Tshwane DA team: Slightly off key
Some members of Solly Msimanga’s mayoral committee hold stances that court controversy
After Johannesburg’s new mayoral team was found to have several members who hold rather controversial beliefs, it appears that some members of Tshwane mayor Solly Msimanga’s mayoral committee are strong contenders in the contention stakes too.
Msimanga announced his team two weeks ago — many of them relative unknowns. But others have built up a public profile through their statements on affirmative action and Islam, and one simultaneously served as a councillor and on the board of a government supplier.
According to the youngest appointee, the member of the mayoral committee (MMC) for corporate services, Cilliers Brink (29), it can’t be denied “that affirmative action is relegating South Africa to mediocrity”.
Brink said as much in a letter he wrote to the Mail & Guardian in 2007, qualifying his statement as follows: “It is the legacy of apartheid and Bantu education, which won’t be turned around by appointing people to jobs they can’t do or that others can do better.”
He still holds that the wrongs of the past can’t be redressed through race quotas. He said in response to questions from the M&G: “I really hope that racial and gender imbalances can be redressed by means other than racial quotas … My problem with quotas as a redress measure is … we have to use the tools of apartheid to apply them, such as distinguishing between black people who are coloured, Indian and African. I’m not sure these distinctions necessarily reflect the realities of disadvantage.”
Freedom Front Plus (FF+) councillor and the capital’s new MMC for health and social development, Sakkie du Plooy, vehemently fought against the construction of a mosque in his constituency in Pretoria.
In April he was quoted in media reports as saying that Valhalla, in Centurion, is a Christian Afrikaner community and, although residents don’t have a problem with people moving in, they would take issue if there was an effort to “take over”.
He is also reported as saying that, should the plans for the mosque go ahead, residents would begin selling their homes because they wouldn’t be able to bear the “noise” made by the call to prayer.
But his most startling alleged remarks centred on the “perception that Muslims kill … There are perceptions about [Islamic State] … Muslims from Valhalla read the same Qur’an as Muslims from Pakistan,” Du Plooy reportedly said.
On the FF+ website he wrote that there was not much the party could do to prevent the construction of the mosque because the Democratic Alliance had already agreed to it.
Little did Du Plooy know at the time that the FF+ would soon be in a coalition with the very party that had allowed a mosque to be built in a “Christian Afrikaner community”.
But when asked this week whether he was anti-Islam, Du Plooy distanced himself from his earlier comments, saying that an argument from a Muslim leader had convinced him otherwise.
Although he might have helped voice the arguments of the “troubled and fearful Valhalla residents” at the time, he believes that, “regardless of faith and creed, any individual or group who violates the human rights of any other individual or group stands guilty and should be brought to book”.
He also told the M&G that he had been acting on behalf of petitioners in the mosque matter, who “had no recourse other than approaching a councillor of the FF+, a party claiming to defend the rights of minorities”.
When asked whether he was racist, Du Plooy responded with an emphatic “no”, citing his involvement in various community efforts as proof.
This i ncludes t he Centurion Recycle Team, a group of “homeless, desolate and often desperate people”, which “testifies to my attitude and passion, especially for minority groups whose plight goes unnoticed and unattended to”.
A firm advocate for Afrikaner pride, Du Plooy posted a comment on a website for the NP van Wyk Louw centre for community studies last month, in which he called Afrikaners filled with guilt “wet chickens” who could not rid themselves of feelings of attrition.
He wrote in Afrikaans: “Thousands of Afrikaners are, in 2016, ashamed to be called Afrikaners and withdraw into sorry little nests where wounds are licked, instead of standing up to build with confidence, as our forefathers did.”
But Du Plooy says that his comment has been taken out of context. He explained that, growing up in the apartheid era, he did not question the “marriage” of apartheid to Christianity or the regime’s biblical justification for committing atrocities. But once he began to form his own “opinions about the world”, he said, he realised that, although “the Afrikaner made a huge contribution, and still does, to aspects of society … there is a much bigger picture”.
He told the M&G: “I grew up in the apartheid era and did not question it at the time … I do not see how I can honestly apologise for that. But if I do these things today … because I can see how wrong and humiliating many of these things were, then I would stand guilty.”
Meanwhile, somewhat controversially, Tshwane’s new MMC for finance, Mari-Lise Fourie, simultaneously served on the board of a company that renders services to the government sector and as a councillor for the municipality.
According to Fourie, she was elected as a proportional representation councillor in 2004, and was also invited to serve in an advisory capacity on the board of the Infrastructure Finance Corporation Limited (Inca) Capacity Building Fund.
Established in 1996, Inca provides finance and expertise to municipalities, provincial governments and other public sector entities. According to Companies and Intellectual Property Commission records, Fourie still serves as a board member.
But Fourie says she declared her participation in the entity to the municipality and, following her new appointment, has since resigned.
“No remuneration was payable for this but a basic allowance is paid for attending a meeting. The level of involvement with [Inca] was restricted to providing technical expertise at board meetings,” she said.
Fourie has some experience in government. She was city treasurer for Tshwane from 1996 until the first democratic local government elections in December 2000.
She applied for the position of chief financial officer of the new municipality but was unsuccessful.
The Tshwane City Council’s other mayoral committee members are Darryl Moss (who once told former Tshwane mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa that he was a Luthuli House puppet), Randall Williams, Sheila Senkugube, Mike Mkhari, Mandla Nkomo, Derek Kissundooth and Ntsiki Mokhotho.