William Saunderson-Meyer, one of our country’s sharpest political columnists, likens John Steenhuisen’s excruciating News24 interview to Prince Andrew’s career-ending Newsnight disaster — except, he argues, this one was deliberate. Writing on Politicsweb, WSM explains how Steenhuisen took aim at Tony Leon, his own mentor, and Geordin Hill-Lewis, the man who succeeded him as DA leader, while dropping insinuations about lobbying firm Resolve Communications and its access to GNU ministers. Saunderson-Meyer reads it not as a political suicide note but as a “ransom demand” — a warning that if the DA doesn’t placate him, possibly with a plum ambassadorship, he’ll keep detonating.
By William Saunderson-Meyer for PoliticsWeb
Not since Prince Andrew’s infamous Newsnight trainwreck has a public figure set his own career ablaze with such apparent obliviousness. John Steenhuisen’s interview on News24 this week was an act of public self-immolation, excruciating to watch.
A key difference is that the subsequent damage done to the monarchy by Andrew’s disclosures was inadvertent, the result of stupidity and arrogance. By contrast, the potential damage to the DA and its participation in the Government of National Unity (GNU) arising from Steenhuisen’s allegations is calculated and deliberate, the result of a potent combination of entitlement and hubris.
The BBC interview did not merely embarrass Andrew. It finished him. He ceased to be a functioning prince of the realm, was stripped of royal patronages and military honours, and was cast out of his long-suffering family’s fold. He was left financially exposed and, in any ordinary sense, unemployable.
Steenhuisen — having already slid down the political food chain from DA leader to Cabinet minister, and finally to deputy minister — faces similarly bleak prospects. It is difficult to see any future for him within his own party. In a single media appearance, he has come perilously close to defaming Tony Leon, not only a formidable former DA leader but also his mentor and the godfather of his daughter. He has slagged off Geordin Hill-Lewis, his successor as national DA leader and the close friend who, until now, has done everything possible to keep Steenhuisen’s faltering career afloat. Finally, through sly insinuations of impropriety, he has gifted the ANC and the DA’s opposition rivals a massive brush with which to tar the party in the run-up to the November local government elections.
Under normal circumstances, such a mutinous fusillade against his own comrades would have led to Steenhuisen’s immediate eviction, at the DA’s request, from the GNU national executive, and his permanent exclusion from any meaningful future role in the party. It would have left a man with well-advertised personal financial difficulties and no profession to fall back on, bereft of employment prospects — except, perhaps, from a sympathetic benefactor hoping to wring some lingering public relations mileage out of him.
Fortunately for Steenhuisen, this is where he differs dramatically from Andrew. Steenhuisen retains considerable leverage. The News24 interview, in which even his most blatant untruths were left unchallenged by group editor Adriaan Basson, is a warning shot to his colleagues. It puts the DA on clear notice that if his high-flying political existence is brought to an end, he is perfectly capable — and more than willing — in a Samson-like fit of vengeful fury to pull the DA temple down with him.
The News24 interaction was less of an interview than a very public extortion threat. Hard questions were not asked. Steenhuisen’s many exaggerations, insinuations and sometimes patently dishonest statements were left unchallenged. For example, Steenhuisen now admits to the very quid pro quo he previously steadfastly denied: that he surrendered the DA leadership to secure the sinecure of agriculture minister. And, unabashed, he now whines that this ‘sacrifice’ has since been rewarded with the ‘personal betrayal’ of being demoted to deputy minister over his poor ministerial performance. It seems, like Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten, Steenhuisen firmly believes a sinecure should be for life.
The language is excoriating and theatrical, with more blood-and-guts imagery than a Shakespearean tragedy. Hill-Lewis, Steenhuisen says, ‘gave my head to the hyenas’. The hyenas in question are the supposedly unreasonable ‘baying mob’ of ‘AfriMAGA’ zealots who — Basson fails to note — had just bested Steenhuisen and his top triumvirate of officials repeatedly in court over their foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) policies. By removing him, said Steenhuisen, Hill-Lewis was ‘putting blood in the water’. Steenhuisen’s signal to the remaining DA Cabinet members is clear: if Hill-Lewis leader lacks the spine ‘to have their backs’ and instead placates right-wing predators, they will be picked off, one by one.
