DA takes action against Zille
FORMER DA leader Helen Zille will face a party disciplinary hearing over her tweets in which she defended the legacy of colonialism. The DA formally charged her yesterday.
The DA’s federal legal commission head Glynnis Breytenbach said the charges against Zille deal with “bringing the party into disrepute and damaging the party”.
While waiting to board a plane last month, after spending a week in Singapore and Japan, Zille tweeted in sequence: “For those claiming legacy of colonialism was only negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water, etc.”
“Would we have had a transition into specialised health care and medication without colonial influence? Just be honest, please. Getting on to an aeroplane now and won’t get on to the wi-fi, so that I can cut off those who think EVERY aspect of colonial legacy was bad.”
“I apologise unreservedly for a tweet that may have come across as a defence of colonialism. It was not.”
The EFF branded her “a cold-hearted racist”. DA leader Mmusi Maimane tweeted: “Let’s make this clear: colonialism, like apartheid, was a system of oppression and subjugation. It can never be justified.” Zille has since apologised.
Last month, Breytenbach met Zille to determine whether disciplinary action would be taken against her. “A report was submitted to the (DA) federal executive after my interview and now the charges have been framed,” Breytenbach said yesterday.
A date for the disciplinary hearing has yet to be set.
WESTERN Cape Premier Helen Zille continues to assert her thoughts and beliefs through Twitter and it has more than given us a sense of how she views the world and in particular, poor people.
Her musings on colonialism and its virtues are well-documented, but it is perhaps her administration’s actions with regard to the Tafelberg school site in Sea Point that is more instructive.
Recently, the City of Cape Town intervened in the Tafelberg controversy in an attempt to make affordable housing for African and coloured working-class people a reality.
The decision by their colleagues in Wale Street to proceed with a R135-million sale of a former Tafelberg school site was made despite protests and demonstrations by citizens, who rightly called it what it was: an unjust decision and a slap in the face of blacks and coloureds.
Ironically, the feasibility study was conducted by the provincial Department of Transport and Public Works which showed it was viable to have 270 houses for low-income households earning between R1 500 and R7 500 a month on the site.
It was an opportunity, as one civil society group said to “bring the province to the brink of an unprecedented decision: to begin dismantling apartheid spatial design in Cape Town”.
Alas, Zille and her administration reverted to type and reconfirmed and asserted their power to protect narrow interests.
Trying to spin its way out of it – terms like “restructuring zone” and conveniently dragging the national government into the conversation – “so the province could not access national government subsidies to provide affordable housing” – further reinforces the notion that Zille and her DA-administration have no qualms in playing politics at the expense of real development of poor black and coloured people of the Western Cape.
Research shows that Woodstock and Salt River had planned social housing projects since at least 2008, and those projects still hadn’t broken ground even though they were in a restructuring zone.
Which renders Zille and her administartion’s utterances around restructuring zones even more hollow.
The truth of the matter is that it is important for Zille and her ilk to keep the status quo, to continue to subscribe to the ethos of colonialism which by its very definition determines that people continue to be undermined; that their development and growth be decided on by a few who only really regard them as commodities, whether it is to tend to their gardens, children or homes. Or an X at the voting ballot.
And land and property ownership and excluding the poor from it is key to maintaining a specific order that is counter-democratic, anti-poor and anti-growth and development.
Zille, in her tweets, cites Singapore as an example of how colonialism has benefited that country.
What about countries where successful models of mixed-used housing, that is, neighbourhoods where different classes live close to centres of the economy, thrive and contribute to the gross domestic product?
Who is being protected here? And at whose expense? The answer is not hard to come to.
But it is an unsustainable model, given South Africa’s rapid urbanisation with its natural disposition to attract more people (or as Zille likes to call her fellow citizens – economic refugees).
Given the political tension between Zille and mayor Patricia de Lille (and the respective interparty disciplinary hearings hanging over their respective thrones), one has to wonder if the city council’s intervention is a power play or a well-orchestrated double-play to simply quieten the noise from propoor lobby groups and those on the opposition benches in both houses.
One thing is clear, however: while the housing issue receives the usual 24-hour news cycle sound bites and column centimetres from time to time, there are movements like Reclaim the City and Ndifuna Ukwazi who refuse to go away and demand attention through their various campaign actions.
Whether Zille survives the disciplinary hearing is almost moot: it is her party’s DNA which has to be continuously scrutinised as they purport to be a party for all and crow about an increase in black party membership.
Black party insiders have for a while now decried them being undermined by a largely, white, establishment cabal within the DA that continues to call the shots and whose agenda has not changed since before democracy.
It is not in the colonist’s nature or character to share. The land issue continues to be an emotive one and rightly so.
South Africa’s history of forced land removals is well-documented.
But at what point does common sense and a greater sense of community cut through or inform and enlighten legislative processes and put paid to narrowed interests?
The actions of Zille and her administration in the Tafelberg land issue would suggest that the latter will continue to hold sway at the expense of the greater good.
Their actions should not be allowed to go unchecked and given the tenor of their most powerful leader (via her tweets) their credentials in being game changers for the majority in the province should be held up and judged more vigorously in the court of public opinion.
They cannot be allowed to continue to speak down to poor people and get away with it. We do not live in a colony. Sayed is chairperson of the ANC Youth League in the Western Cape