DA councillors don’t get it
RESPECTED journalist and editor, Ferial Haffajee of the Huffington Post, said it so succinctly, when commenting on the Ashwin Willemse SuperSport incident, that we will all have our Ashwin moment.
The melodrama at the City of Cape Town council meeting, when the DA councillors chose to withdraw the executive functions of our mayor, and downgrade her role to a humiliating ceremonial one, created an Ashwin moment for tens of thousands of voters who voted for the DA in 2016, and put it in power.
These voters must be saying: is this what the DA think of us, that the person who campaigned for our votes, and in who we put our trust, is valued no more than a soiled floor cloth, and is subjected to humiliation upon humiliation, the most cowardly tactic in politics.
They accuse her of maladministration and corruption, but it is nothing but a smoke and mirrors exercise, for allegations are just left hanging in the air, no charges are pressed, and all that they are left with is the politics of dirt.
With their obsession of getting rid of the people’s mayor at all costs, the DA has now resorted to a Kamikaze approach, suicidally taking the party’s support down.
The DA councillors just don’t seem to get it. They are in their cushy jobs not by their own volition, but because voters entered the polling booth to give them a mandate. And if a mandate is betrayed through their actions, then the implications must be crystal clear, or should be, anyway.
The timing of Mmusi Maimane’s interview with the Sunday Times must be significant. He is saying publicly that the right-wing elements of the DA has no role to play in the transformation of South African politics any more.
I wish him luck, but with the likes of a Twigg, a McKenzie, and a Booi in the DA ranks, he has a hard task ahead.