Steenhuisen lashes out at Leon for ‘relentlessly’ driving negative FMD publicity against him. It was ‘quite a shock’ that Resolve Communications — chaired by Leon and run by former DA CEO Paul Boughey — had presumed to accept a brief from farmers critical of Steenhuisen’s handling of the crisis.
Then comes some spectacular close-quarters knife work. Steenhuisen accuses Resolve of exploiting its ‘proximity to DA leaders’ to set up meetings between DA ministers in the GNU and its clients, including, ‘notably’, Solly Malatsi on Starlink. The Starlink meeting, he says, ‘raised a flag’ for him. This was ‘behaviour that would, if we didn’t check it, end up being problematic at some stage’. He does not explain, nor is he asked, why all this supposedly nefarious activity was tolerated by him.
The formulation is poisonous because it deliberately blurs the line between ordinary lobbying and the corrupt purchase of influence through privileged insider access. It is also slick. By conceding, in passing, that he has ‘no doubt there’s nothing illegal’ about it, Steenhuisen tries to shield himself against defamation while allowing the ethical stain to spread.
The political effect was exactly what one would expect and what was undoubtedly intended by Steenhuisen. The ANC called the allegations ‘damning’ and ‘perturbing’, saying the alleged conduct amounted to an attempt by Leon to ‘capture the state’, in cahoots with his former DA CEO, using their PR firm as the vehicle. The credibility of the claims, said the ANC, lay in the fact that they came not from opponents of the DA, but from ‘a former leader of the DA and a senior public representative’.
ActionSA said the saga was ‘reeking of textbook state capture’ and called on President Cyril Ramaphosa, the Public Service Commission and the Public Protector to investigate. Its national chair, Michael Beaumont, taunted Leon that it was thanks to Steenhuisen that, at last, ‘the truth has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the public domain’.
Boughey’s rebuttal was sharp and immediate. Resolve’s FMD work, he told News24, which was unsolicited, ‘communicated legitimate concerns … on a matter of genuine national importance’. Turning to Steenhuisen’s surprise that Leon had not approached him privately about concerns over FMD policy, Boughey cuttingly observed: ‘If Mr Steenhuisen is suggesting that a private approach from Tony Leon would have been appropriate, he cannot simultaneously argue that the firm facilitating meetings on behalf of clients is improper. Mr Steenhuisen cannot have it both ways.’
Leon and Hill-Lewis, both evidently anxious to avoid full-scale internecine warfare within the DA, are strikingly restrained. Indeed, neither rebuts Steenhuisen by name. Rejecting the allegations as baseless, Leon points out that ‘one of the individuals’ levelling these claims had conceded that they possessed no evidence but had ‘put two and two together’. ‘That is not a basis for a public accusation,’ said Leon. ‘It is the absence of one.’ Hill-Lewis simply shrugged off Steenhuisen’s claims as ‘a non-issue’, noting that engagements with lobby groups are standard practice in government and no politician could ever be forced to meet with anyone they did not want to meet.
But Steenhuisen’s fire-bombing of the DA will not be easily quenched. The News24 interview was not just an angry man letting off steam. Although it will effectively end Steenhuisen’s role in DA politics — albeit probably not until after the election — it was not a political suicide note. It was a ransom demand.
Its purpose was to convey a veiled threat: unless the party negotiates a ceasefire, he can and will continue to wreak havoc. DA insiders agree that the interview is devastating for the party in the run-up to the November election. Steenhuisen also retains a substantial, if waning, parliamentary power bloc. He therefore has to be either placated or curbed.
Curbing him would be perilous. All political parties have skeletons they would rather keep locked away. These are not necessarily the grave misdemeanours imagined by febrile conspiracy theorists, but simply the reputational detritus of betrayals, jealousies, failures, affairs, substance abuse, business peccadilloes, and all the other mundane but sordid realities of human existence.
Far better, then, to placate Steenhuisen. He is very keen, one is told, on an ambassadorship to a middle- to upper-income country.
Follow WSM on X @TheJaundicedEye
Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. Register here.
Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.
If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.
Leave a Reply