OPINION: Bloody battle of Lindiwe vs Athol

In 2009 Lindiwe threw her hat in the ring to become a member of parliament, on the KwaZulu-Natal list, the province from which she hailed.

She came in at number three on the list and was duly elected as an honourable MP on 22 April 2009.

It soon became apparent how quickly she mastered new policy areas. The articulacy with which she could argue almost any case, from our perspective, prompted me to appoint her as party spokesperson, which is usually reserved for more senior parliamentarians.

Lindiwe ticked all the boxes. And she now had the platform to raise her profile. She made such an impression that she became the face of the 2011 election campaign, where she did almost all the television debates normally done by the party leader. She rapidly garnered a large following. She was firmly among the favourites in the succession pipeline I was trying to build.

When Lindiwe made her move to become caucus leader, it sent a strong signal that she saw herself moving in that direction.

Lindiwe had turned thirty-one in April that year, and had been a member of the parliamentary caucus for just over two years. Her name was seldom mentioned without the qualifier “rising star”. Indeed, her ascendancy in the DA had been meteoric.

She was doing a job I could never have mastered at such a young age, but aiming for the caucus leadership so soon, I thought, might risk overreaching. Life experience is almost more important than any other qualification for the complex job of maintaining a functional team, pulling in the same direction, in a context of constant competition for influence and power, not to mention South Africa’s many other fault-lines.

At that stage our talks with Mamphela Ramphele were not advanced enough for me to introduce her as a factor into the conversation. If she joined the DA, I envisaged the possibility that she would contest and fill the next parliamentary vacancy, and possibly run for caucus leadership at the appropriate opportunity. If that happened, there would be yet another divisive internal election – a very disruptive event in the life of a caucus.

Without being able to go into these background details, I suggested to Lindiwe that she stand back and let Athol Trollip complete a full term. She declined. She was determined to run. And win. It was her right to do so, and while I could suggest that she stand down, I certainly could not pressure her to do so.

I then concluded that if she ran, she would have to win. We were still feeling the reverberations of our 2010 congress when not a single black candidate had been elected to the party’s top leadership. I did not want a caucus election to provide further grist to the ANC’s mill. We needed to move closer to our Clause 4 moment – not further away from it.

Then, as inevitably happens in tense moments, I got a call from a journalist. He had received a tip-off, he said, that I was backing Lindiwe to take out Athol in the mid-term election, and there was huge dissatisfaction in the caucus because of this.

Did I have a comment? In the course of our brief conversation it transpired that he had received an e-mail from a source who wanted to remain anonymous.

I read through this e-mail – it was clearly intended as a juicy story to drive the narrative that I was not coping with both jobs and was trying to “remote-control” the caucus through deploying my proxies. That certainly was not my perception of the dominant mood in the caucus at the time, but it was indicative of what I was to face further down the line.

The e-mail’s information was objectively wrong in material respects. For example, I did not want Athol to resign. In fact, my preference was for Lindiwe not to run for the caucus leadership so soon. A mid-term election was optional, and if we did not have one, no questions would be asked, no feathers ruffled and no new controversies generated.

But when it became clear that the mid-term election would go ahead, and that Lindiwe would run, I concluded we had to make sure she won. Our opponents were always looking for “proof” that we were racist. They would seize on this. If she had been good enough to be the face of our 2011 election campaign, why was she not good enough to lead the caucus, they would ask. Had she merely been a token?

I discussed the issue with a few of the party’s leadership figures, and we resolved to ask Athol to withdraw his candidacy, for the worst of all possible reasons – that we thought he would win. We asked James Selfe to speak to Athol.

James told me afterwards it was a very difficult conversation. Athol listened to James’s case, framed in his normal cautious and diplomatic way. There was a pause before Athol said: “Let me get this quite clear. You are asking me not to contest the caucus leadership because you are worried I will win?”

“Yes, bluntly, that’s it,” said James.

Athol laughed. “You can’t be serious. Let our democratic process run its course.”

When James told me about the conversation, I said we couldn’t fault Athol’s logic. The battle was on.

David Maynier, the DA’s shadow minister of defence, chaired Lindiwe’s campaign like a military operation. They met according to a strict schedule, raised funds, hired a public-relations consultancy to manage the media, and held weekly press conferences. This broke the mould of the DA’s normal below-the-radar internal elections. The public campaign introduced the culture of American primaries into the DA’s internal electoral process.

My chief of staff, Geordin Hill-Lewis, and other young people threw themselves into Lindiwe’s campaign with determination and enthusiasm. One day Geordin came to speak to me. They had tallied their canvassing, and if they allowed for a “lie factor”, there was a risk of losing. The campaign team had decided I had to get involved.

