Democratic Alliance (DA) director of communications Richard Newton sounded a bit pressed when he called me at 5pm on the day of the presidential inauguration.
“Helen asked me to call you,” he squirmed, “about that video.”
Newton was referring to the now infamous Renaldo Gouws k-word video. He had been deployed to intimidate me into killing the story, after Helen Zille had failed to do so.
“I think you ought to wait until the veracity or otherwise of that video can be confirmed. If there is any doubt you should not run it. If it is true, Renaldo is gone. If it is fake, then it is not fair to proceed,” Zille wrote to me before my bizarre interaction with Newton.
“I have contacted Renaldo,” said Zille. “He says he has no recollection at all of making a video with such vile language and says if one exists, it could be AI generated.”
Somewhere in the recesses of the DA propaganda machine on full spin cycle, some card-carrying member of Mensa had come up with a strategy to die on Deepfake Hill. Because if it wasn’t fake, it meant that Renaldo Gouws had broken a great commandment of the DA: thou shalt not lie to Helen (and in so doing, publicly embarrass her).
Gouws' outright lie to Zille, or his inability to recall one of the times he sprinkled his videos with the k-word, forced the party to spin an even bigger, more implausible yarn.
“We have our initial response back and they say it’s almost definitely a fake,” said Newton.
“They are 98% sure,” he continued. “They say if you look between the collar and the jersey at some stages, there are a number of markers, but they will have a report within the next 24 hours…”
They? “Who are they?” I asked Newton.
The comms guy mumbled something more about “them” being a company who detects AI or deepfakes, before repeating the line about a “ninety-eight percent chance” and a bit more about “markers”. I asked him if I could include his comment in the story, and said I’d be happy to include this ninety eight percent report from “them” before he said something about a plane to catch and ending the call.
Between Zille and Newton’s exhortations, the inference was clear. A ninety-eight percent chance that the video was fake means that there was only a two percent chance that Renaldo Gouws had said the words. The implicit argument was that we’d be rolling loaded dice if we published the piece.
It seems that personal responsibility, a core tenet of the “make your bed” cult of Jordan Peterson is suddenly optional when it comes to extending white privilege to include saying the k-word.
Roman’s revenge: Killing the liberal DA
There is a proud legacy of White English liberalism in South Africa. The political work in opposition to apartheid by Helen Suzman, Colin Eglin and Frederik van Zyl-Slabbert, among others is written into our constitutional democracy.
This liberal undertaking has now reached the end of the road. In its place is Zille’s podbro loyalty programme which marks a decisive turn from liberalism to the US alt right. The latest beneficiary of DA cadre deployment is Roman Cabanac, who has been appointed as John Steenhuisen’s Boy Friday in the Ministry of Agriculture.
Cabanac has long been one of Zille’s favourites. He was a founding member of the ridiculous Capitalist Party. While it failed, farcically, as an electoral venture it was hugely effective in being a lobby to pressure Mmusi Maimane to resign as DA federal leader, and ultimately leave the party altogether.
Here’s Zille and Cabanac talking with Mmusi’s then-programme co-ordinator, who had formerly been a Zille staffer. Nothing to see here, folks. Just three friends having a coffee together at Cape Town International airport, one week before Mmusi resigned as federal leader of the DA.
The coup de grâce on Maimane was a report authored by Tony Leon, DA strategist Ryan Coetzee, and one of its megafunders Michiel Le Roux, in which three white men argued for the minimisation of race as a factor in perpetual apartheid patterns. Someone else who fell on their sword was former DA CEO Paul Boughey. Did I say sword? I meant feather bed. Boughey is now the CEO of Leon's Resolve Communications.
The report by Leon, Le Roux, and Coetzee argued that race, redress, and reckoning with South Africa’s apartheid past was an illiberal path to walk. This conveniently ignores the fact that if the brains trust of the DA wanted a true liberal to lead the party, they would not have coronated Maimane, a well-known homophobe. Instead, they would have rallied behind the solid yet unspectacular Wilmot James.
Regardless, the report was a public lynching of Maimane based on the paper-thin premise of electoral decline. The DA’s favourite client media were there to help put the boot in. A reliable stenographer of the DA wrote in News24 about “the disastrous results in the general election in May this year, where it shed almost half a million votes in a low turnout election, losing support for the first time in 25 years”. When the DA dropped a further percentage point in the 2024 election under Steenhuisen it was presented as a success.
Zille’s strategy was to consolidate a small but staunch bloc of support around the 20% mark. To get there she choose to pander to a white base rather than to aim to fix 400 years of colonialism, slavery, apartheid, and now structural apartheid.
In 2019 in leaked recordings at OR Tambo, she said “I think we need to consolidate the DA around 20% of the vote. It’s a bloody strong percentage… We mustn’t try to be populist. Twenty percent is big… and if the ANC falls to, let's say, 40%, I’d rather make TOUGH DEMANDS on Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC, to FORCE reforms out of THEM than go into coalition with anyone else.” It’s a game of political opportunism, not liberal principle. Suzman be damned.
Now aiming at nothing more than 20% of the vote the DA threw the Black babies out with the illiberal bathwater. Lindiwe Mazibuko. Phumzile Van Damme. Mmusi Maimane. Patricia De Lille. Mbali Ntuli. Into the breach stepped Cabanac, Gouws, and others to reengineer the DA to look a lot like MAGA, fighting the same culture wars, using the same language of grievance and entitlement and feigning victimhood from a position of extraordinary privilege and opportunity. In other words, the old tradition of white English liberalism gave way to the politics of the US alt right.
