Daily Dispatch
Leadership test for Maimane
HOW is it possible that at a time when South Africans are desperate for new leadership in any shape or form, the former leader of the opposition has deemed it fit to plunge the DA into a crisis all of its own.
That’s what two months of Helen Zille pirouetting around the media space like an aged prima donna trying to grab back the limelight has achieved.
Consider her flight path since mid-March. At the very moment she chose, possibly from the comfort of Singapore airport’s departure terminal, to raise to dizzying heights the issue of colonialism, South Africans at home were in a frenzy over whether 17-million social grants would be paid out or not – and if so by whom and at what cost.
At the centre of this storm was the shockingly bloated and improperly aligned CPS tender which the mis-titled Social Development Minister, Bathabile Dlamini, was trying to shunt into place with the finesse of a 10-ton truck, and no thought as to the hellish consequences.
Segue to Zille tweeting about the “benefits” of colonialism.
How grateful President Jacob Zuma must have been for that gift of diversion when he had to face parliament to account for Dlamini’s illconcealed looting escapade.
And how grateful Zuma must still be to Zille as she has continued to clutch at headlines while he has been so busy purging his Cabinet, reducing the country to junk status and knuckling down to ram through a tender so monstrous in its propensity to cause ruin that the CPS deal pales into nothingness.
Zille could not have provided a better foil for the Zuma faction of the ANC than had she been on their payroll.
That’s just one of the consequences of behaviour that has verged on compulsive obsessive and has inflicted harm on both her successor as an individual, and her party as a whole. No matter which way she ties to spin it, by refusing to back away from a self-created and unwinnable war, Zille has tarnished the DA in the eyes of many black people and projected herself as some sort of queen mother.
In the process “like it or not, you’ve damaged Mmusi [Maimane]”, said editor Peter Bruce.
She has also exacerbated internal schisms within the DA.
That of course, is not new for Zille. She has behaved in like manner since, at least, she aimed her knife at Tony Leon’s unsuspecting shoulders. But how ironic that Zille now epitomises the very people OR Tambo warned the ANC against when he said “beware to wedgedriver”.
But Zille, in her protracted attempt at selfjustification, has gone even further than causing division within the DA.
Her self-righteousness posture is there for all to see and it is inflaming rather than healing an already racially scarred population.
For evidence look no further than last Saturday’s Dispatch where Lazola Ndamase of the SACP rebutted Zille’s offering in the Sunday Times.
Deepening race tensions is an unpatriotic act. More than that, it is a betrayal of the very white people Zille seems to believe she is defending.
She has pushed Maimane into a leadership test all of his own. If he does not cut her loose neither he nor his party may recover.