A serious critique of the DA’s current leadership configuration must begin with a structural observation rather than a rhetorical one.
The recent party’s leadership slate reflects neither the demographic composition of SA nor the sociological profile of the voters it must win to grow.
The gender imbalance in senior decision-making roles is not an incidental flaw but a diagnostic signal of deeper institutional conservatism in candidate selection, patronage networks, and its racialised consolidation of internal power.
It is the symptom of a party that has confused stability with stasis.
The DA has long positioned itself as SA’s pre-eminent liberal alternative, rhetorically committed to constitutionalism, equal opportunity, and the rule of law.
Yet its leadership composition reveals a persistent disjuncture between normative commitment and organisational practice.
Gender parity is not merely a representational good but a strategic imperative.
Parties that fail to incorporate women meaningfully into leadership tend to reproduce narrow policy priorities and exhibit structurally diminished responsiveness to a diverse electorate.
The optics are particularly damaging because they hollow out the DA’s most cherished self-description.
A party that rejects race-based redress on principled constitutional grounds must, at minimum, demonstrate excellence in other registers of inclusion.
The universalist language remains; the universalist practice has not followed.
Helen Zille’s claim that the party rescued itself from “ethnonationalist wokeism” by parting ways with figures such as Mmusi Maimane is rhetorically effective but analytically thin and ultimately evasive.
It reframes what was, in substance, a leadership crisis and an identity reckoning into a civilisational struggle over ideological purity.
The term “wokeism,” deployed in this context, functions as a political frequency that resonates with a segment of the electorate made anxious by redistributive discourse and racial transformation.
The irony is transparent.
The charge of identity politics, levelled against those who sought a more racially inclusive leadership, was itself an act of identity politics, just in the opposite direction, and less willing to name itself.
This framing, however, obscures a more consequential strategic choice, which is the DA’s deliberate pivot away from a multiracial, aspirationally inclusive coalition toward a whiter politics defensive posture.
Under Maimane, the party undertook a genuine — if imperfect — experiment in expanding its appeal among black middle-class voters, particularly in the urban and peri-urban constituencies where SA’s next political settlements are likely to be forged.
His departure, and the departures that accompanied and followed it — Lindiwe Mazibuko most conspicuously among them — marked a retraction of that experiment.
It was not merely a change in leadership style but a contraction of political imagination.
This matters because that experiment represented, in all probability, the DA’s last realistic window of opportunity to become a party with genuine national governing ambitions.
SA carries, in suspension, a significant political constituency: educated, aspirationaly mobile, disillusioned with the ANC’s failures, and politically unattached.
The DA was better positioned than any other party to harvest this constituency.
Instead, it chose to fire the very figures who embodied the possibility of that harvest, and in doing so communicated, unmistakably, that black leadership within the DA remains conditionally acceptable only insofar as it ratifies, rather than challenges, the assumptions of a white liberal institutional culture.
The strategic logic of this retrenchment is not difficult to trace.
The rise of the FF+ among disaffected Afrikaner voters created a palpable electoral threat to the DA’s traditional base.
As a short-term tactic, this has a certain electoral rationale. But as a long-term strategy it is self-defeating.
By adopting rhetorical registers and policy tones calibrated to reassure the white conservative constituency, the DA risks ideological convergence with the very party it seeks to outcompete.
If the DA is to recover its earlier growth trajectory it will need to revisit the experiment it abandoned of the construction of a genuinely broad, inclusive coalition that reflects SA as it is, in its complexity and its possibility, rather than as its most anxious constituency fears it might become
In political economy terms, this is a race to the bottom within a numerically finite and demographically contracting voter segment.
SA’s white electorate constitutes a numerical ceiling — and not a high one.
Even under optimal conditions, it cannot deliver national power, or anything approaching it.
The DA’s earlier growth trajectory, most pronounced between 2014 and 2019, was predicated on consolidating this base additionally to the hoped for incremental gains among black voters, specifically, the emerging middle class.
These black middle class are sensitively not ideologically aligned with racial conservatism.
That is the growth frontier the DA has lost by retreating from authentic multiculturalism.
The DA’s oscillation between liberal universalism and defensive identity politics has begun to erode the ideological coherence that was, for much of its history, its most distinctive asset.
The deeper irony is that in seeking to avoid what Zille characterises as “ethnonationalist wokeism,” the DA has drifted into its own form of identity politics — less explicitly articulated, but carrying the same structural logic of minority consolidation over majority engagement.
It is not white nationalism in any formal doctrinal sense. But it operates, strategically, within the logic of minority entrenchment of shoring up a bounded constituency rather than building the cross-racial, cross-class solidarity that national electoral viability requires.
What the DA currently resembles, in political terms, is a party in a cul-de-sac of its own making — a strategy that yields short-term stabilisation at the cost of long-term foreclosure.
If the DA is to recover its earlier growth trajectory it will need to revisit the experiment it abandoned of the construction of a genuinely broad, inclusive coalition that reflects SA as it is, in its complexity and its possibility, rather than as its most anxious constituency fears it might become.
It will also need to treat black voters as fodder for ‘white’ leadership.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a Komani-born writer
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