Run, Mmusi, run, minister urges DA leadership candidate
ENERGY Minister Tina JoematPetterson has waded into the DA’s leadership debate, telling Mmusi Maimane that he needs to free himself of his oppressors.
Joemat-Petterson said during parliament’s Freedom Day debate that some, like trained monkeys, did not know freedom, and even when released, still ran around their masters.
She said former DA parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko “ran for her life”, while Agang leader Mamphela Ramphele had done the same.
She urged Maimane to follow suit. “Run, Mmusi. Run, Maimane, run,” she said.
DA chief whip John Steenhuisen said Maimane was running. “He’s running for president.”
The Freedom Day debate also focused heavily on the recent spate of xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa said South Africa was not a violent place and its inhabitants should not all be “tarred and feathered” because of the violence.
She hit out at countries that had issued “so-called travel advisories” in the wake of the attacks.
Speaking on behalf of the ANC, Gauteng Transport MEC Ismail Vadi said recent research showed that 56% of those who had committed xenophobic attacks were unemployed, while the vast majority were youths – 25% of them were aged 10 to 19 and 55% were between 20 and 29.
The debate also turned to the recent spate of attacks on statues.
The Freedom Front Plus’s Pieter Groenewald said attacks on Afrikaner statues and the xenophobic attacks showed that South Africa was not free, but gripped by crime.
Groenewald also said that the more than 17 million South Africans who relied on social grants were not free, but dependent on the state, which relied on their votes to win elections.
The ANC’s Tekoetsile Motlashuping, meanwhile, lashed out at those who “hit colonial statues with their colonial hammers” and went on to speak “Cecil John Rhodes’s English”.
And then, he said, “after speaking their big English, they eat with a fork and knife. Hypocrisy!”