Is Steenhuisen and Zille’s alt-right slip showing?

ROMAN Cabanac is agriculture minister John Steenhuisen’s “chief of staff", his right-hand man. According to Steenhuisen, it is an “administrative position that manages staff and workflows” and involves “documents and briefings as well as legal papers, appeals and other processes”.

Government departments that have previously advertised the same position have listed responsibilities such as liaising with internal and external stakeholders and other political structures and institutions within the portfolio.

Cabanac has an LLB degree from Wits but apparently never practised law and describes himself instead as a legal consultant. According to Steenhuisen, he has many years of experience in deceased estates.

Cabanac says nothing of this on his LinkedIn profile. He only refers to his YouTube show, Morning Shot: “With a huge fan base of over 50,000 subscribers and an astonishing 15 million views on YouTube, I specialise in spicing up everyday tales, one short video at a time.”

Thus, he has little administrative or management experience with people, except perhaps those working for him on his YouTube channel. His salary at the Department of Agriculture reportedly amounts to about R1.4 million, more than that of an MP.

So, there must surely be other talents and experience beyond those of a social media influencer that make him suitable for this senior position and stand out above all other candidates? Political experience, perhaps in the DA itself?

Well, in 2019 Cabanac was a co-founder of the Capitalist Party and second on its candidate list in that year’s general election. But the party garnered only 15,915 votes or 0.09%, failing to secure any seats.

On July 31, 2018, he announced on Twitter/X that he, AfriForum/Solidarity’s Ernst Roets and two others had launched the “alt-right” in South Africa. The Oxford definition of alt-right is: “a right-wing ideological movement characterised by a rejection of mainstream politics and by the use of online media to disseminate provocative content, often expressing opposition to racial, religious or gender equality.”

The two leading proponents of this are Trump propagandists Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News but now with his own YouTube channel, and Steve Bannon, once chief strategist at the White House under Trump, then head of the far-right Breitbart website, and currently in prison for refusing to testify before Congress about his role in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Like Bannon, Carlson and others in the Maga camp, Cabanac is also pro-Trump, praises Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orbán of Hungary, and curses President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

According to Rebecca Davis of Daily Maverick: “On his podcast, Cabanac has certain recurring preoccupations: taunting environmentalists and expressing contempt for concepts like ‘green energy’ or the ‘just transition’, raging against South African NGOs, and railing against the decline of the West. He is a mouthpiece for standard talking points of the alt-right, including the concept of the Great Reset: a conspiracy theory about socialist ‘globalists’ pulling the strings.”

Cabanac sings in the same choir as the hotheads in the ANC, the EFF, and the MKP about civil society organisations receiving financial aid from outside our borders. “Our government has a mandate to rule. That mandate is being stopped, changed and retarded by these foreign-funded NGOs,” he recently said on his podcast. They should be banned, he says. He also shouts with the radical choruses against the liberal billionaire philanthropists George Soros and Bill Gates.

Cabanac quickly deleted all his extreme comments on Twitter/X after his appointment, but the internet never forgets.

Just before the May election, he tweeted, for example: “The DA is a constant reminder that blacks are not liberals. If you want to be a liberal party, it cannot be black-run.” (Does he mean people like the Minister of Basic Education, Siviwe Gwarube, or the Minister of Communication, Solly Malatsi, both senior DA leaders, or the DA’s Gauteng leader, Solly Msimanga?)

He prefers to refer to black South Africans as the “Bantu tribe” or “Bantu people”, a term he surely knows is offensive. In May, he tweeted: “Bantu people, much like Arabs, are not democratic people. They are monarchists at heart.”

Last year, Cabanac visited Orania and described the residents as “folk heroes”. His advice to his audience was: “Build your own Orania.”

So, from this, we can confidently conclude that Cabanac’s statements are directly at odds with the image the DA wants to project as a tolerant, non-racial, liberal party aiming to attract black voters.

His statements about, among other things, non-racialism, Putin, Ukraine, climate change, the transition to green energy, LGBTQ rights and NGOs sharply conflict with official DA positions.

Then the answer must surely be that Steenhuisen and the DA leadership did not really know who and what Cabanac is, just as they did not know about their elected MP Renaldo Gouws’s controversial statements that were deemed so racist that he was temporarily suspended. (He is still an MP.)

No, the DA leaders know Cabanac very well and have for many years.

When Helen Zille was briefly at the Institute for Race Relations in 2019 before returning to the DA leadership, Cabanac started and managed her podcast series, Tea with Helen.

Zille and Steenhuisen were guests together last year on Morning Shot, where Zille railed against wokeness.

In fact, there was talk as far back as four years ago that Steenhuisen would appoint Cabanac to a senior position. Cabanac’s fellow podbro and fellow Trump supporter, the American Chris Wyatt, specifically asked him if Steenhuisen had offered him a position. Cabanac replied: “No. Parties don’t want me, I’m too radical.” 

If I were a DA member, I would confront Steenhuisen and Zille with a few questions.

Such as: Why do you embrace a man who describes himself as alt-right, makes extreme racist statements, and goes against the grain of what the DA stands for?

Or is this who you really are, and the tolerant, non-racial and liberal face is actually a lie?

♦ VWB ♦

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