The Democratic Alliance: The future of South African politics

Note to editors: This is an extract of the speech delivered by DA Parliamentary Leader, Lindiwe Mazibuko MP in Rotterdam addressing the D66 Congress, April 21 2012

Ladies and Gentlemen, fellow liberals and democrats:

I am honoured to have been given this opportunity to address D66 today. From the Democratic Alliance, your sister party, I bring you the greetings of our leader and premier of the Western Cape province, Helen Zille.

This occasion is a special one for me. It is the first time I am addressing an audience outside South Africa since being elected as the leader of the DA parliamentary party in October, 2011.

Here, in the Netherlands, as across the European Union, notions of ‘leadership' are being redefined. The old ideological lines of ‘left' and ‘right' have collapsed. The old way of doing politics no longer works. Voters are discarding old allegiances and choosing parties of government that work.  

Liberals have been better prepared for this new, changed world for one simple reason: we always understood that the major differences in the world are between ‘open' and ‘closed' minds. We have always been open-minded about different cultures and beliefs, and never feared adopting new ideas even if they challenged our own way of doing things. Long before the word was invented, we championed globalisation through our support for free trade.

While many politicians of the old ‘left' and ‘right' are pessimistic, liberals are being renewed by a sense of confidence and self-belief because we know the future belongs to the open-minded and pragmatic. The policy answers are less clear in a world of lower predictability.

Liberals believe that ‘wise policy is a setting of priorities - differentiating between that which is merely important and that which is truly essential': this befits the spirit of the times we live in. Never has liberalism's balance between individual freedom and the power of the state to champion social responsibility and opportunity through taxation, welfare and public services been so widely understood.          

In international affairs, the wheel of power is still spinning widely in Northern Africa and the Arab world, and we do not know yet which way it will land. Liberal democracy is beating at the door of the military regime in Rangoon. Soon it might reach North Korea. Even Mr Mugabe, Mr Castro and Mr Chavez are exhausted from running from it. One thing is for sure: the days of the dictator and the ‘president for life' seem to be numbered.

In a globalising world, many of the issues that concern the Dutch electorate concern South African voters. Challenges and opportunities like the ‘rise' of China and India and the rapid spread of new technologies, and threats like economic degradation, the sovereign debt crisis, extremism and xenophobia, the tragedy of youth unemployment, and fiscal sustainability concern us as much as they do you.

Despite global uncertainty, Africa is on the march. A new generation of smart, capable leaders is emerging who understand that the challenge of modern democracy is efficacy. As the Economist recently reported, opposition political parties in Africa are benefiting from the general absence of ideological fault-lines since the demise of Marxism in 1991. Perhaps more than in the West, voters are swayed by evidence of individual competence than by ideological preference.

Take just one lady who has been in the news in the last week: Nigeria's finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Who better than this remarkable woman - who has done much to break up Nigeria's culture of corruption, sort out the country's public finances and introduce a measure transparency - to lead the World Bank?

I am frustrated that she did not succeed, but encouraged that she has cracked the glass ceiling that sits above non-US candidates for that position. She has demonstrated that development is not something that rich countries do for poor ones. It is something that poor countries do for themselves.

There is a head of government in South Africa, Helen Zille, who emulates this brand of leadership. Helen, leader of the DA, former mayor of Cape Town, and now the premier of the Western Cape, is perfecting the idea of what a modern and capable government should look like. 

If a job needs doing, she asks: ‘who is the best person to do it?' Where we are in government we are constantly looking at how to reduce the cost of government to the taxpayer, while making it an agent of strategic change. We understand that the lives of millions of people, as well as billions of rand, turn on our rational decision-making.  

Under Helen's leadership, the DA approaches government with the view of how to make it work better for people, not the other way round. ‘Better together' is the slogan of the provincial government.

From improved school testing to improved healthcare and, I believe, happier citizens, the results are startling after only three years in office. Competency is the currency of DA administrations.     

Like you are in the Netherlands, the DA is familiar with coalition-building. In 2006, when Helen Zille was elected as the Mayor of Cape Town, we formed a coalition of seven parties that spanned the political divide, including parties with a religious hue.

Confounding the sceptics, the coalition lasted the entire five year term. Helen achieved this because she never wavered from clear liberal democratic principle:

• One, the DA in a coalition must be the dominant party in order to have a realistic chance of delivering our programme.
• Two, we only enter coalitions based upon shared values, not a marriage of convenience. Nor will we enter into a coalition with any party that is antithetical to the values contained in our human-rights based Constitution.
• Three, the administration was characterised by complete openness. There were no background channels between the various players.

