From African Arguments

South Africa’s largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), elected its first black leader, Mmusi Maimane, this May. The 35-year-old Maimane succeeded Helen Zille, who oversaw an increase in the DA’s share of the vote from 16.7% in 2009 to 22.2% in 2014 amid widespread disillusionment with the ruling African National Congress (ANC). However, despite Zille’s credentials in the struggle against apartheid, the DA has remained under pressure to transform at the leadership level to gain a greater share of the black vote.

Maimane, a skilled orator, has been the parliamentary leader of the DA since 2014 and is well-known for his anti-corruption stance. He has been particularly notable in raising the ante in holding President Jacob Zuma accountable for $22 million of public funds he is said to have unduly benefited from for upgrades to his personal residence, Nkandla. Maimane though was recently roasted on air by BBC HARDtalk journalist Zeinab Badawi who said that his claims of Zuma’s grand scale corruption were more tenuous than he asserts.

Maimane has also recently been vocal in his critique of the government’s handling of the economy, which has seen growth stall to a forecasted 2% of GDP in 2015. Maimane has further condemned the economically unjust education system in South Africa where democracy has not been accompanied by meritocracy. Only 3.4% of black South Africans entered tertiary education in 2014 compared with 23.3% of whites. This is a less than 1% increase over ten years – only 2.8% of blacks attended universities in comparison to 15.6% of whites in 2002. The educational statistics are a crucial metric requiring urgent redress if South Africa is to become more economically competitive and broaden its middle-class. These statistics also reflect the country’s extremely racialized economic inequality more than 20 years after the end of apartheid.

The majority of South Africans live in poverty – around a quarter are unemployed and reliant on social grants from the strained government treasury. A severe lack of service delivery has also led to protests in recent years, and wage disputes have led to violence in the labour sector such as that witnessed at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in 2012 where over 30 miners were killed during a wildcat strike.

Read more at African Arguments