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Newly minted interim DA leader John Steenhuisen (pictured) wants a chance to prove himself, and his plea is that people should not rush to judge him based on “the amount of melanin in my skin”.
He sat down with City Press last week, three days before his election to replace Mmusi Maimane as the interim party leader.
The most notable change as you enter the former DA parliamentary leader’s office is that the enormous portrait of Maimane no longer dominates the left wall, begging to be acknowledged.
At first we struggle to hear each other over an incessant drilling and banging outside the window –Parliament is under construction – but Steenhuisen gets up to shut out the noise.
“It sounds like they are trying to bury a body out there,” he says with an almost nervous laugh.
The federal council delegates who didn’t vote for him believe that his election signals the death of the DA and the legacy of Maimane, who Steenhuisen worked closely with as the chief whip.
“Mmusi wasn’t a perfect leader. There is no such thing as a perfect leader. Every leader has blind spots. As a leader, what you have to do is mitigate those blind spots and ensure that you have people in the room who can mitigate against them,” he says of Maimane.
But wasn’t he one of the people advising Maimane?
“I don’t think I ever gave Mmusi bad advice. We would have these discussions and debates backwards and forwards. It was my duty to advise Mmusi in the best way that I saw fit, and I did that every single step of the way. Some of the advice was taken and some of it wasn’t.”
One of the things he says he warned Maimane about was coming out strongly against President Cyril Ramaphosa in the early days of his presidency.
“In a post-Jacob Zuma world, coming out hard against Ramaphosa when the country’s mood was desperate for some hope was a spectacular misjudgement. And I made that point to Mmusi, and I made it at the federal executive.”
Labelled a rudderless ship, what is the legacy of the first black leader of the DA?
“It is too early to talk about Mmusi’s legacy in the party. But I am certainly not one of the people who joins the bashing and denigration.
“I certainly won’t sit here and say Mmusi is the worst thing to happen to the DA and I am sorry he ever darkened our door. That is not the case. Every leader brings with them good and bad points. I think it is too early to write the legacy now. There is some dust that needs to settle, but that legacy will emerge over time.”
So how might Steenhuisen’s leadership differ from Maimane’s?
“I am a lot more assured about where I stand on issues and I think this has been very obvious over my career and in interviews that I have done.
“Leaders need to be decisive. They need to act with the best set of information – not be impulsive, but get the best people in the room and decide on a key course of action, and then stick to it.”
Do you believe in collective responsibility, especially following the party’s electoral decline?
“No I am not a communist, I am a liberal. We each have to take responsibility for our own role in it, not that there is a collective that must stand together. We made some missteps in Parliament.
“We misjudged the mood on some things. Perhaps we didn’t always field the best speaker in the debates. But that was the extent of my role in the party – it was to run Parliament.
“I happen to think that Parliament is one of the centres of success of the DA rather than being one of the things that dragged us down. I don’t think there is anyone who said: ‘Well, I didn’t vote for the DA because of what it did in Parliament.’”
Following the May 8 election setback, many in the party are moving to win back those voters lost to the right of politics. It’s a play that Steenhuisen says he can’t support.
“I don’t agree with that. And I certainly would never lead a party that focused on that. We will never build trust in the party if we don’t pull people who have never voted for the party before. We have to win over the hundreds and thousands of young people who are, in the majority, black,” he says.
Despite fervently agreeing that the economic divide between black and white is worlds apart, the former KwaZulu-Natal leader is adamant that the party’s redress policy must change and no longer categorise the poor as black.
“Why reduce it to a proxy when you can measure it? We can measure it. Stats SA has measured poverty – 99.9% of poor people who fall under the category of poverty in South Africa are black South Africans.
“So why not target them? Why do you need a proxy when you have got something there that you can measure?”
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