I was very reluctant, beyond doing what I had already done, which was suggesting to both candidates that we should avoid a divisive, race-charged contest at that stage.

Geordin insisted and reminded me of what we had been through the previous year after the congress. I concluded it was time to expend some political capital to diversify our leadership. It was certain to be a highly controversial move.

That was the start of what came to be known as “the Leeuwenhof Express”. Geordin scheduled appointments for me with individual MPs who were marked on the canvass sheets as “doubtful”. He drove them to Leeuwenhof for our one-on-one conversations, where I did whatever possible to convince them of the importance of repositioning our party, which required us to give Lindiwe the opportunity.

I faced stiff resistance. My colleagues said she was too young, too inexperienced, and that Athol was doing a good job and didn’t deserve to be treated this way. It was hard to contest any of this. However, I said there was an overriding imperative to change the DA’s brand, and we knew how good a national spokesperson Lindiwe had been. Although I agreed it was slightly premature, I was confident she was ready for the next step.

In the end, most of the people I spoke to agreed to vote for her. Even some who had sworn allegiance to Athol decided to swing behind Lindiwe. I knew my own credibility was on the line. For the future of the party, it had to work out.

One of my attempts to persuade a colleague to vote for Lindiwe went seriously pear-shaped. It was my interaction with my long-standing young colleague, Masizole Mnqasela, a strong Athol supporter. I took Masizole out to Nelson’s Eye steakhouse for dinner to try to convince him why I thought he should vote for Lindiwe. He told me directly he would not. I was backing the wrong horse, he argued.

I was glad he felt free to tell me this directly. However, I did not appreciate that he took his campaign against Lindiwe onto the airwaves, announcing on national radio that she was not black enough to attract the support of black voters. For good measure he added that by trying to persuade caucus members to vote for Lindiwe, I was running the party like a spaza shop.

The battle became bitter because it was so public. Many of the professional communication and research staff in parliament openly sided with Lindiwe, partly because of their loyalty to their former colleague, Ryan Coetzee, who had lost to Athol in 2009.

Contrary to our rules, Gareth van Onselen, executive director of innovation and projects, and Ryan’s close friend, was actively involved, writing “attack” documents for Lindiwe’s campaign to use against Athol.

It created an untenable situation. I felt my absence from parliament intensely. There was blood on the floor before a single vote had been cast.

I will never forget the caucus election. Dene Smuts, firmly in Athol’s camp, flayed me for asking the caucus to vote for a “sapling from the grow-your-own-timber” nursery. It was a powerful piece of oratory.

In the end Lindiwe won by a differential of 9.5 votes. Athol gritted his teeth, appeared at the press conference, and was gracious in defeat, once more. He had done nothing to deserve being treated like that.

I felt terrible. Few people had made the sacrifices for the party that Athol and Angela had. At times like that I really hated the choices politics forced me to make, but I did so on the basis of what I genuinely believed was the party’s best interest at that time and place. It is a miracle that so many friendships survived these decisions.

Finding a new leader to take my place would be next on the cards. First, however, I had to make sure that the new parliamentary set-up worked. This required, as a start, a seamless interface with my office.

I immediately sensed resistance. Not anything overt, just implied. However, I was relieved to hear Lindiwe had asked Geordin, to assist her in setting up an office. That would lay the groundwork for good communication, I thought. I immediately arranged for him to be seconded to her, and suggested we consider setting up a shared office, in the parliamentary building, where Geordin could manage our complementary roles seamlessly. Lindiwe rejected that suggestion, and I accepted that she wanted to build her own platform, clearly differentiated from mine. Fair enough.

Within three weeks I got a call from Geordin. Lindiwe had fired him from his position managing the transition in her office, he said. I was dumbfounded. Why, I asked.

Geordin said Lindiwe felt the recruitment process (with advertising, interviews, etc) was not moving quickly enough. Neither had he secured sufficient media coverage for her early on, when David advised that a “big splash” was required.

Unbeknown to me, although the caucus election was over, David continued driving the military operation into the next phase of Lindiwe’s campaign. I mistakenly thought she and her team would regard the parliamentary leadership as a destination, at least for a while. Instead, it soon became clear it was merely a stepping stone, on which to land one foot, fleetingly, before taking the next leap, to the DA’s national leadership, and then to the Union Buildings in the 2019 election.

I received reports of dinner parties at which the composition of a new national cabinet was discussed, but I laughed it off. I thought it was obviously done in jest. No one would seriously be measuring the curtains in the West Wing of the Union Buildings shortly after being elected the DA’s caucus leader!

Helen Zille’s Not Without A Fight: The Autobiography (Penguin Random House) is on sale at good bookstores nationwide or online www.penguinbooks.co.za. The recommended price is R380