Zille told to ‘watch her tweets’
She cost us the votes, says DA KZN leader
FOLLOWING DA Federal Council chairperson Helen Zille’s latest race comments on Twitter, one of the party’s provincial leaders has warned her to be careful as a post-2019 election party review report indicated that her previous tweets cost the DA votes.
Zille’s latest race saga comes after she posted a divisive cartoon on her Twitter which depicted a conversation between a white and a black man, with the black man telling the white man to “give back the land you stole”.
In response, the white man said: “You should be jailed for raping my wife” and Zille said the cartoon “captures the fallacy and racism behind generalisations”.
Zwakele Mncwango, the DA’s KwaZulu-Natal leader, yesterday said the party’s Federal Council meeting on January 22 would be a platform for Zille to respond for herself.
“Our post-2019 election review report did highlight that part of the issues that made us lose votes was the tweets by Helen,” Mncwango said.
He added Zille needed to be responsible.
Mncwango said politics was based on perception, with a portion of the electorate being of the view that the ANC is corrupt while others perceived the DA to be a racist party; and that any event that adds to perception has the potential to have a negative impact during elections.
“This means that our leaders and members need to act responsibly and not add to the perception and unfortunately those kinds of comments do add to the perception that the electorate has of the party,” he said.
Political analyst Mighti Jamie said that although Twitter was not truly representative of the broader South African society, the popular social media platform did drive the discussion into the broader society.
“Conversations that happen on Twitter do happen on the news, they do happen in print as well and if you’re insensitive to the electorate on one platform it will trickle down to them on a variety of other platforms.
“Increasingly young people do make use of Facebook, Twitter and online content, as this is how they consume their news and Zille’s continued disregard for their collective sensitivity towards these issues is one that I think is definitely going to be an Achilles Heel to the DA’s prospects in 2021,” said Jamie.
Another political analyst, Thabani Khumalo, said Zille’s comments were an indication that following losing many votes to the Freedom Front Plus at last year’s elections, she was now attempting to make the DA appealing once more to its traditional and predominantly white electorate.
“For the DA to reclaim the support which it lost to the FF Plus it has to go back to that fight back campaign where it responds tall to whatever the ANC is saying so that it is seen by the white traditional support as representing their fears and narrow interests,” he said.