Making way

THERE are many things that Helen Zille can be accused of, and rightfully so, but indecisiveness isn’t one of them. On Sunday, she convened a quick meeting of the official opposition’s executive to inform them that she wouldn’t be standing for re-election as national leader at the DA’s national congress next month.

She will not be relinquishing her post as Western Cape premier, but will see out her term.

Zille told the party leadership that her decision was motivated by the need for “renewal and fresh blood”, specifically to ensure the DA remained “exciting and relevant”, with a view to breaking into the ranks of middle-class black voters. She’s absolutely right. Zille has been a tour de force as party leader, taking the DA to new heights from the 12% support base across the country that she inherited from Tony Leon eight years ago.

She has been brash, brilliant and bolshie. She has won friends and made enemies, serving this country with a courage that has often veered between foolhardy and vain.

Carrying the flag for opposition politics, she has sometimes come across as downright dictatorial and imperious, paradoxically mimicking the very traits she has found so offensive in her political foes.

Zille though has never been forgettable and neither will her political legacy be.

She leaves at a time when the DA desperately needs something extra to break the race ceiling it appears to be trapped beneath, to remain not just relevant and exciting, in her words, but to actually become the kind of real opposition and government in waiting it so dearly aspires to be.

Whether her timing was right, whether the contenders to her throne are able to fight a short, sharp campaign and galvanise the party and the public, as she hopes, will soon become clear.

The one thing that is indisputable is the debt this country owes her. We might have differed with her at times, vehemently, but we respect her contribution to this nation – in all its myriad shapes and forms. Thank you, Helen Zille.