From leader to Twitter lunacy — what happened to Zille?
After her latest mindless, Trump-esque Twitter bomb, even some of Helen Zille’s staunchest supporters have stopped defending her and ask the question many of her old friends and allies have asked for a while: what on earth has gone wrong with Zille?
How did she move from being a progressive antiapartheid activist, a dynamic politician who has done more than anyone else to make the DA a real factor in SA politics, the best mayor in the country and an outstanding premier, to a reactionary, unguided missile that is systematically destroying her party?
It was buzzing on Facebook, Twitter and many WhatsApp groups: is Zille perhaps unstable? Did something terrible happen to her that has affected her judgment?
Or was she actually always an old-style white liberal with a race chip on the shoulder who paraded as progressive, but was mostly concerned with white interests?
Her tweet last week stunned me: “Lol, there are more racist laws today than there were under apartheid. All racist laws are wrong.
“But permanent victimhood is too highly prized to recognise this.”
It was the kind of thing Steve Hofmeyr or Ernst Roets of AfriForum might say, not someone who was a political reporter during apartheid, who aligned herself with the Black Sash, who harboured black activists from the security police, who witnessed the demise of apartheid and the rise of democracy from up close.
Zille was equating black empowerment and affirmative action to laws that took black people’s citizenship away and replaced it with “citizenship” in bantustans, that forced them to carry pass books in “white” SA, that forcibly removed millions from the land and suburbs declared “white”, that denied the majority economic opportunities through job reservation and a ban on property ownership, that kept white and black apart in the cities and towns, in schools and universities, even parks and lifts.
What could have driven a seasoned, intelligent political leader to utter such lunacy?
It couldn’t have been just a moment of madness. She had done this before, most noticeably when she tweeted that the legacies of colonialism were not only negative and when she supported FW de Klerk’s position that apartheid wasn’t a crime against humanity. In the storm after her tweet, even the Freedom Front Plus said her statement wasn’t true.
Zille seemed unrepentant and sniped at her critics in her own party — and she is the DA’s federal council chair.
She had an angry exchange on Twitter with senior DA MP Phumzile van Damme, who accused her “faction” of “terrorising” their opponents in the DA.
Several other black DA leaders criticised Zille, among them Gauteng leader John Moody, MP Hlanganani Gumbi, and a former DA Youth leader who is contesting the upcoming leadership election, Mbali Ntuli.
From inside the DA’s white ranks hardly a peep was heard.
And so the caricature of a white-led party with a bunch of unhappy but powerless black representatives was reinforced.
SA will, if the pandemic allows it, hold local elections next year. The last time, the DA got 26% of the vote, and the party had hoped it could make up for the losses in last year’s general election, especially because of the failure of so many ANC local councils.
Zille’s return to the DA top leadership, her perceived bossiness and her reckless behaviour on social media have probably dashed that hope.
The exit of two top black DA leaders, Mmusi Maimane and Herman Mashaba, was directly linked to her.
There is a theory that Zille is moving to the right to make the DA more attractive to Afrikaner voters who abandoned the party for the FF+, but it is difficult to understand why she would exchange a handful of white voters for the only real growth potential for the DA — black and brown voters. I met Zille in Soweto in June 1976 when we were young reporters. We were never close but I always knew what she was doing and had many encounters with her.
I cannot explain her strange behaviour over the past few years, other than that it probably has something to do with her personality.
She is always combative, intolerant, and doesn’t tolerate criticism or opposing views.
But is she a racist, as so many on social media allege? I have never seen any evidence of this being the case in the ordinary sense of the word racist.
But events of the past few years made me suspect that deep down she believes that her party — and perhaps more than just her party — should be led by white people. If true, is that not racist?
She handpicked young black leaders like Maimane and Lindiwe Mazibuko and pushed them into leadership roles, but when she discovered they had their own views and approaches, she undermined them.
She’s doing it again now with people like Van Damme and Ntuli, two strong politicians who could have boosted the DA’s standing among black voters.
History will not remember Helen Zille as an antiapartheid campaigner or a great administrator, but as the individual who made sure the DA would forever be tainted as a party caring only about white interests.