The DA needs to look forward
The DA campaign: "Know your DA," has proved surprisingly controversial and effective. Its achievements so far include an energising of DA grassroots campaigners, attracting a disproportionate amount of ANC anger and a definite uptick of support in the target community.
The unseemly haste of the ANC leadership to be photographed with President Nelson Mandela and the tasteless use of his image is directly ascribable to the DA campaign.
Helen Zille expressed her mystification at the fact that some people actually believe the lie that the DA would bring back apartheid when elected to power. The ANC played this card in the last election and some voters who do not read the newspapers or watch anything other than SABC TV can be forgiven for believing that the ANC is the only show in town.
It is said that the winners write the history and the political history of South Africa has been rewritten to exclude the anti-apartheid contributions of the Progressive Party, the PRP, the PFP and the DP in the long years of apartheid rule. The PAC, AZAPO, the Black Consciousness Movement and even the UDF have to a larger or lesser extent been airbrushed out of history. Only the ANC did anything.
In attempting to correct the historical perspective and make it clear that the leaders of today's DA are the last people who would want apartheid back, the focus has been on who did what when. This is essentially a backward look and while necessary to set the record straight, it nevertheless invites finger-pointing and blaming for things that happened long, long ago. The ANC has pointed out that the PP in the sixties stood for a qualified franchise.
It failed to point out that qualified franchise was not on racial grounds - it involved education and property; and from the time of the PRP in the seventies the policy was universal franchise. The ANC also forgot to admit that at that time membership of the ANC was confined to black people. Whites, coloureds and Indians each had separate organisations. Also, women did not serve on the NEC of the ANC at a time when a woman, Helen Suzman was already a leading parliamentarian.
What happened forty or fifty and years ago is interesting. But it is the present and the future that is more interesting and relevant to the young voters of this country.
Looking at the leadership line -up of the DA today, one sees a good mix of generations, colours, cultures and languages. Helen Zille, the leader, Wilmot James, Lindiwe Mazibuko, Patricia de Lille, James Selfe, Mmusi Maimane and Anchen Dreyer, to name a few, now joined by exciting young politicians like Magashule Gana, Mbali Ntuli and Yusuf Cassim; they look like South Africa.
The DA needs to realise that the best answer to anyone suggesting that the DA wants to return to apartheid would be to look forward. Publish the photographs of the leadership figures and their biographies. It is not believable that any of them long to bring back apartheid.
It is good to highlight the stellar record of Helen Suzman, which her memory deserves, and that of many others in the past in some of the predecessor parties. But voters born after she left parliament in 1989 want to know what the DA, formed from many different strands in 2000, offers now and in the future. Seeing and hearing the leaders will help but the challenge is to talk to people and answer the question; "What will you do for me?"
If the DA can answer that question, it may well make many young voters exercise their democratic prerogative and change their votes from the ANC to the DA. The election campaign, starting now, should be fascinating.
Douglas Gibson is Opposition Chief Whip and Ambassador to Thailand. He can be followed on Twitter @dhmgibson
This article first appeared in The Star.
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