Cape Town - Following Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille’s criticism of the African National Congress (ANC) in the Western Cape, the party responded on Tuesday, lashing out at the Democratic Alliance (DA) and de Lille, its mayoral candidate.
During a question session after she had launched the DA’s Cape Town manifesto on Tuesday, de Lille responded to a media question about her views on the ANC and their chances come local government elections in August.
De Lille said the ANC undermined voters’ intelligence, were full of hot air, lacked an elections manifesto, and constantly tried to paint the DA-led city as racist which De Lille said was the ANC’s only campaign tactic.
Read: De Lille talks gangs, housing and ANC ‘hot air’
ANC provincial spokesperson Yonela Diko responded: “The DA is unashamedly the biggest aiders of racism in the Western Cape.
“As long as they treat racism as just another item at the bottom of their checklist to be ticked, a mere mistake in reasoning, a faulty logic, rather than something much deeper and more powerful, more threatening and more persistent, which requires greater vigor and determination, the Western Cape will continue to be a certain version of Orania for white exclusivity over and against black interests,” said Diko.
In reference to one of the pillars of the Cape Town manifesto - that of building an “opportunity city” – Diko said racism in the province determined who actually received the opportunities.
“Racism in the Western Cape is responsible for who gets opportunities, who gets hired, who gets fired, who rises, [and] who falls,” he said.
Diko said the ANC had questioned Tim Harris - who left his employ with the City in March 2015 to head up Wesgro, the province’s trade and investment promotion agency - about the “demographic spread of some 90 000 jobs the Western Cape had created [in] one particular year”.
“He cunningly, if not cavalier, [said] he did not have the figures readily available,” said Diko.
In response to de Lille’s comment on ANC provincial chairperson Fransman in which she said he was not wanted back by his own party and that his speeches come elections produced nothing new for journalists to write about, Diko stated: “De Lille could never be half the politician Chairperson Marius Fransman is.”
Diko added that any attempt to draw a correlation between Fransman’s political capabilites and an investigation into a sexual harassment allegation against him were immature and elementary. This, however, had not been done by De Lille during her launch.
Diko also took aim at the province – the only one of the nine not governed by the ANC – on inequality as it pertained to crime.
The province is governed by one of de Lille’s predecessors as mayor, Premier Helen Zille, who is also the former national leader of the DA.
On the recent gruesome murders of two teenage girls – Sinoxolo Mafevuka from Khayelitsha and Franziska Blöchliger who was found dead in Tokai Forest – Diko commented: “We have already chastised Zille and [the] DA’s line of thinking… as exacerbating the racial offence and DA’s rich-poor divide.”
Referring to Zille’s response to the two murders and outcry about the way in which police responded – Zille had in her Premier’s letter referred to the in/frequency of such crimes in the affected communities – Diko said it emphasised the DA’s racism.
“Helen Zille’s interpretation of these tragedies was that Franziska’s community of Tokai is unused to incidents like that, that the forest she was running at with her family is a recreation area that is not normally associated with murder, and that it needs additional security,” he said.
“This flippancy exacerbates the racial offence.”
Diko added that the ANC had found the DA-led City’s spending on community safety was on the decrease since incumbency.
“We have already stated that for every year since the DA governs and [has controlled] the Western Cape Province, it spent less than 1% of its budget on community safety,” he said.
This, said Diko, conjured up disaster for hotspot areas such as Manenberg and affected communities.
African News Agency