[imagesource: @hermanmashaba / Twitter]

Herman Mashaba’s parting from the Democratic Alliance was not a cordial one.

When he resigned in October last year, Mmusi Maimane followed close behind, and there was talk of a party in turmoil.

Helen Zille’s return also complicated matters, and some pointed to that as evidence that the party was looking backwards, rather than to the future.

This past Sunday, Carte Blanche decided to look closely at where it all went wrong, including hearing from Mashaba and Zille:

[Mashaba] is on the cusp of launching a new political party that will contest seats in the 2021 local government elections. Now Mashaba takes Carte Blanche through those tumultuous three years of resistance to his corruption busting efforts; coalition politics; his current relationship with the DA, and what went wrong between himself and the party’s federal council chair, Helen Zille.

Let’s dive right in:

Not exactly a great look for the DA, right?

Add in the fact that former party leader Maimane and current party leader John Steenhuisen have since been involved in some ugly exchanges, and it’s clear that there is plenty of bad blood.

Carte Blanche only featured part of Zille’s response to Mashaba’s claims in their Sunday segment, but they did publish her letter, in full, on their website.

Here’s some of what she said, in a letter titled ‘Herman Mashaba: the man who betrayed his voters’:

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Herman Mashaba was never really DA material. For one thing, he started as a rabid free-marketeer, well to the right of most people in the party.  Certainly far to the right of me. And, not long into his term, Mashaba’s increasing xenophobia – as evidenced by his many tweets on immigration – had started to become an issue in the party…

Never, in my experience, has a leader squandered political capital as rapidly as Mashaba did.  Initially regarded as a hero by his own caucus, his autocratic leadership style quickly led to profound alienation amongst his colleagues.  His increasingly Pavlovian default to EFF positions developed to a point that several DA councillors were rumoured to be planning to vote against him in the scheduled no-confidence motion tabled by the ANC…

Mashaba knows he has a difficult task ahead of him, which is why he has hand-picked a coterie of former DA ‘strategists’ to direct his campaign.  Sadly for him, this is the same hapless crew that presided over the DA’s reversal of electoral fortunes last year. And it is clear they have learned little from their mistakes…

11% of the votes the DA lost in the disastrous 2019 election were lost in the City of Johannesburg  —  45,000 votes in all.  That summarises how the DA snatched defeat from the jaws of victory under Herman Mashaba.

As I consider this, I also reflect upon my profound political mistake in believing that “trophy candidates”, like Mashaba, could change the trajectory of the DA. How wrong that turned out to be.

She’s certainly right with regards to the disastrous 2019 elections, and who knows how long, if ever, it will take for the DA to recover.

Read her letter in full here.

[sources:carteblanche&carteblanche]