How Steenhuisen was undone

The ousted DA leader inherited a leaking, divided party and rebuilt it through a tight regime of discipline and message control. In the end, that hardball culture helped to precipitate his departure. By Rebecca Davis

- By Rebecca Davis

When John Steenhuisen stood before the party faithful on Wednesday, 4 February, to announce he would not make himself available for reelection as DA leader, there was a certain Shakespearean element to the moment.

The rules of engagement for internal party warfare had been written years earlier, and Steenhuisen himself had helped draft them.

Former DA leader Mmusi Maimane described the moment of his own political death in the DA in his book Dare To Believe. September 2019, he wrote, was defined by a concerted campaign to make his leadership impossible to sustain. Former friends and allies including his own chief of staff, Geordin Hill-Lewis, and the party's then chief whip, Steenhuisen were, he alleged, colluding with Helen Zille and others, including then party spokesperson Gavin Davis, to box him in from all sides.

An insider at the time described Maimane as “reeling from the betrayal”. Maimane recounts waking up on Sunday mornings with a pit of dread in his stomach, waiting to see what the newspaper Rapport would publish about him.

Rapport, he believed, had become the preferred conduit for smears about him. They arrived thick and fast. He was driving a car subsidised for the DA by disgraced Steinhoff boss Markus Jooste. He was renting a Claremont home for his family owned by a Durban businessman and had incorrectly disclosed its ownership in Parliament.

By today's South African political standards, these allegations barely register. But that was never the point. The message was clear: the leader was no longer protected. Maimane was dead in the water.

This is how Steenhuisen chose to characterise those events in his Wednesday speech: “The previous leader walked off the job.”

It's a revision of history that whitewashes any role in Maimane's exit beyond his own, painting him as someone who simply lacked the grit to finish the job.