From hero to Zille: why the former party leader would best thrive in retirement

WHAT is Helen Zille up to? It’s a dangerous question but it consumes me because I am simply unable to explain the former DA leader and current Western Cape premier’s public volatility.

Has she lost it? She’s strayed so far from what I would normally expect a former party leader to do — especially as she hand-picked her successor — that it has become a little like watching Hamlet, but as a silent movie. What, you ask yourself, the hell is going on?

First was the airport tweet about the residual benefits of colonialism. I hope that’s accurate. I don’t want the editor to have to run a long letter from the premier accusing me of spreading fake news and accusing him of not checking my “facts”.

The colonialism tweets caused a furore, invited a measured rebuke from DA leader Mmusi Maimane, and a disciplinary inquiry.

They were immediately followed by a very long piece she wrote in the Daily Maverick justifying her original views on the way Singapore had converted its colonial legacy into the powerhouse it is today.

There was short silence before another large piece appeared under her name, in this newspaper, again explaining her views on colonialism and reminding us that under the ANC matric textbooks had been teaching as much for a decade.

But she concluded with a cataclysmic view of the future, detecting a “tectonic shift” in our politics as the writings of Frantz Fanon drive a virulent anti-white “critical race theory” in which whites are “scapegoated” for the country’s ills. This has spread rapidly through our born-free generation, “especially the young, educated elite”, she said, laying into students behind the chaos at South African universities. But that observation could have been made a year ago. Why now?

Is the “young, educated elite” not exactly the audience Maimane will be pitching to in 2019?

Not content with the Sunday Times, she was back in the Daily Maverick very quickly, warning that student elections at the University of Cape Town were being hijacked by radicals to the extent that the DA Student Organisation was not even contesting them.

This past week two Business Day columns critical of her attracted long Zille letters and no doubt there will be more.

The fact is, she has gone rogue. Zille will write and say what she wants now that she’s been charged by the party. She doesn’t care about Maimane. She is just right. Only she tells the truth.

She has lawyers working on the disciplinary hearing, which may only be resolved in July. Her “prosecutor” in the affair is Glynnis Breytenbach, so expect a clash of some magnitude.

But the longer it takes the more it will damage the DA and it is hard to find voices in the party who back her.

She acts alone now as premier, not as a successful former party leader. She is, in other words, on her way out.

Zille will be much happier in retirement once she gets used to it.

She has more than a million Twitter followers. That’s quite a base. She writes well and will no doubt produce brilliant books about the coming apocalypse. If I were still a newspaper editor, I’d offer her a weekly column. She’ll earn a staggering amount from public speaking.

And those loyal followers on Twitter and elsewhere will lap it all up. But you only get to make history once.

Leadership, in almost anything, seldom ends well. Somehow the dogs always bark and the caravan always moves on.

Maimane has been working on some very smart policy to take to the country in 2019, some of which is directed specifically at that “young, educated elite” Zille now disparages.

But he doesn’t really have the political space to begin selling the country his new vision until the Zille process is done and she is gone.

Those who go with her will think about forming a more traditional liberal party, but the time for that is also past, or at least not right now.

Fortunately for Maimane, the ANC seems to be in comic freefall.

Every now and then you get a hilarious freeze-face, like when the wily coyote falls off a cliff.

For Maimane’s sake, may it continue a while longer.

She has gone rogue. Zille will write and say what she wants now that she’s been charged by the DA