Since our liberation, the Democratic Alliance supporters are quick to position themselves as "liberal", "non-racist" and "left leaning" etc. Nothing could be further from the truth! Looking closer at absolute numbers of voters from 1981 to the most recent election in 2009, we begin to see a pattern of voting that brings to mind the old African proverb - "A leopard can't change his spots". Sad but true in SA.
The graph above depicts white voting patterns from 1981 to the most recent 2009 elections for parties garnering more than 3% of the white vote. NP(National Party)/NNP(New National Party) [red], CP(Conservative Party)/HNP(Herstigte Nasionale Party)/NRP(New Republic Party)/(FF)Freedom Front [orange] , PFP(Progressive Federal Party)/DP(Democratic Party) [green], DA(Democratic Alliance) [blue]. Its clear from the graph, where most of the NP voters landed after the 1994 elections. The data speaks for itself!
Those pesky blind spots that just won't go away!
Centuries of white supremacy and apartheid indoctrination has created giant blind spots to where our self-proclaimed "opposition" party actually think of themselves as the official opposition party. They fail to see that even an opposition party needs to be reflective of the demographics of the country otherwise its just another tribal party serving the needs of its own "tribe".
Is black leadership an oxymoron within the DA?
The DA has utterly failed to attract black (African, Coloured or Indian) voters in any significant numbers. The upper echelons of power in the DA are still dominated by whites who have immense difficulty promoting blacks into leadership positions. This is mind-boggling since we do live in an African country that is overwhelmingly black! Recently they DA had to stoop to the shameful ploy of "buying" its way into the Independent Democrats in order to window dress its leadership.
Anyone for some NP-Lite?
The DA is a hybrid relic of the old National Party (NP) mingled together with racists from the CP, HNP etc. and a sprinkling of liberals, depicted in green on the graph, from the PFP and DP. Most of the liberals, a small minority of whites, have either switched to the ANC or abandoned the DA altogether in disgust.
The DA train wreck.
Watching the DA leadership is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. They seem to be stuck in their old apartheid mindset and far more interested in parroting their racist counterparts, the neo-cons of the Republican Party in the US, by employing the politics of division to cling to power in the Western Cape not realizing the political instability they are inadvertently creating in the region.
Instead of taking responsibility and cleaning up the mess created by apartheid which, based on the graph above, they supported until the bitter end in 1994, the DA prefers to persist in engaging in petty politics to cling onto their ill-gotten gains - the wealth accumulated from their privileges and government handouts during the apartheid era and centuries of colonialism. Over the last decade, by hijacking the role of the opposition party, the DA have proved to be a hindrance to our transformation into a Rainbow Nation.
