SIMON LINCOLN READER
If only politicians apologised more
THE Democratic Alliance (DA) is guilty of fouling two political issues in recent weeks. The first was public enterprises spokeswoman Natasha Mazzone’s comments about Eskom CEO Brian Molefe being “politically useful”.
But the second has generated more interest. Last Friday, safety and security spokeswoman Dianne Kohler Barnard shared a post from journalist Paul Kirk in which he expressed a desire for the return of former state president PW Botha.
In her defence, Kohler Barnard claims that she hadn’t read it properly, to say nothing of thinking about it properly either, as the only people Botha despised more than militant blacks were white, Englishspeaking liberals.
Nevertheless, Kohler Barnard was immediately apologetic and went to lengths to acknowledge just how blisteringly daft she had been.
But the sound of blood being spat drowned out the contrition as selfappointed African National Congress (ANC) hatchet children emerged with their thesauruses and emojis, and the next thing the issue is the social media equivalent of a Soweto gangster’s burial.
The most prominent was Moloto Mothapo, the ANC’s parliamentary spokesman, who evidently spends his time using the Daily Maverick to assassinate the characters of individuals aligned to the DA, supporters of the public protector, etc.
Someone in KwaZulu-Natal screamed riots and someone called Chelsea Lotz alleged that there exists irrefutable evidence of the DA being “heavily” involved with coloured gangs in the Cape.
I have not heard many ANC politicians apologise. I heard Julius Malema apologise on radio once (at the end of 2008) for comments he made about “killing for Zuma”.
But I have never heard, for instance, Bathabile Dlamini (now head of the ANC Women’s League) apologise for defrauding Parliament, or Thandi Modise (chairwoman of the National Council of Provinces) for subjecting the pigs and cows on her farm to a holocaust. Nothing from John Block or the late Winkie Direko either.
Whereas Kohler Barnard apologised, many ANC politicians have not, and the deafening silence of ANC supporters is just as mischievous as the US and British elites who look away as members of the Saudi royal family violate their way through the world’s supply of Caucasian women.
Though they don’t amount to excuses, there are reasonable explanations for the shameless conduct of certain ANC officials. Thanks to exile, many ministers and officials have a profoundly naive and limited perception of the world.
They were thrust into positions they were unqualified to occupy, largely influenced — and shackled — by the theoretical, ideological romance of defiance.
Essentially, they were not appointed to serve but were asked to help, and it is this obfuscation of service and its sequential departures — the “career politician” — that has, by way of complacency or arrogance, lost sight of fundamental decencies, such as saying sorry when you’ve blown it.
This incident has been nothing if not an examination in hostility politics — the clumsy opposition, the reactionary tomahawks aligned to the ruling party, a nervous exchange of portfolios (with a swiftness that resembles the DA’s humiliating embrace of King Dalindyebo, despite knowing he was a rascal), the calls to arms, accusations, the demands for punishment and this tectonic eruption of contempt that Mothapo appears to be relentlessly harvesting, coupled with an aversion for the dead that runs curiously incongruent to then deputy president Jacob Zuma’s official statement in 2006: “I would like to convey my heartfelt condolences to the Botha family by remembering some of these aspects about the man who led the party and the government which my organisation fought at the time.
“But this was also a man who, during the last days of his rule, began to see the need for change and dialogue.”
Kohler Barnard appears to be frustrated. The foundations of this frustration may be receiving text messages from a “black and proud” national police commissioner — to which the correct response would have been to declare that no one cares that Riah Phiyega is black, only that she’s proud, since it is precisely this pride that blinds her from the humilities of real service.
I cannot determine Kohler Barnard’s sanction, but it would be a mistake for the DA to apply its sometimes bilious pursuit of political correctness by sacking her.
She has apologised, and that, in the context of contemporary South African politics, is a rare thing.