Dear Friend of the DA,
Four months ago, I was elected Leader of the Democratic Alliance. While that isn’t enough time to change South Africa, it is enough time to show the kind of leadership I believe our country needs.
In my latest address to BizNews, I reflect on what we’ve achieved so far, the direction we’re taking, and why I remain more optimistic than ever that South Africa can work for everyone. I also set out my priorities for the months ahead, from restoring law and order and growing the economy to ensuring the GNU delivers real reform.
I hope you’ll take a few minutes to watch the speech or read the full text below. I believe it offers a clear picture of the DA I am building, and the future we are working towards together.
Watch my full address at the BizNews Conference here
Read the full address below:
FOUR MONTHS IN: A DA THAT MEANS BUSINESS
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is an absolute pleasure to be here, and thank you to BizNews for creating a space where South Africans can speak frankly about the choices facing our country.
Today marks exactly four months since I was elected Federal Leader of the Democratic Alliance.
Four months is not long enough to transform a political party, never mind a country. But it is long enough to establish a direction. It is long enough to show people what kind of leadership they can expect.
And it is long enough to make one thing clear:
The DA under my leadership is not interested in merely managing the decline of South Africa.
We are interested in reversing it.
We do not accept the argument that South Africa cannot work, or that it is beyond fixing.
We are fundamentally optimists about South Africa’s future. My central belief is that South Africa can work — for everyone. That a future of broadly shared prosperity is still possible.
We know it will take a lot of hard work. It will also take a different kind of politics.
More serious. Committed to bringing integrity to government. Ending the wave after wave of scandal and looting that now define the state.
And a return to the values that define our country at its best.
Most importantly, a politics focused laser-like on building trust with millions of people who have never voted for us before.
This past weekend we launched our local government manifesto in Jo’burg.
It is another indicator of a new kind of politics at work.
Our manifesto, rather unusually for a party manifesto, makes no grand promises of easy miracles. Ours is a straightforward, humble and serious plan to get towns and cities working. And perhaps that is the grandest thing South Africa needs right now.
Our plan is positive, optimistic and hopeful.
It is not based on talk. It is based on what our party has done, is doing, and will do in municipalities across the country.
The evidence that South Africa can work already exists. It exists where capable government meets accountable leadership.
It exists in towns and cities where the DA governs with a clear mandate and can be held responsible for the result.
And the opposite is also true.
Failure is not confined to municipalities governed by the ANC alone. We have now seen coalitions of chaos in which the ANC, EFF and MK are joined or enabled by other smaller and fundamentally unserious parties who trade in the politics of grievance and fear, but offer nothing.
In too many municipalities post the 2021 local government elections citizens have seen revolving-door mayors, collapsing services, political horse-trading, and no one willing to accept responsibility.
The real dividing line in South African politics is therefore no longer simply ANC versus opposition.
It is between government that works and politics that does not.
However, as refreshing and important as working towns and cities will be, that alone is not enough to turn around South Africa.
The politics of competence is a good starting point. The politics of integrity is an essential addition.
But to really change South Africa for the better, we must also proudly make the case for different ideas.
We are not in politics to pursue the same ideas as the incumbents, just executed more efficiently.
We believe in a different conception of the role of the state in society, and we know that the pursuit of our ideas leads to greater liberty, more opportunity, more human prosperity, less poverty and suffering, and to a successful society.
So we cannot stop at working towns.
Our mission must be to become the biggest party in South Africa. That is the only way that we will reform the state fundamentally, so that it works in favour of all South Africans.
Hard and ambitious as that may seem, there is reason to be optimistic.
Last week the Social Research Foundation released its newest poll. Recall that the SRF’s was the most accurate polling in the last election cycle, accurate in the final weeks to within half a percentage point, if memory serves.
Most of the media has, perhaps understandably, focused on the implosion of ANC support in Johannesburg, to just 18% now. In the same poll the DA and our wonderful, energetic Mayoral Candidate Helen Zille, is attracting 44% support, That’s within striking distance of a majority which would give her and the DA the mandate needed to begin the long hard slog of fixing that benighted city.
So perhaps understandably that has attracted the lion’s share of coverage. But to my mind, an equally shocking result was the fact that the gap between the DA and the ANC nationally is now just 7%, at 27% and 34% respectively.
