Memory is a weapon.
Don Mattera
Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It’s just the living part that we still have to work out.
Damon Galgut
Introduction
There is a noticeable spring in the step of the Democratic Alliance. Some of that has to do with them having already made a few hard decisions, and the enthusiastic start of Geordin Hill-Lewis has carried this positive momentum forward. They have, by the occasional accident and mostly by design, managed to outgrow the potholes-and-neighbourhood watch level of politics, and they now need to show that they are ready and competent to lead beyond the basic level at which they made their initial impression. I like the work they are doing, and trying to do, and in our underachieving political landscape, they are the only party that shows the potential of making meaningful, sustained change possible for the citizens of this beautiful country.
The DA Ministers that have been given difficult portfolios have so far by and large acquitted themselves admirably of their tasks, with Dr. Leon Schreiber, Siviwe Gwarube, Dean Macpherson and Solly Malatsi all showing the ability to lead effectively. New appointments Willie Aucamp and David Maynier have started off well, with all indications being that they will also be high performers in their respective departments. In Andrew Whitfield as the DA’s new Eastern Cape leader they have a politician that is of the highest calibre.
But having reached this stage, there are a few deeply troubling red flags in the DA’s trajectory, intrinsic defects that could derail the complex task ahead, urgent challenges that should concern their senior leadership and supporting voters.
We should make no mistake: in the long run, we cannot litigate this country into shape, we cannot fix the systemic defects and unresolved conflicts with snappy advertising campaigns, and as counterintuitive it may be, good governance in itself will also not provide enough firepower to get them to where the real work can start.
I want to analyze these red flags through the lenses of three main categories that will help us to focus on not all, but some of the more noticeable of these areas of urgent concern. We can mark those three categories as the conflict challenges internally, domestic / national, and then the particular concerns flowing from the government of national unity developments.
Abysses and wolves
The selected red flag areas I will analyze here are all subjected to high degrees of volatility, as all political conflict arenas are, and must be. The trajectories that are discussed, and the suggested remedies, can all change through one or two poor performances, improbable outcomes or black swan events, but on anticipated conflict patterns, those red flags remain.
Internal challenges
One of the first bites of the bullet that the DA stepped up to, was the managing of John Steenhuisen out of the main leadership position. His appointment to leadership of the DA was a blunder, and the medicine was taken late, with unnecessary complications, but it was taken. What becomes of him now is of a rather academic nature for the DA itself, and it can be managed easily from here on.
The Steenhuisen affair however provides the DA, and the rest of us, with a most illustrative example of several of the DA’s current vulnerabilities. Its leadership is blissfully unaware of modern conflict skills and strategies, and this is easily illustrated and measured. Like the rest of South African politicians they believe (and we support them in this) that experience, a good social media platform, some litigation, and a loud voice and a nice smile will do the job. Around here it does, for a while. The challenges ahead for our country, and for the DA, will however require a vastly higher degree of conflict competency, making use of what has become available to them. Your handbooks and seminars from the 80s are about to run out of relevance.
In this, they are aided and abetted by some disappointingly outdated models and frameworks touted by some of their advisors, people who should know better.
The most glaring, and measurable example, is their leadership’s utter lack of knowledge, experience or skill insofar the latest knowledge and strategies around identity conflicts are concerned. You can draw straight lines from this to some of the most enduring strategic errors in their messaging, social media strategies, slogans, election campaigning, and public conflicts.
Two adverse conflict outcomes flow from this, both by now so apparent as to have formed discernible, predictable patterns, but still ignored by their leadership.
The first is their insistence on only using objective standards, that much vaunted truth arguments. This is classical liberalism at its finest, and it is completely inadequate for the work that must be done. Fact-based arguments and good governance examples are presented in a specific manner, and as adequate arguments and evidence, often delivered with sneers of one-upmanship and superiority.
The second is that in getting the first part wrong as they do, their best and increased efforts at persuasion is not just underpowered and ineffective compared to what it should be, but it actually entrenches people in their already existing in-group narratives, leaving even great governance and objective wins as actually, and counterintuitively, serving as evidence against their best interests.
