John Steenhuisen needs to grow up or get out

Resorting to coalition politics of lawfare and ultimatums, is unbefitting for a party leader

- MUSHTAK PARKER

IS THE DA wanting to have its cake and eat it? Is its establishment in 2000 and playbook a truly 'Made in Africa' construct in the morass of the post-apartheid dispensation and discourse, or a caricature conjured up from the melting pot of the losers in the majority struggle for freedom, equity and justice after over two centuries of colonial-cum-white supremacist rule?

At first glance, the DA, the second largest party in the Government of National Unity (GNU) 'coalition of the unwilling' after the ANC, feigns the very epitome of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which would be anathema to the DOGE dinosaurs roaming the urban sprawls and steppes of MAGA America, its ally of ideological and race-based expediency.

Did you notice the callous coyness of John Steenhuisen, the DA leader and Minister of Agriculture in the GNU, in the Oval Office in the White House in May when President Trump and his sycophants literally ambushed and put the boot into a stoical and dignified President Ramaphosa with fake news about Afrikaner "genocide", white victimhood, marginalisation and land grabs?

It was not the DA leader's finest hour, but that coyness betrays a fundamental flaw in his and his party's fit for purposeness in South African polity and indeed in the GNU, which under its current persona and profile together with the arithmetic of race makes it unelectable unless of course the country undergoes a seismic event very high on the Richter Scale of electoral politics.

Fast forward to June 25, when Ramaphosa sacked his Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition Andrew Whitfield, a member of the DA, for defying protocol by undertaking an overseas trip without prior permission from his president as the rules clearly stipulate. One man’s “minor peccadillo” is another man’s 'wilful defiance'. There are plenty of precedents as to the sacking of ministers defying their commander-in-chief.