That is truly exciting and wonderful news. And I certainly intend to press the advantage.
The other reason to be optimistic is that the ANC’s world view is rapidly colliding with the facts of life.
For example, what is hardly ever said about the reform agenda currently being pursued by Operation Vulindlela, is the obvious truth: that those reforms are being pursued now only because every other policy has failed.
That is the brutal truth of it.
The ANC is not privatising the ports (call it ‘concessioning’ if you want to) because they love to do so. They are doing so with great reluctance because they are fresh out of other options. Their adherence to every other statist fantasy has failed, and so all that remains is reality.
I recently had a discussion with an ANC Mayor of one of the other 7 metros in SA. What this Mayor said, and I will not even reveal their gender so they don’t get in trouble for saying this, but their words will stay with me always.
They said to me “I now realise that the things I spent my life believing were true are the same things that have destroyed this city.”
Poignant words indeed.
Conversely, reality is more closely aligned to the DA’s conception of the state.
Put simply, the DA has reality on our side.
Now, that is a powerful ally, but in politics truth and reality are often not all that influential, as global politics is currently ably demonstrating.
So, in order to win, we must combine our offer of competence, integrity, trustworthiness, and getting governments to work, with the intellectual confidence to make a strong case for what we believe in.
This is our path to being the largest party in South Africa in future.
Let me illustrate that through three priorities that have defined my first four months as DA leader.
Law and order
The first is law and order.
Law and order is the first condition of liberty.
If you claim to be concerned about increasing human potential and making freedom meaningful, as we are, then it is essential that we establish ourselves as the party that will bring law and order to South Africa.
Last month, in Delft, I pledged that Cape Town would build South Africa’s first Metro Police Detective Branch if voters renew our mandate in November.
That pledge is the culmination of the first five years of my tenure as Mayor of Cape Town where we have relentlessly pursued devolved policing powers.
But this advocacy began with the experience of families living under gang rule: parents who hear gunshots at night, children who cannot play in their streets, and communities who watch the same criminals return because arrests do not become convictions.
Cape Town’s Metro Police already confiscate more than 400 illegal firearms a year. Yet the City has found that only five percent of those cases result in convictions. That is a number so horrifying and unacceptable that you would think it would spur immediate government response. And yet, our calls for greater policing powers so that we can help address this have been met only by a tin ear.
Our pledge is therefore not only about policing powers. It is about fighting for the principle that powers must be devolved to let local and provincial governments get on with fixing problems that national governments cannot.
It is my firm belief that South Africa’s future will be best served by more federalism, not less.
We must give stiff resistance to the constant attempts to subsume more power to the centre, and must fight to change the direction of traffic completely. Powers must move away from Pretoria, to capable provinces and local governments.
The case of policing powers will be an important test. If the national government continues to refuse, without a rational public-interest basis, to allow a capable city to help investigate violent crime, we are more than prepared to test that refusal in court.
When the DA leads the national government, our national crime plan can be stated in three words:
Catch. Convict. Clean up.
Catch criminals through professional policing and intelligence.
Convict them through detectives, forensics, working dockets and capable prosecutors.
And clean up the police itself, because SAPS cannot get criminals off our streets while criminal networks operate inside SAPS.
In this example you can see how we are bringing together the politics of reliability of and competence – fixing how the criminal justice system currently works – and also pursuing a different idea about how state powers should work, namely devolution and growing federalism.
That is the new politics I am talking about.
Jobs and economic freedom
The second priority is jobs and economic freedom.
South Africa does not have an unemployment crisis because government has failed to invent enough public employment schemes.
We have an unemployment crisis because, for too long, government has made it unnecessarily difficult to invest, build, hire, trade and grow.
Jobs are created when an entrepreneur risks capital, when a company expands a production line, when a developer receives approval, when a tourist books a trip, or when a small trader gains a new customer.
Government’s role is not to command this process.
Its role is to create the conditions in which millions of private decisions can produce opportunity.
That is the approach we have taken in Cape Town and the results are clear.
The City’s Ease of Doing Business programme measures the actual time, cost and complexity of ten business-facing municipal processes.
We publish the results publicly.
One practical example is the City’s digital wayleave system. The average process has been reduced from approximately 40 days to six, an 85 percent improvement.
That may sound technical.