Research and case studies are clear. People will vote against their own best interests for a number of reasons, all originating in not understanding identity or value-based conflicts. To turn the popular saying on its head: feelings really do not care about your facts. To persuade across the types of identity and in-group lines that we have developed in South Africa, you need so much more than objective facts and objectively good results. You need to persuade people in ways that your textbooks of ten years ago, or your conventional street-smarts and experience, would not have anticipated. Much of this is counter-intuitive, extremely complex, measurably harmful when not done skilfully….and completely preventable.
A select group of the DA’s top leaders and advisors should spend the quality time necessary to meaningfully upgrade their conflict skills. The above is one blatant example of that skills shortfall, and its consequences. These skills have nothing to do with compromise, being polite or good manners, and everything to do with being measurably more effective in your conflicts. To somehow avoid that responsibility, given what is available, amounts to professional negligence.
Not effectively, and timeously, dealing with the internal red flags could be enough of a strategic error as to derail the other categories, and to require an insufficiently empowered leadership to do very difficult work without the available best tools.
Domestic challenges
Nationally the DA’s red flags would need an assessment not just of the DA’s own trajectories, but also those of the country itself. Scandalous unemployment, an increasing scepticism in democratic solutions with its concomitant rise in the acceptability of populist and radical solutions, decades of frustration and unrealised hopes and expectations and a range of other unresolved national conflicts have created a perfect storm of conflict causes that will not be resolved through textbook liberal solutions.
In their domestic challenges we see the DA’s continued internal strategic errors starting to bleed into their national ambitions. A failure to effectively persuade South Africans across those identity lines means a perpetuation of unfair but existing perceptions of the DA being a “white party”, it dulls arguments around effective governance, automatically perpetuates in-group narratives that make the cost of voting DA simply too high for most people, and dooms them to always be seeking coalitions, another battleground where the DA underperforms because of their understanding of appropriate and effective strategies.
Helen Zille for Johannesburg, Retief Goosen for Gqeberha and several other examples are all wonderful, nearly self-explanatory candidates, especially given the dystopian messes made of those cities by the incumbents. And yet, because they get the basic conflict building blocks wrong, and while both of these candidates will most probably win their local elections, the problems will simply shift in complexity and urgency. Win they should, for nearly existential reasons, but just imagine what they could have been achieving if those victories were not tied to those limiting coalitions.
This is frustratingly true both for the extent of persuasion leading to voter base expansion, and the potential for effective change when coalitions are more effectively managed.
The DA repeatedly shows itself to be incapable of managing coalitions in a manner that does not require compromise, and fails to include all South Africans in ways that make them feel a part of those projects. This again is the inevitable result of poor conflict competency and outdated principles being applied.This will be an important hurdle for the DA to clear. You can only litigate and use effective governance as mainstay political conflict strategies for so long.
Government of National Unity challenges
The conflict dynamics of the GNU is wonderfully complex. The cry has certainly increased in conservative circles that the DA’s continued participation in the GNU is serving to prop up a defeated ANC, and that the DA is really just “ANC lite”, selfishly interested in their own advantages. It is trivially true that for the DA to remain in the GNU continues to give them opportunities that will fall away or diminish if they were to stay outside that structure.
It is also true that their departure could open up a few far more harmful scenarios for the country, given the wounded ANC and the rise of populist narratives.This is a complex question that must be assessed and reviewed on a regular basis, depending on a rather complex dashboard of conflict variables. For now, I would advise that the status quo be retained, but that the DA learn to properly manage these complex conflicts, and how to properly use these internal conflicts as fuel to obtain benefits for the country far beyond what we have to show after the first year and a few months of the arrangement.
But it is in the more diplomatic / geopolitical field that I believe that the DA is facing some meaningful risks of long-term damage. As inept as the domestic leadership of the ANC is, so skilful their diplomatic iteration can be on a good day. It is as if we are observing two completely different parties. And on this particular stage, with the birth pains of the new multipolar world giving rise to new power alignments, new possibilities and a few existential dead-ends, that I believe the DA’s policies, at least as far as the public narratives are concerned, are outdated, and will prove to be harmful in the shaping of this brave new world.