Redpill revanchist illiberalism
Someone in the DA thought that appointing a guy who posed with a gun with the caption “preparing for EWC” is a wise appointment to the ministry of Agriculture. Someone dismissed the notion that a race provocateur might not be a "fit for purpose" appointment to a ministry that would play a key role in fixing the slow pace of transforming historical patterns of land ownership and limited agrarian reform in a country deeply divided by the original sin of colonial land theft.
And then, even after all of that, it has emerged that John Steenhuisen's office has applied for a deviation from minimum education and experience requirements to be waived to accommodate the appointment of four DA staff into the Ministry of Agriculture. Fit for purpose, wit for purpose, or cadre deployment?
The ANC is no longer the sole centre of political gravity in South Africa. The Government of National Unity (GNU) has usurped that role. At the core of the GNU is the Grand Coalition, a hybrid political beast composed of the most revanchist tendencies of the DA, mixing its political nucleotides with the most milquetoast elements in the ANC. Perhaps they deserve each other: A DA that has discarded liberalism holding hands with an ANC that has largely abandoned socialism and is flirting with the DA’s agenda to balkanize South Africa.
The liberal tradition of the past is in sharp distinction to Zille’s project to hollow out the ANC from the inside. It has no room for the pragmatic liberalism of Colin Eglin. Eglin left the United Party when it did exactly what the DA are doing now - lurching to the right and pandering to white nationalism. While Eglin built a principled political project brick by brick, Zille has expedited the path to power by jettisoning all that useless liberal cargo.
What of the doyens of White English liberalism who grace us yet in their golden years? Graham McIntosh left the DA for the IFP because of “the gay agenda”, an illiberal turn informed by his faith. RW Johnson has now written two books predicting an IMF-heralded economic doomsday for South Africa, displaying an ideological superiority complex couched in the usual language and tone that he and other liberal economic prophets of doom are prone to narrowcast to their Politicsweb and Biznews adherents. Still, McIntosh and Johnson look like Guevara and Castro compared to the right wing edgelords that are hijacking the DA. A penny for their thoughts on the desecration of the liberal tradition that Cabanac's appointment represents.
In place of these great minds, we now have Gouws, Cabanac, and a coterie of online provocateurs whose chief KPI is to trigger wokes and sow swart gevaar. To these people, Helen Suzman is just a road that they take to get to Cafe Caprice in Camps Bay. They know nothing about van Zyl-Slabbert because he’s never been on Rogan. They are a new breed of politicians who openly engage with self-identifying fascists and create permission structures for the mainstreaming of far-right ideas.
A wide spectrum of the self-identified white liberal establishment is complicit in this shift to the alt right including Politicsweb, BizNews, the Daily Friend and Gareth Cliff, as well as cultural figures like The Kiffness and the cartoonist Jerm.
A post-Grand Coalition polity
Former SA Ambassador to the United States Ebrahim Rasool wrote recently of how the ANC’s electoral trajectory broadly follows the path of the Indian National Congress (INC), where coalitions of minority parties ultimately dissolved the INC. He writes that “the BJP (now led by Modi) became increasingly dominant, with an election and political formula based on populism, identity politics, and a rightward shift punctuated by conflicts”.
Rasool tracks the trajectory of the INC from ruling party to minority party. Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP was built on the broad poisonous ideological firmament of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to seize and consolidate political power. With this power it has systematically trampled on the rights of minorities deemed by it to be unworthy of a place in protected society.
The dissolution of the ANC into its constituent parts is now well underway. Unlike the Indian political landscape, there is no broad fascist or nationalist movement that is analogous to the RSS. Instead, the South African polity is breaking up into a set of populist ethnonationalist and sometimes criminal political projects. The melting pot of South Africa now contains toxic ingredients of Zulu nationalism, Coloured nationalism, Afrikaner nationalism, Cape separatism and alt right white racism. Afrophobia, xenophobia, homophobia, ethnic chauvinism and white supremacy all fester in this increasingly toxic political landscape.
In this context of fragmentation, 20%, is, as Zille says, a big bloc. That’s why the podbros are so important to the Democratic Alliance. Both by design and by unintended consequence, they are a stable of stalking horses for several issues. They mainstream hard right and at times even fascist ideology to perpetuate the privilege of a tiny minority of South Africans — the rich and powerful. They are the vox elitari who wilfully misrepresent themselves and what they stand for as being in the best interests of the country
The unitary construct of the Republic of South Africa is precarious. This new DA, having failed to take electoral power through popular will, is now making the circle ever smaller, ever more elite, ever more alienated from a common vision for all South Africans. The ANC through corruption, mental slackness, distance from the masses, and incompetence has left the backdoor, the front door, and all the windows of a once revolutionary house wide open for the home invasion that is the business-backed Grand Coalition.
To countervail the creep of the new right, and to stop those who want to balkanize South Africa, the left must build a broad multiracial political project that is steeped in the lessons of history, can develop a correct analysis of the present moment, and drives the creation of an inclusive, powerful vision for all South Africans. It must reject picking the low hanging fruit of expedient ethnonationalism, as the DA and others are wont to do. It can never compromise with, or apologise to racists, reactionaries, and white supremacists.
* Roscoe Palm is an investigative journalist and a political commentator.
** The views reflected here do not necessarily represent the views of Independent Media or IOL.