen’s field trip. But I’m not sure any of them really matter. All that mattered this time, I suspect, was moving the needle.
Charisma and personal magnetism shouldn’t be decisive influences in politics. We should vote for technocratic excellence and not need our public servants to radiate that intangible, unquantifiable energy that can hold a room. But that’s not the world we live in, and we do, for better and often for worse, demand that our politicians tug first and foremost at our hearts.
In her prime a decade ago, Helen Zille clearly did that with millions of DA voters. Beyond Twitter, I regularly meet people who still have a deep and almost unshakeable admiration for her, and who remain determined to ignore her later provocations.
I have never met anyone who is passionate about John Steenhuisen. Of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but I don’t think it’s too wild a generalisation to suggest that he is the John Major to Zille’s Margaret Thatcher.
That flatlining of charisma can be seen, literally, on Google Trends, which measures the number of times a name pings up on the world’s biggest search engine: despite being the DA’s leader and the focus of much of the media content produced by the party, Steenhuisen consistently averages fewer Google hits than Zille.
This week, however, his largely comatose Google Trends line suddenly shot up. This week, Steenhuisen got noticed. It didn’t matter that it was because journalists were slagging him off. When you’re standing in the vast shadow of Helen Zille, slowly fading from view in domestic politics, just being seen is almost as big a win as being admired.
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