Analyses of DA conference stuck in a narrow groove of personalities over policies

Over the past few days, there has been intense media scrutiny of the DA’s policy outcomes. Daily Maverick alone has published three separate articles on it; one each by Greg Nicolson, Stephen Grootes and Marianne Merten. 

It’s unfortunate that none of these articles has really attempted to engage with the depth of what the DA’s policy offering is to South Africans, or more so to envisage the type of country that South Africa could be if race did not dominate policy thought.

Nicolson has done some justice in engaging on the DA’s proposals regarding the use of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a better metric to grow the economy in terms of how the state engages with the business sector. However, neither Grootes nor Merten even bothered to make mention of this approach, or interrogate it thoroughly. 

In fact, it is clear that neither one of them has in fact read the DA policy documents themselves, based on the level of commentary that they have provided. Instead, they have opted for the seemingly predictable approach that is followed by many analysts in discussing the DA in that they focus on the people and not the policies. 

It’s all about the personalities rather than the content.

Grootes merely glosses over the policy discussions that took place, because what he really wants to discuss is the perceived factionalism he sees in the DA and partition the conference into winners and losers. At some point, even stating that the “liberal side of the DA have won the day” – and suggesting that race-based policy issues have split the party.

Merten does the same thing. Except she barely mentions the DA’s policy discussions and just focuses on the people and personalities – Gwen Ngwenya and Helen Zille, in particular, labelling the recent policy outcomes as a “rearguard take-over by the Institute of Race Relations”. 

As one reads the commentary further, it becomes almost conspiratorial, as if Zille and Ngwenya are the only two people who are in the DA and who make decisions. It's clear Merten doesn’t actually understand how the DA works internally.

The process that led up to this past weekend was months in the making, where not only DA members but all members of the public were invited to comment on the DA’s policy proposals, all of which were available online, to help refine and structure a policy approach that would be best for the country. It resulted in two days of deliberations by more than 200 DA members from across the nation, and will still be subjected to further engagement at the party’s federal congress with hundreds of members.

Despite this, Nicolson, Grootes and Merten were fixated on the DA’s adoption of non-racialism as one of the principles that was adopted at the party’s policy conference. You would think, based purely on their commentaries, that this is all that was discussed for two days, or in the months leading up to the conference.

The official opposition has produced a comprehensive policy alternative that it wants to present to the country. Yet, despite the level of work that has gone into it, it has been met with commentary that is clearly slapdash, amateurish and quite frankly disappointing.

In fact, it reinforces why non-racialism is so important if South Africa is to grow and develop into the future. Their commentaries all emerge from a race-centred and race-driven analysis. They seemingly also cannot escape this approach in their writing. It controls and dominates their thinking and, when they do stray from it, they opt to merely focus on the personalities and people in the DA – blatantly ignoring all the other discussions that have taken place at the conference.

This is a fundamentally different policy approach to what is currently shaping South Africa’s development – and yet analysts are focused on race.