Young man without liberal albatross ready to rule DA

Janet Smith

JOHANNESBURG: Mmusi Maimane peered forward politely to have a closer look at photographer Boxer Ngwenya’s pictures.

Reassuringly, this was not about vanity. He playfully requested Ngwenya to avoid what he called the “rephuza” look. “You can’t really have your mayoral candidate being pictured like that,” he pointed out with a smile. Yet the DA’s mayoral candidate for Joburg was as far from the “rephuza” – or hard-partying – image as Sandton, where he first joined a DA branch, is from Dobsonville, Soweto, where Maimane grew up.

Handsome and clever, the 34-year-old is now some distance away from that interview in 2011 when he was a surprise choice to take on the ANC’s Parks Tau in the wake of party veteran Amos Masondo.

Styled as a philanthropist who can speak seven South African languages, Maimane’s youthful integrity was a cunning choice on the part of the DA as it introduced its surprise element – a young black man apparently without the liberal albatross.

Unlike the ANC, the DA had held interviews to find Maimane, a business consultant and trainer who was lecturing in diversity and generational differences at the GIBS Business Institute. A product of the party’s electoral college, he was working towards his second Masters degree at the time.

Maimane – whose maternal family is from Covimvaba, Eastern Cape, and his father from the old Bophuthatswana – got involved in formal politics when he discovered through an NGO where he was working how difficult it was for Aids orphans to access state intervention.

Maimane was 19, just out of matric at Roodepoort public school Allen Glen High, when he queued at the polls for the first time in 1999. Thabo Mbeki was the presidential candidate.

“I voted ANC back then. I just wanted the best, but my ideas have progressed since then,” Maimane said.

Helen Zille’s bolt from the blue on Sunday has left him with the considerable prospect of leading the DA, and that would make even his campaign of four years ago seem slight. His history teacher wife Natalie – who grew up in a struggling white family in Florida on the old West Rand, and who he met at school – was still on maternity leave when he ran for mayor. Their first child, a daughter named Kgalaletso, was only nine weeks old.

They now also have a toddler son named Kgosi and Maimane has completed his second Masters in public and development management. The first was in theology.

After ANC KZN MEC Meshack Radebe accused blacks who joined the DA of being “confused”, Maimane said:

“As a black South African who is keenly aware of our country’s painful past, and who has chosen freely to support and participate in the DA’s vision of creating a better future for all, I am personally incensed. We must free our politics from racial division.”

Once he became the DA’s national spokesman and its deputy federal chairperson, his national and internal profile intensified. He railed against the rape culture, saying men who couldn’t respect women should be named and shamed. He lashed out at then minister for women and children Lulu Xingwana, saying comments she had made about Afrikaner men were “offensive and divisive”.

By January last year, as his party made Maimane its candidate for Gauteng premier, he was taking on Zuma openly.

But the terrain is more complex now as he approaches the DA congress next month.

Yet, while his rise has been rapid, Maimane has been significantly weathered in his latest role as parliamentary leader. He stepped into a fiery seat against the backdrop of the outspoken Lindiwe Mazibuko. But he reinvented it for his own purpose and has exceeded her.

This is partly because he didn’t carry such overtly alienating Model C baggage, and partly because his ideological direction has been less directly liberal.

As the DA endeavours to shift its emphasis away from the Western Cape, Maimane is making a careful pitch for a national role. “There are more than a million young voters who are my age,” he has explained. “They have no sense of patronage and they’re not bound by a particular history. I have no political connections, so I’m also part of that space within which we play.”

The games begin on May 9 at his party’s congress.