DA Scores Spectacular Own Goal – Cutting Down Their Tall Poppy

The numbers may not be showing it yet, but the DA is going to have to fight to keep Cape Town.
Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille.
Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille.
Alfredo Estrella/ AFP/ Getty Images

So — the Democratic Alliance's blue-eyed boys have got what they've wanted for months now: the political skull of Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille.

On Wednesday, her caucus struck the knockout blow when it voted in favour of a motion of no confidence in its mayor. De Lille put on her best boxer get-up in a show of bravado, but she is all but gone from the DA — and is unlikely to be seen in a blue party T-shirt again.

In her biography, Charlene Smith reports De Lille telling her: "When my opponents attack me, I don't go crying in a corner like a little sissy and say, 'Oh you know they've attacked me, I'm a woman.' I just wait for the next opportunity and return the punch."

De Lille is going to take this fight to the end, and she is likely to drag the DA through court and every party process open to her. So through a period when the party should be in high electioneering mode, it will be fighting a rearguard action against a mayor it didn't have to fire. It will be all over the headlines, and the party that wants to showcase how well it governs where it runs things, will instead be in reactive mode.

South Africa loves a victim and an underdog, and the DA has gifted De Lille by making her both these things.

If you read the two key documents the party has used to get rid of her, there is no grand corruption. Instead, De Lille is guilty of something that faces many strong women: she got too big for her boots.

When men do the same thing, they get awarded and promoted. When women do it, they need to be cut down, and hers has been the most classic case of tall-poppy syndrome I've seen. Tall-poppy syndrome refers to the practice of strong women getting cut down by the people (usually men) they threaten.

De Lille did not manage her caucus well; she should not have favoured an incumbent for the role of city manager, and she failed to get value for money on the MyCiti bus service. And she should have been pulled up short when she failed to understand that a party-political system means that the personal brand cannot be bigger than the party's.

But her value to the DA and her popularity as mayor meant the party's clever people could have done better in managing her shortcomings while allowing her strengths to flourish.

Instead, it allowed mayoral committee strongman JP Smith to take her out, assisted by a caucus whom she addressed in too rough a style on occasion. Again, when men lead like former New York mayor Rudy Giulliani did, in a take-no-prisoners style, they are showing leadership. Let a woman try it, and she will be accused of being divisive — a charge De Lille now faces.

I am sure that both the ANC's Western Cape leadership and the EFF's are knocking loudly at De Lille's door to entice her into their camps. She is a seasoned and consummate politician who knows the complex Cape Town electorate well.

For a party that aims to win three provinces next year, the DA has put itself into a position in which even its most certain province, Western Cape, may be in play.

Yes, the DA governs with a big majority and the numbers (though not the opposition or civil-society rhetoric) suggest it governs well. But the Ramaphosa effect (the popularity boost that President Cyril Ramaphosa has gifted to the governing ANC's fortunes) is real in Western Cape, and the DA has woefully mismanaged the water crisis.

These two factors, along with the distractions of the De Lille debacle, mean the party goes into the 2019 election fighting a defensive strategy rather than the offensive one it would have preferred.

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