The Democratic Alliance (DA) has made moves against controversial characters within its ranks. Renaldo Gouws and Roman Cabanac, both of whom have a history of racist remarks, attracted backlash.
Gouws’s membership was terminated on Friday after an internal investigation into racist remarks from his past. This meant he lost his seat in Parliament, just three months after making it to the legislature in a hotly-contested election.
Just a day before, agriculture minister John Steenhuisen asked his chief-of-staff, Roman Cabanac, to resign mere weeks after being appointed. Although Cabanac was not a party deployee, critics said the move reflected badly on Steenhuisen’s nonracial party.
“We’ve seen the DA move more and more to the right over the course of many years and so it became a tent that welcomed characters like Renaldo Gouws and Roman Cabanac at the expense of a black electorate that we had seen,” said Roscoe Palm, the investigative journalist who brought Gouws’s video to light.
Meanwhile, political analyst Daniel Silke is of the view that although the Gouws and Cabanac controversies generated much negative attention, most supporters were unlikely to turn their backs towards the DA at the next election.
“Whatever happens on the periphery, the appointments and the debacles of Gouws and Cabanac, I don’t think it is going to be seen as a negative by the supporters … The DA took action against those two individuals which is positive. There was an error of judgment, poor judgment when it came to both those individuals,” he told The Citizen.
Gouws, for his part, hit back the day he was booted. In a post on X, he made clear his disagreement with the Federal Executive decision that terminated his membership.
“It is disheartening to see a decision like this, especially one that I believe fails to reflect the full context of my actions and my dedication to my role as a public representative. It’s also disheartening that something I said 15 years ago, and completely taken out of context, is held against me as if it was said over the last year,” he wrote.
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[Picture: via Business Day]
