Steenhuisen downplays 'spat' with Dion George as he reflects on six years of leadership

Three months before DA elective conference, party leader John Steenhuisen has boasted about the success of his party since he took over the reins six years ago.

Steenhuisen, who took over as interim leader in 2019 when his predecessor Mmusi Maimane resigned and assumed the position a year later, said he was incredibly proud of where he has taken the party.

“I inherited a party in 2019 that was sitting at 16% of the polls,” he said, recalling that doomsayers thought it was over for the DA.

“Well, look at us now in 2026. We are part of national government,” he said when he engaged with the Press Gallery Association in Cape Town on Thursday.

He said the party was growing and that every single credible poll has the DA as the largest or close to being the largest party in the country. 

“We have huge success at local and provincial level and I'm very proud of how I've used the mandate given by the voters of the DA and the electorate of the DA to take the party to where it needs to go,” Steenhusien said, adding that he will obviously be taking the party’s successes into the elective congress in April.

However, he would not say if he will stand for re-election in the upcoming conference.

“Our nomination process only opens on 27 February,” he said, when declining to make a pronouncement before the nomination process opened.

Steenhuisen downplayed the “spat” he has had with former minister Dion George, who terminated his membership last week after a fallout with him.

“I don't understand what the spat is. There's no spat,” he said.

He stated that as the party leader, he exercised his rights to make changes to the executive just as the party’s mayor, like Geordin Hill-Lewis, Solly Msimanga, Helen Zille, and Cilliers Brink, as well as Western Cape Premier Alan Winde, have done to their executives on previous occasions.

“I made a change to my executive, as is my right under the party rules. So this is not a spat. This is, I would say, a fallout from a political decision.”

Steenhuisen also said he did not get involved in spats. 

“I'm not really allowed to go into detail on this because of the Federal Executive injunction, and so I can't go into the details, but I've no doubt that once that process is finished and the Public Protector finishes her process, that the truth will out, just as it outed on the allegations about the so-called hundreds of thousands of rand of Uber Eats that were bought with a party credit card that turned out to be absolutely false.”

He said the process of the Federal Legal Commission (FLC) interrogated the alleged abuse of the credit card thoroughly and released a report.

“It showed that it was a complete utter fabrication. I have my faith in the FLC that when the process finishes, the truth will be out there and everyone will know what it is.”

Last week, the FLC cleared Steenhuisen on the credit card saga, a move that prompted George to quit the DA.

However, what has happened in the DA was not good for voters to see, he said.

“That is why it's better for people to use the internal channels of the party to deal with it.”

He also said when he was unhappy with issues, he raised them with the FLC or the caucus leadership.

“I don't think it's good to air your dirty washing in public and I don't think voters like to see a party where people are fighting each other, because their very first thought is that, ‘are these people so busy fighting themselves? How do they fight for me?’.”

Steenhuisen said he was just getting on with the job of leading the DA and talking to voters.

“My focus is dealing with problems and issues that are the voters' concern and focusing on things that keep ordinary voters awake about unemployment, crime, corruption, and failing service delivery.

“Those are the things that people care about and want to hear us talking about. And that's why I've never stopped talking about those things and I won't be distracted by games and other psycho-dramas. I'm focused on the issues that matter most to South Africans,” said Steenhuisen.

mayibongwe.maqhina@inl.co.za