Johannesburg - It started with a tweet, and two days on it had escalated into a racial row that invoked the spirit of the architect of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd.
As the nation bade farewell to slain footballer Senzo Meyiwa at Durban’s Moses Mabhida Stadium, Idols judge and radio personality Gareth Cliff tweeted his disapproval for Meyiwa’s official provincial funeral.
The tweet unleashed the wrath of Meyiwa’s supporters.
“Who’s paying for this massive funeral for #SenzoMeyiwa?” Cliff tweeted.
And while he fielded what he called “the wrath of black Twitter” throughout the weekend, Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula unleashed his own missile on Monday, practically calling Cliff a racist.
“He is suffering from Verwoerd hangover. Country mourning and Gareth talking like that as if he doesn’t know,” Mbalula tweeted – a post he later deleted from his timeline.
Cliff defended his stance, asking “why is it rude to ask who’s paying for Senzo’s funeral?
“Senzo has one of the biggest non-political funerals in SA history and I’m insensitive for asking questions? Help me understand. Everyone has a different answer,” he tweeted.
While some of his followers like Khensani (@houseChores came to his defence by saying he had a valid question, some attacked him for being insensitive. Mbalula entered the fray by saying Cliff had insinuated that Meyiwa was not deserving of a state funeral.
“Why does SA allow this disrespect in the name of independent thinking. Why are we so gullible?” the minister tweeted.
He wrote further: “Who payed for Verwoerd’s funeral? And who payed for PW Botha’s funeral? It is the state? Did they deserve it?
“We never asked bcos we respect the DD,” he said, adding it was the prerogative of provincial governments to “ask and motivate to the president why their own heroes should be given partial official funerals”.
In Meyiwa’s case, the KwaZulu-Natal government had made such a request, he said.
Mbalula’s spokesman Anda Bici said he had not seen the tweet when contacted at 7.30pm. “I’ll check it… can you call me in an hour’s time?” he asked.
Writing on his blog on Monday night, Cliff said while he was “someone who would never claim ignorance when it comes to the sensitivities of our all-too-evident racial divisions”.
What he would “not do is try to defend my non-racial, liberal, democratic or libertarian ideas in the face of those who didn’t like me, before they had evidence of supposedly culturally insensitive remarks, or become one of those brow-beaten whites who allow themselves to be bullied into submission by outrage on social media”.
He said his question was driven by the fact that he had never seen a non-politician being accorded such an “extraordinary” funeral, and while he did not mind “if we paid for Senzo’s funeral… I mind that I am the bad guy for asking the question”.
“I did not ask the question to be controversial or because I was looking for attention,” Cliff added.
The Star