But to a business waiting to install fibre, connect infrastructure or begin construction, 34 days is an entire month of extra business.
It is rent. It is wages. It is interest. It is lost customers. It is delayed jobs.
Cape Town is not perfect. Its unemployment remains far too high, especially among young people and in poorer communities.
But the contrast matters.
Over the last five years, Cape Town created nearly two thirds of all the net increase in employment in the five big metros in South Africa. Cape Town created more jobs – a lot more jobs – than the other 4 metros put together.
This is the compound effect of functioning institutions, reliable services, infrastructure investment, regulatory improvement and a government that welcomes enterprise instead of regarding it with suspicion.
This is the lesson I want the DA to carry into every government we lead:
The private sector is not a suspect to be monitored or a junior partner to be summoned.
It is where jobs are created. It is where enterprise and investment happens.
A capable state must do the essentials well: law and order, infrastructure, education, healthcare, and a safety net for people in genuine need.
Beyond that, it must trust citizens.
A new approach to the GNU
That brings me to the Government of National Unity.
The DA entered the GNU for two reasons: to keep destructive populists away from the levers of national power, and to show South Africans what the DA can achieve in government.
But let me be absolutely clear:
The DA’s participation in the GNU is not unconditional.
Being in government does not require silence.
Partnership does not mean more of the same.
When the ANC obstructs reform, ignores agreements, protects compromised politicians or places party interests ahead of the public, the DA will say so openly.
We will fight inside government where agreement is possible, and we will fight in public where accountability requires it.
That approach has already been tested these last few months, and it will be tested again often.
That is how the GNU should raise standards: not by creating collective protection, but by creating collective accountability.
On the President’s Phala Phala matter, we have taken the same principled position.
President Ramaphosa has the right to approach the courts. Parliament must respect judicial process.
But a procedural interdict is not an acquittal, and it cannot become a device for indefinite delay.
The review must be heard urgently, and Parliament must fulfil its constitutional responsibilities once the courts have clarified the route forward.
At the Public Investment Corporation, we have opposed the old habit of treating control over the pensions of teachers, nurses and police officers as another political deployment opportunity.
The DA argued for an independent, professionally qualified chairperson, not simply another politician.
The ultimate outcome fell short of the clean break we wanted. But we insisted on a commitment to the outstanding Mpati Commission reforms, and we got that. And we will hold the government to that commitment.
These are not comfortable issues.
GNU politics is not meant to be comfortable.
It is meant to produce better government.
And now we intend to go further.
DA ministers will use every lawful regulatory power available to them to open the economy.
They will challenge rules that protect incumbents instead of consumers, shorten approval times, remove barriers to investment, expand market access, enable private participation, and insist that regulation be judged by outcomes rather than ideological intent.
The DA does not believe a regulation is successful just because it was announced with the right revolutionary language.
Government is successful if the economy grows, unemployment comes down, human suffering is eased, people are moved out of poverty, and state institutions are built.
We are not going into national government to become more like the ANC.
We are there to make national government work more like the best DA governments.
This is the deeper shift I spoke about in my “Subject to Citizen” address.
For too long, South African politics has treated people as subjects of political parties: dependent on permission, patronage, tenders, connections and state approval.
A citizen-centred country begins from the opposite premise.
The state belongs to the citizen.
Opportunity should not depend on proximity to a political party.
Economic decisions should, as far as possible, belong to free people: what to build, where to invest, whom to hire and how to serve their customers.
The DA I am building will be unapologetically on the side of those citizens.
We will be on the side of the family that wants a safer street
The young person looking for a first job.
The small business owner who needs an answer from the municipality.
The investor deciding whether South Africa is worth the risk.
The honest public servant who wants to do good work.
And the voter who is tired of being told that failure is inevitable.
Four months into this job, my optimism about South Africa has not diminished.
It has grown.
Because I have seen how quickly people respond when politics offers them something better than anger.
I have seen communities cross old political boundaries because they want working government.
And I have seen, in the places where the DA governs well, that decline is not inevitable.
That is the DA under my leadership.
A party strong enough to govern.
A party confident enough to support markets and liberty.
A party serious enough to enforce the law.
A party honest enough to confront complexity, including inside the GNU.
And a party optimistic enough to believe that South Africa can work — for everyone.
Warm regards,
Geordin Hill-Lewis
DA Federal Leader
