Project CBNews

IT'S OFFICIAL: DA ELECTS NEW LEADERSHIP AT HISTORIC MIDRAND CONGRESS
Project CBNews | Breaking | April 12, 2026

The Democratic Alliance has a new Federal Leader. Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis walked out of the Gallagher Convention Centre in Midrand today as the head of South Africa's second-largest political party, the newest leader of a DA that analysts describe as emerging from this congress with a more diverse and significantly younger leadership cohort, most in their mid-thirties to early forties.

It was never really a contest on paper. Hill-Lewis told the more than 2,100 delegates that the DA is not a party built around a single personality, and that in casting their vote they were not being asked to unite behind a person, but behind a mission, to grow the DA into the country's biggest party by 2029. His challenger, Sedibeng caucus leader Sibusiso Dyonase, made his presence felt. Dyonase told delegates the election was not a popularity contest, a pointed remark, given that he entered the race just two days before nominations closed, with no national profile and no campaign war chest. He ran on conscience, and the party gave him a fair platform. That matters in its own right.

Hill-Lewis has confirmed he will remain in his role as Mayor of Cape Town rather than taking up a position in the National Assembly, a deliberate move. Staying outside cabinet gives him room to hold the GNU to account without being bound by collective responsibility. It's a smart play. He wants the governing credibility without the silence it demands.

The chairperson race was the other major contest of the weekend. Solly Msimanga, the DA's Gauteng leader and former Tshwane mayor, went head-to-head against incumbent Ivan Meyer, and walked away victorious. Congratulations to the newly elected Federal Chairperson, Solly Msimanga. His pitch was explicitly about rebuilding the party's collapsed structures in Gauteng, the province where the DA lost critical black leadership figures between 2019 and 2023 and has been fighting to recover ground ever since. Meyer had the advantage of incumbency. Msimanga had the energy of a man who believed his moment had finally arrived. The delegates agreed.

For the three deputy chairperson positions, seven candidates contested three spots, and the results reflect the generational wave this congress was always building toward. Congratulations to Siviwe Gwarube, Cilliers Brink, and Solly Malatsi, the newly elected Deputy Federal Chairpersons. Gwarube, the Basic Education Minister, ran on a simple but urgent argument: only a growing DA can deliver a growing South Africa. Brink, former mayor of Tshwane, made unity his rallying call. Malatsi, seeking re-election, said the work isn't done, and delegates gave him the mandate to see it through.

What is beyond dispute is what this congress represented as a whole. With over 2,000 delegates at the Gallagher Convention Centre, this was the largest Federal Congress in the DA's history. And it unfolded without the drama of bribery, coercion, or factionalist chaos that characterises so many political gatherings in this country. Delegates voted electronically, in private cubicles, in a process the party described as verifiable and dispute-proof.

Hill-Lewis and his newly elected co-leaders face a mammoth dual task, showing how differently they can grow the party from the previous generation of leaders, while juggling the reality of being simultaneously a GNU insider and a credible opposition voice. That tension is not going away. The ANC is watching. So is ActionSA. So is every community that still wants service delivery and not just speeches.

South Africa has a new DA. The blue machine has new drivers. The road from here runs straight into the 2026 local government elections, and what happens on that road will tell us everything about whether this generational handover was a genuine reset or just a change of faces.

Project CBNews | Midrand | April 12, 2026
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TWO FAREWELLS, ONE QUESTION: WHAT COMES NEXT FOR THE DA?

*Project CBNews | DA Federal Congress 2026 | Midrand*

Helen Zille and John Steenhuisen both walked off the same stage today and neither of them looked like they were losing.

That's the thing about the Democratic Alliance that its critics have never quite figured out. It doesn't collapse when its big names leave. It reorganises. It recalibrates. And today, at the largest Federal Congress in the party's history, it did exactly that with 2,000 delegates watching, and a country paying closer attention than usual.

Zille went first. And if you expected a sentimental goodbye, you didn't get one. She opened with the party's founding in 1959 — not 2000, not 2023 — 1959, when a handful of South Africans broke from the United Party and stood alone in Parliament against apartheid. She reminded delegates that liberal democracy has never had easy soil in this country. And she said something that deserves more attention than it will probably get: that historically, liberalism thrives in homogenous societies, and begins to crack the moment those societies diversify. The DA, she argued, is the rare experiment that proved the opposite. A liberal movement that grew in arguably the most complex, divided, historically fractured society on earth.

She didn't dress it up. She called the global retreat from liberal values exactly what it is alarming. And she said the DA has remained "unbent and unbowed" while much of the world capitulated to identity politics, ethno-populism, and the weaponisation of diversity.

Bold claim. But not an empty one.

Then Steenhuisen took the floor. He came in with receipts.

He inherited a party polling at 16 percent in 2019. Divided. Written off by the media. He leaves it polling close to 30 percent, sitting inside the Government of National Unity, and managing portfolios that touch millions of South African lives daily Agriculture, Home Affairs, Basic Education, Public Works, Communications. He went through every one of them. The removal from the FATF grey list. The first credit rating upgrade in 20 years. The blocking of the VAT increase. The court challenge to the Expropriation Act which, he noted with some satisfaction, has led the President himself to concede in court papers that the Act is unconstitutional.

He called it the Moonshot mission. And by any honest measure, they pulled it off.

But what struck this reporter sitting with both speeches side by side is what both leaders chose to end on. Not policy. Not polling numbers. Not the local government elections coming later this year. Both of them quoted the same man: Dr Jannie Steytler, the DA's founding leader, who said in 1959: *"One day South Africa will be governed by our principles, because it is the only way it can be governed."*

That's not coincidence. That's a deliberate handover of a flame.

The question Project CBNews is watching because it's the question nobody in that room quite answered today is whether the next leader can carry it somewhere new. Geordin Hill-Lewis is almost certainly walking out of that congress with the federal leadership. He is capable, his Cape Town track record is real, and the party machine is behind him. But Steenhuisen's own speech named the threat clearly: the Doomsday Coalition has taken Gauteng. Ethnic nationalism is growing. The populist tide is rising domestically just as the DA reaches its highest point of national influence.

The DA has proven it can govern. The harder test — the one Steytler probably didn't anticipate in 1959 — is whether it can grow in a country where racial identity remains the most powerful political currency there is.

Two extraordinary leaders left that stage today with their heads high. The baton is in new hands now.

South Africa will be watching what they do with it.

Project CBNews | Reporting from Midrand | DA Federal Congress, April 11, 2026