JONNY STEINBERG: DA will have to get rural savvy to win 2019 poll
A COUPLE of weeks before the municipal government election, DA leader Mmusi Maimane spoke in London to an audience packed with South African expatriates.Among a host of other questions, he was asked whether his party had a strategy to win votes in rural SA.Maimane gave a smooth, pro forma response and moved on. His mind was elsewhere; he seemed not to have given the matter much thought. If Maimane is serious about challenging the ANC in 2019, he will have to start thinking about such things.That the DA is governing three new metros vastly exaggerates its electoral success. Examine the results ward by ward and you will see that across the country, there is barely a black area in which the DA made it into more than a distant second place. It has not yet cracked black SA; it has not even come close.If the DA wants power, it will have to win a broad spectrum of black votes, and if it wants that, it will have to start thinking seriously about rural SA. For now, much of the countryside is...
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