DA leader Mmusi Maimane has given a faction that wants to unseat him an easy ride – his ownership of a Toyota Fortuner donated by Steinhoff, the company at the centre of South Africa’s largest corporate fraud in recent history.

Even after the company collapsed when its CEO Markus Jooste’s house of cards came falling down in December 2017, Maimane kept driving the car while his party criticised the multiple frauds Steinhoff visited on pension funds.

That story came hot on the ‘wheels’ of another report in the Sunday title Rapport: Maimane was living in a snazzy home owned by a trust and it’s unclear if he pays rent on it.

Maimane says neither is true. On the car: “It’s utter hogwash,” he told Daily Maverick. “I hardly used the car. I was not in the Western Cape (for most of the time).”

On the house: “I am a political principal, my assets are available for any legal pursuit (like a damages claim). For any CEO, if you are in a public space, you have a trust which is declared and a business which buys assets on your behalf, so your assets are not in your name. It’s to protect my children… our trusts own assets for which I have raised capital. Call 10 CEOs and ask how they have structured their finances and it’s the same mechanism. It’s all listed in my declarations,” said Maimane.

But you’re not a CEO?

Daily Maverick put it to Maimane that he is not a CEO but a publicly appointed servant.

“If you ask President Ramaphosa how he structures his assets (the answer will be the same). You can take any other MP with assets to protect and they do it this way,” said Maimane, who added, “I have always invested in property.”

He attributed the release of details about the car and the house to “those opposed to change in the DA. I am a big boy and fighting for a more inclusive DA,” he said, as opposed to those who wanted the party to become a “Freedom Front lite”.

The Freedom Front Plus is eating into the DA’s white support base with its more forthright stance against affirmative action, for land and property protection with its slogan “Slaan Terug”, or Hit Back, which has resonance with the DA’s “Fight Back” motto which saw it grow from 1999 onwards to becoming a significant party rather than a marginal one.

The DA has promised a paradigmatic shift in public service and against corruption – it’s there in every position the party takes and it is the longest section in its election manifesto published ahead of the election in 2019.

South African political leaders earn good salaries and the DA gets healthy funding from corporate and other donors, both in and outside South Africa. The allegations against Maimane paint him as a leader who lives large, and to be a lessee to private interests in his personal life – a pattern that resonates with revelations of how leaders of the ANC and EFF have lifestyle sponsors and which the DA has always promised to model in the opposite.

And in the two cities that the opposition party won in the 2016 local election, the patterns of micro state capture mimic the patronage rents that ate away at South Africa under former president Jacob Zuma.

Daily Maverick and amaBhungane have in the past month exposed tender procedures in the Johannesburg council and the Tshwane council in Pretoria, where the EFF ran roughshod over tender systems to fund its lavish lifestyle. This throws shade on the DA’s promise of running clean local governments – the key reason the party won those cities and which put Maimane on a fast track to playing a bigger role in South Africa.

Now those dreams lie shredded as Maimane faces an open and hostile attack by a liberal faction of the DA which wants him out. This faction wants to return the DA to a purer liberal agenda that opposes black ownership empowerment and the more progressive social democratic direction Maimane has pushed the party to and one in which black leadership is more manifest than at any time in its history.

“The DA can’t become a puritan Ayatollah of liberalism,” says Maimane, adding, “We have to broaden the DA base.”

Poor election performance has weakened Maimane

The DA leader is not helped by the fact that the party’s national campaign flaked out in 2019 and he returned it to Parliament on a lower percentage than the previous election and polled way under what the DA’s strategists had hoped for ahead of the June election. The party put all into winning Gauteng and even moved its headquarters to Johannesburg; it came nowhere close to taking the heartland province. Now its showing in polls is being dissected by a team including former strategist Ryan Coetzee and former leader Tony Leon – an investigation that is weakening Maimane because it has created a second seat of power.

Maimane’s adversaries have smelt blood and they want to take him out; he says the allegations are baseless. His allies in Gauteng such as provincial party leader John Moody and Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba have come out swinging for him, calling the campaign a “smear” and a “coup” attempt.

But the party is now facing a difficult local government election in 2021 and a real risk of losing its gains of 2016 (as by-elections are showing) because it appears to have lost its way on its promise of governing differently and without sleaze. DM