Give Zille the boot

WESTERN CAPE Premier Helen Zille’s well-known arrogance often borders on the astounding. She has used her Twitter account like a hand grenade, hurling her 140 letters and spaces deliberately to places where it can hurt and do maximum damage.

Every time she has been called out for mindboggling racism, for hurtful paternalism and for an attitude of “I’m Helen Zille, I can do no wrong,” she has wriggled out of trouble because the DA, the party she once led, has never had the guts to bring her to book. Either that, or party officials support her views. Zille’s biggest claim to fame was that she was said to be the journalist who found out that the Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko, had been murdered by the security police on September 12, 1977. Let’s put this matter to rest once and for all: Allister Sparks, the Rand Daily Mail editor at that time, had a report by Jonathan Gluckman, the pathologist for the Biko family, in his possession.

But he couldn’t use it because it was a confidential document.

So he sent Zille, his rising star, to the Eastern Cape to do some inconsequential digging, to enable the newspaper to run a story saying Biko had been murdered, without making it seem this information had come from Gluckman’s report.

In her latest Twitter brain fart, Zille has tried to tell millions of South Africans that colonialism, that evil bedfellow of apartheid, was not necessarily all that bad.

What would she know about the suffering, the poverty, the apartheid laws and the deaths caused by it? If the DA doesn’t boot her out of politics, South African victims of colonialism should. And the sooner, the better.