Ebrahim’s diatribe on DA is baseless

SHANNON Ebrahim, Independent Media’s foreign editor and wife of Ebrahim Ebrahim, the former deputy minister of the Department of International Relations and Co-operation, added another layer to the emerging canvas that portrays the DA as being a complicit vehicle for Donald Trump’s alt-right agenda in South Africa (The Star, February 17).

In a diatribe that invents alternative facts, she seeks to connect the dots between his South African agenda, the editor of its media mouthpiece – Breitbart news – and the DA.

This is based on an assumption that Joel Pollak – onetime speech writer for Tony Leon and husband of Rhoda Kadalie’s daughter – is high on the list of candidates for US ambassador to South Africa, and that this “will lay the foundations for a right-wing party… to take power in South Africa”.

She says, in the absence of evidence, if the DA is the only viable vehicle for right-wing politics, then its coffers are destined to be injected with cash, with a paper trail that leads to Washington. A clear case of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning – with an agenda.

Ebrahim doesn’t mention that the DA is a broad-based, liberal party whose members include those with left-leaning, social liberal, centrist, neo-liberal as well as right-leaning views – united in opposition to a corrupt government.

She doesn’t mention that Leon’s kitchen cabinet which included the likes of Pollak and the one-time Nat security apparatchik, Russel Crystal, was supplanted in the leadership of the DA by Helen Zille. The DA leader who as a political reporter broke the Biko story, was a Black Sash anti-apartheid activist and who, as head of a school governing body, took the fight to the South African Democratic Teachers Union on the basis that it was self-serving and had no interest in the education of children.

Ebrahim doesn’t mention that since Zille, the DA, under the leadership of Mmusi Maimane, a young black leader, understands that race is at the centre of restorative justice.

She doesn’t mention that Kadalie is not a DA member.

Ebrahim does, however, posit a view that hopes “South Africa’s ruling party (will) forge a strong and respected leadership that will promote social cohesion… consolidating its people-centred agenda, delivering services to its people and prosecuting those guilty of corruption”.

What she doesn’t mention is that the ANC has broken social cohesion, fostered the growth of a rent-seeking elite, failed on the delivery of essential services and entrenched corruption and state capture.

What she does seek to do, via the media organ she serves, whose purchase was government-funded to the tune of R896 million (2014/2015) by the Public Investment Corporation and the Government Employees Pension Fund, is to add to the race-carded canvas, an ethereal and gossamer link of the DA to the Trump agenda. No doubt other flights and depictions of fancy will be added as she seeks to assist the ANC “to counter and overcome sophisticated attempts at regime change at the ballot box” – otherwise known as democracy.

No doubt other flights of fancy will be added

DA caucus Leader, Ekurhuleni, and member of the Gauteng Provincial Legislature