The Democratic Alliance was seeking to deflect attention from its leader's “silly” remarks about HIV and Aids by laying bribery charges against the ANC, the ruling party said on Tuesday.
“The DA uses this story as a political ploy to cover up the tracks of its premier Helen Zille,” the ANC's Western Cape secretary Songezo Mjongile said in Cape Town.
Mjongile said Zille had come under heavy criticism after she had “a lot of silly things to say about HIV and Aids”.
These included her call to revive “apartheid style sex policing” and her lucky draw to “coerce” people to test for HIV.
Earlier in November, Zille suggested that men who refused to wear a condom during sex be charged with attempted murder.
Last week she said a R50,000 lucky draw would be held for people who took part in the city's free HIV tests.
On Tuesday, the DA said it would lay criminal charges against seven Western Cape ANC officials accused of being part a plot code-named Project Reclaim.
It said the plot appeared to be a co-ordinated attempt to bribe DA ward councillors to give up their seats and stand for the ANC in the by-election triggered by their resignation.
Mjongile said the ANC was considering taking legal action against the DA for making the allegations.
“The DA must back up their allegations with tangible proof or face the consequences of legal action, which the ANC now considers,” he said.
He said the DA had lost touch with real issues facing communities.
“When the ANC teams up with any other party of person, the DA cries foul.
“It is typical of the double standard DA which has a set of rules for the ANC, but a different set for the DA,” Mjongile said.
“If there is any fraud committed, it will be the lies that the DA has sold our people that it delivers to all whilst condemning the majority to conditions of poverty and squalor.”
He said the DA acted “like cry babies” when they lost a councillor or a municipality.
“It forgets quickly that the DA national leader Helen Zille became the mayor of Cape Town in 2006 after a coup plot involving smaller opposition parties. It also governs in a number of hung municipalities in formal plots as coalitions of alliances.
“The only DA councillors the ANC has contact with are those that are frustrated by racism and the dictatorship by the DA mafioso.” - Sapa