Rabbie Serumula, author, award-winning poet, journalist.
For years, the Democratic Alliance built its identity on a simple promise: we are not the ANC.
It was a powerful message. While the ANC staggered from scandal to scandal, the DA positioned itself as the custodian of competence, accountability and clean governance. It held up a mirror to the governing party and invited South Africans to look.
Corruption lived there, it said. Cadre deployment lived there. Political protection lived there.
The DA was different. Or so it claimed. Lately, however, the mirror has begun to turn.
