Zille tweets herself into trouble again
WESTERN Cape Premier, and notorious tweeter, Helen Zille has been knee-deep in trouble before – only to come out of it unscathed.
But this time analysts, and some members of her own party, the DA, believe her tweets on the “positive aspects of colonialism”, could finally see her often controversial political career come to an end.
Her latest tweet is likely to see her hauled to a party disciplinary hearing. This comes after the party’s leader, Mmusi Maimane, referred her to the DA Federal Legal Commission (FLC) for having breached the party’s social media policy.
Zille’s latest troubles started on Thursday morning, when, en route to Malaysia, she said: “Getting on to an aeroplane now and won’t get onto the WI-FI so that I can cut off those who think EVERY aspect of colonial legacy was bad.
“For those claiming legacy of colonialism was only negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc.”
As has happened a number of times before, she was forced to retract, saying she was in no way defending colonialism, after her tweets sparked outrage from Twitter, and even leaders from within her party.
The ANC and the EFF called on the DA to recall her.
The DA’s federal council chairman, James Selfe, said an investigation by the FLC would determine whether the matter would be recommended for disciplinary charges to be laid against her.
If this is so, she would appear before a panel, he said.
“If she is found guilty, the FLC will make a finding and recommend a sanction.
“The report of the disciplinary panel will serve before Federal Executive, which is obliged to accept the finding, but may either accept the recommended sanction or increase or decrease the recommended sanction with good cause,” he said.
Appeal
“In the event that the sanction is increased, she would have the right to appeal to an appeal panel. As this is a relatively simple matter that does not require witnesses, we anticipate it won’t take too long.”
But Selfe added: “The FLC is an independent institution and we cannot prescribe to it.”
Political analyst Somadoda Fikeni suggested that the enemies Zille had made within the party could use this opportunity to make sure she is dealt with, or she might decide to step down on her own.
“Zille has a fair number of enemies in the DA, people she has spoken out against who will want to see this matter resolved and who have spoken out against her and (Dianne) Kohler-Barnard, who could say she was punished for simply sharing a tweet, whereas Zille created a tweet that led to this mess,” he said.
Barnard was initially expelled from the party after sharing a Facebook post which praised former apartheid-era president PW Botha.
Barnard was reinstated at a later date.
WHEN will South Africans ever learn to be more circumspect about social media?
It’s something that Helen Zille’s minders are probably mulling over this morning, after the premier of the Western Cape took to Twitter to share a quick thought before she took off – and then landed to a war that knocked the Sassa debacle (with its impending disaster for 17 million South Africans) clean off the news agenda.
Zille was quick to fall on her sword and issue a grovelling apology, but her haters – who are legion – were worrying her earlier tweet like dogs on a bone.
Zille’s not the first, she won’t be the last. The list from last year alone is already long and infamous, starting with Penny Sparrow and including (but not limited to) Velaphi Khumalo, Vicky Momberg, Matthew Theunissen, Judge Mabel Jansen and Ben Sasonof. Most of those involved Facebook.
For Twitter, the gold standard of bigotry remains Justine Sacco, who blithely tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white”, in December 2013, just before taking off for Joburg to holiday with her family.
By the time she landed, she’d been fired. By the time Zille landed, there was an unprecedented revolt among her fellow party members, many of them MPs, with her own party leader Mmusi Maimane ordering her conduct to be referred to the federal legal commission. The reaction itself is heartening both for the stand it takes against racism and revisionism, but also the unequivocal speaking of truth to power – in sharp contrast to the way other leaders have been treated by their party faithful in recent weeks.
The reality is that colonialism was appalling – even more so than apartheid. Lest we forget, it was colonialism – in the guise of Cecil Rhodes – which laid the foundations for migrant labour through the hut tax, and spatial segregation in rural areas, which ultimately morphed into the hated bantustans. Would Johannesburg have become the Eldorado that it did, if the mine bosses had been forced to pay fair wages, build decent housing and provide pensions – instead of getting away with the latter day equivalent of a handful of beads, a bag of mealie meal and a bicycle to men who had to leave their familes behind thousands of kilometres away for a year at a time to live in hostels?
But, thanks to them, we ended up with electrified cities, telephone networks, roads, railways – all built to serve the industry that their labour made possible. Colonialism was also deadly. Comparisons with the Nazi holocaust are neither theatrical nor over-stated. Australia’s aboriginal population declined from a quarter of a million in 1788 to less than 60 000 by the 1920s due to massacres and diseases imported by the colonists. The Hereros of Namibia, widely recognised as the first genocide of the 20th century – were systematically exterminated by their German colonial masters.
All of this though, pales into insignificance with the absolute horror of the Congo between 1896 and 1905 when Belgium’s King Leopold amassed a personal fortune from the rubber industry while his concessionaires tortured, maimed, starved and killed millions of indigenous Congolese to force them to work the plantations.
Colonialism, particularly when driven by commercial imperatives, was tyrannical. The local populations had no rights, no access to justice, particularly when their lands were governed by companies with special charters.
Clive’s India is a perfect example. It took the mutiny in 1857 to bring about change. Rhodes’ eponymous Rhodesia, under his British South Africa Company, is another.
Whatever benefits that ever accrued from colonialism wherever it was practised were at the expense of others. People lost their natural rights in their birthlands either because their leaders negotiated them away for a bottle of brandy and a trinket – or the colonists came in and literally stole the land at gunpoint, making the former farmers their serfs, or killing them.
We dare not ever lose sight of this.
It’s exactly the same with apartheid, which was nothing less than indigenised colonialism. People who benefited from either will find it difficult to speak against the very real advantages that the beneficiaries enjoyed – like 20% of the population enjoying 80% of the national budget for state healthcare or education. They did live in paradise – because everyone else paid for it.
That was legalised apartheid. The legacy of that privilege, the gap between political franchise and economic and social emancipation, is structural apartheid. If ever we needed to be schooled on the meaning and relevance of that phenomenon, the Fallist movement forever shook us out of that. But there’s another phenomenon at play here, too. It’s not new. In Zille’s case, it is the perennial narrative of her role as a fearless journalist in forcing the apartheid government to own up to the murder of Steve Biko.
We should all respect her for that. She deserves our thanks to, for being brave when so many of her colleagues in other newsrooms were cowed, craven or just actively didn’t care – because they were benefiting from the very system that Biko’s existence threatened.
Past heroics can’t be a perpetual panacea for present failings. The Boers were among the first most storied freedom fighters on the continent. Paul Kruger, the Transvaal president, was revered in Europe in his day, as Nelson Mandela would become 50 years later.
Today though, the Afrikaners are synonymous with racist insitutionalised repression – with apartheid recognised as a crime against humanity. Six million Jews perished in the holocaust.
Today Israel stands accused of practising apartheid, with every pejorative that that entails, in the Middle East.
Here at home, black South Africans routinely turn on other Africans, people fleeing here for a chance of a better life from the very countries that gave succour and support to our liberation movements. The crime is that we don’t call it racism, but hide behind the euphemism that is xenophobia.
We dare not forget our history, especially not revise it. Our todays are built on the price of their yesterdays.
Perhaps, the greatest gift of all is the intoxicating allure of vanity and social media, which will paradoxically give us the best weapon possible in the fight against bigotry and prejudice by allowing us to spot it every time and hang it out to dry for the dangerous cant that it is.
The allure of vanity and social media will give us the best possible weapon in the fight against bigotry