In 2009, the DA won the Western Cape province with an outright majority, and invited two other opposition parties' to participate in the government. One, the Independent Democrats (ID), accepted, and the other, Congress of the People (COPE), declined. A little later, the ID joined the DA based on a coherence of principles.

We therefore watched the Dutch government coalition agreement process in 2010 with the Peoples' Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), the Christian Democratic Alliance (CDA) and the PVV (Party for Freedom) with great interest. The coalition was, as widely reported, controversial because it included the PVV. Only time will tell if it will last the course.

We salute you, our sister party, for standing up for liberal principles inside and outside parliament. I know this has meant, on occasion, that you have chosen to relinquish office and gone into opposition. Parties, like you, that stay true to their principles do not capsize in the storms of public life.

After last year's local government elections in South Africa, the DA chose not to enter into  coalition in a few municipalities where no party emerged with an outright majority. We did not believe that the prospective partners would prove reliable in working with us to deliver upon our promises. In the long-run, integrity and principle pay off.

The rapid rise of the DA in South Africa is mirroring the positive trend that is reshaping African politics from Senegal to Ghana to Zambia.

The DA is the most diverse and fastest-growing political party in South Africa today. The Party won 24.3% of the vote in the 2011 local government elections, up from 16.3% in 2006. This was an increase of 89.2% in absolute numbers of votes cast, and set a new record in South African history.

We hope to win two more of our nine provinces: Gauteng and Northern Cape in the 2014 general election. In 2014 we aim to win 30% of the vote , and to remove the ANC from power in 2019.

In a national election in South Africa 30% would yield 52 new members of parliament and increase our representation to 136 members in the 400 seat National Assembly.

To achieve our goals, we need to do what President Barack Obama did in the US election in 2008, and what other African leaders have recently done across the continent: mobilise the youth and talent of the nation into a great enterprise to change how we do politics. We must restore the belief that politics is not the place for personal enrichment, skulduggery, or for the mediocre to rise, but is the arena for noble pursuits and just causes.   

South Africa has a very young population. About a third of our population of 50 million is made up of those younger than 15 years old, while the proportion of people between 15 and 34 years of age has remained relatively stable at about 37%. The means that over two third of South Africa's population is defined as ‘youth'. 

This reality underlines the importance of our ambition to widen the narrow gene pool going into public life. Our party political representation does not yet adequately reflect the ‘youthful' composition and complexion of South African society. But we are changing that. 

We are working to get younger people represented in politics and public life - at local, provincial and national level. We want them included in the Party's activities; to ensure we ‘look' and ‘sound' like South Africa diverse communities. This is necessary to reflect the goals, desires, concerns and hopes of the nation.

In short we need the best brains and talent we can get. The challenges of South Africa are too great for politics to be a mission left till ‘later in life'. We need to draw talent from every walk of life, every age group, and every community.

The DA has boldly raided outside the party demesne for talent. In our ranks we now boast famed social activist, Patricia de Lille who serves as the DA's Mayor of Cape Town, and leading academic, Wilmot James, the party's chairperson.   

We need more dynamic young leaders to strive towards the bright horizon, as we need to retain older leaders who often possess the judgment and experience on how to get there.

The under-representation of younger people in South Africa has, in part, entrenched leadership as being defined by ‘the struggle', and its attendant luggage from the apartheid era. 

This age distortion and entrenched interest means that one of the world's youngest countries has one of the eldest collective leaderships. Our head of state, for example, is 70 compared to the US's Barack Obama who is 50, Britain's David Cameron who is 45, Mexico's Felipe Calderon who is 49, and your own Jan Pieter Balkenende who is 55. 

President Jacob Zuma's Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, is stepping aside at 70, while Mr Zuma is busy seeking a second term of office. Yet Mr Zuma leads an exhausted liberation movement that lacks the energy or focus to tackle today's challenges of service delivery and reconciliation in a nation torn by injustices.

These are the challenges that the DA has taken up in government and opposition. We do it for the single reason that it is the right thing to do.   

These are difficult days in the world, yet my message to you is one of optimism and hope: for you, for Africa, for South Africa. Liberalism's hour is here. Our belief in imaginative ideas, an empathetic heart and a generous spirit will unlock South Africa's potential.

It finds expression every hour, every day as the DA strengthens in size and purpose.  We hold the answers, and we are marching towards the drumbeat of liberal democracy.

Issued by the DA, April 21 2012

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