This is a massive topic, and I will expand on that in my forthcoming book Tightrope: South African lessons in a multipolar world, but the DA’s positions and policies are, firstly, not delivered as skilfully as they should be, and secondly, not the best understanding of the new forms and uses of power in the new geopolitical arena. For a short, sharp lesson in why I say so, have a look at some of the things that the DA is criticizing the government for in its geopolitical manoeuvres.This new geopolitical stage is a new and dangerous place.
The confident return of geopolitical realism and great power developments have made middle power conflict skills a brand new reality, and an inarguable, urgent requirement of survival and prosperity. Getting this wrong, in a window of maybe as much as five years, will have catastrophic effects for the countries so affected, and in these conflicts, those depths may very well prove to be permanent, subservient fates.Here the DA’s foundational views, its policies and understanding of the relevant geopolitical conflict trajectories need urgent and structural upgrading.
Concluding analysis
Much of what I have argued above is supported not by some of our intuitive sense of reason and fairness, but by the simple state of the nation. If good governance, objective facts and clean audits were enough to win hearts and minds, the DA would have been a national clear majority leader, at all levels of government. But it does not, and they do not.We have very briefly discussed topics that are complex, and that seem unnecessary. Just be honest, govern well and keep at it, they will come around, right? No, they won’t.
Understanding the levers and pulleys of what keeps us here (not just the symptoms, as the majority of our analysts discuss) shows us that more is needed for the DA to step up from the B-team. That, added to a few other conflict dynamics, should make them and their supporters lie awake at night.
For all their public disgrace and woeful leadership, those self-same identity mechanisms will keep the ANC in this fight. Do not underestimate them. Ridiculing the public mismanagement by the MK Party has become par for the course, but again, do not underestimate them, especially because they have those identity mechanisms working for them, and these are narratives that are, at present, fed by decisions made by the DA themselves. And the ANC’s relative skill levels in the geopolitical arena is also keeping them alive, and a viable voting option. For those who understand the shapes of things to come in that crucial area in the next few years will have no real problem in voting for this ANC, despite their national failures.
Those identity conflict dynamics also have their benefits for the DA. The Resolve Communications and related media events will not move the voting needle much, for those same reasons. They do more harm with some of their social media responses. If anything keeps the DA from reaching the critical mass needed for sustained, meaningful change it will be the mismanagement of these red flags discussed.
We do not need tea leaves to see these patterns and trajectories. Current applicable conflict research, case studies and practice shape them for us, in predictable and useful ways.The DA holds our best political hopes for the revival that this country needs, in the limited time it has available to it. It will only realise that potential if it can effectively and timeously deal with these red flags. The DA as we see it now will not be the DA that brings us that well-deserved, much delayed victory. The abyss, and the wolves, are waiting.
Summary of main sources, references and suggested reading
1. My article on identity conflicts in political conflicts at https://www.conflict-conversations.co.za/conversations/identity-conflicts-or-how-to-waste-time-and-money-on-politics-how-to-effectively-change-the-south-african-political-landscape
2. One of my several articles on coalition conflict management at https://www.conflict-conversations.co.za/conversations/coalitions-in-south-africa-bridges-or-barriers-article-1-in-a-series-of-4
Andre Vlok can be contacted at andre@conflict1.co.za for any further information.
(c) Andre Vlok August 2026
* Author’s note on the use of artificial intelligence in writing this article
I learned to draft, argue and write in the hard school of litigation. I enjoy and value the very human process of creating ideas, of testing my own knowledge and thoughts. It is a process that I need, for answering some of my professional and even personal questions, it is cathartic and inspiring. Other than the most basic research assistance I do not use any AI in the creation of my written work, this article included. It is a matter of pride, of preference, and of mental health. Whether that is a wise choice or not, I will leave to the reader to decide.