The DA is SA ’ s only hope

If I had a rand for every time someone predicted the demise of the DA, I’d be wealthier than the average tenderpreneur.

Koert Meyer’s is the latest attempt at political fortune telling, and one sincerely hopes that he has better luck predicting the lottery. In spite of losing a few wards, mostly marginal, the DA remains the second-largest party in SA, the most diverse and the only party to beat both the ANC and FF+ in by-elections in the same city. The result in Pretoria was particularly important, given that the FF+ threw everything it had into taking on the DA and still couldn’t make it. No wonder it doesn’t bother taking on the ANC, which the DA beat comprehensively in two wards in the governing party’s heartland of the Eastern Cape.

When it comes to historical revisionism, the attempt at painting the decision not to join the 1994 government of national unity as selfish is next-level stuff. Had Tony Leon and his small band of MPs not chosen the more difficult route of opposition politics, SA would have had to establish an opposition to hold the government to account and to build a non-racial alternative to the failed ANC. Thanks to the hard work done by these committed South Africans, opposition politics is an established reality and the DA is the secondlargest political party in SA. By all measures and in terms of numerous accolades locally and abroad, where the DA governs, it does so more successfully than any other party.

The DA remains committed to the vision in its constitution of creating one nation with one future, and rejects the identity politics strategies of small ethnic- and race-based parties, which are more intent on cannibalising the opposition than tackling the ANC.

There’s no way that’s being disbanded into little racial and ethnic enclaves which have no hope of ridding SA of the disastrous ANC.