At end of the day, well done to Zille

072 2015.04.12 DA leader Helen Zille said she has decided not to make herself available for re- election as leader next month at the Congress. Picture: Bhekikhaya Mabaso

072 2015.04.12 DA leader Helen Zille said she has decided not to make herself available for re- election as leader next month at the Congress. Picture: Bhekikhaya Mabaso

Published Apr 18, 2015

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Helen Zille has made mistakes, but she has also committed herself to her country, writes Yonela Diko.

The first time I met outgoing DA leader Helen Zille was in a lift at the provincial legislature on my way to the gallery to listen to the provincial budget speech by the current Western Cape MEC for finance Ivan Meyer (who was also in the lift) and Zille was on her way to support her MEC as he tabled the provincial fiscus.

“Hey there, I am Yonela Diko”, as I stretched my hand to shake her hand.

“Oh hey there Yonela. For a second she pauses, engaging her brain and repeating my name, “oh hey Yonela”.

Our media battles have been few, but consequential, she was saying now.

Here she was right.

I was one of the first persons to observe early on that there is a kind of criticism, whether it’s the content or the person, which makes Zille lose her footing and say the craziest things.

At the height of the controversy over Zille having unwisely called other South Africans refugees, and her race to the bottom trying to explain what she meant, I had taken time to find out where her origins were.

Oh well, what do you know, Zille was born and bred in Joburg, did her schooling and lived there most of her life.

Whatever reasons for her move to Cape Town, why could she not give the same benefit of the doubt to others who had moved, I wondered; it’s not like new resources, new schools, new roads, new wells of water, were created in Cape Town to accommodate her move.

She also came here to compete for the same limited resources, I was thinking now. After my letter was published by the Cape Times, she decided to respond in the same paper directly to me.

I fell in love; that is why I moved to Cape Town, was her shocking response. This was a pathetic one but a telling one because I felt it was selected from multiple optional responses. Besides feeling I had touched a tender nerve on her, I genuinely felt here was Zille, telling me she was more than just the crass statements and emotional tweets she occasionally got boiled for.

She was a woman, a wife, a mother, a friend and it seemed that in her battle to remain strong and fight the Godzilla nicknames, she had lost control of certain parts of her image, and in some moments she wanted those aspects to form part of a more holistic opinion about her.

We are in a battle of ideas, nothing more, nothing less. Zille believes in free markets and an education meritocracy. She finds it hard to imagine that there might be social ills that could not be cured by academic excellence or the market. She has no patience with protectionism, finds unions troublesome.

Of course such an approach would be most appealing to those who are still holding on to unjustified enrichment that was acquired with black people standing outside looking in.

For the ANC, on the other hand, that approach falls on its face purely on a structural basis. In most parts of the country, people are hungry first, and must be fed before they are told of the magic of free markets. We believe in social justice, the fact that employers must do right by their workers, we believe that Adams Smith’s invisible hand cannot be left alone to decide the fate of the people. Our people need the visible hand of government.

But these are ideologies, consequential as they may be (but) they remain just that. The tendency to then deduce that those we disagree with necessarily become bad persons comes out of immaturity with politics.

But I believe Zille’s insisting that she was more than just politics was to reach out to this underlying truth that is not emphasised enough in our battle of ideas, that we are first, and primarily, South Africans. I chose not to wonder why somebody does not do anything about the things that needed to get done. I decided to be that somebody.

It would be folly, then, to miss a golden opportunity to say to another South African, who, while many of our fellow South Africans are happy to travel a narrow path of personal pursuits, decided she would not let the task of nation-building be a responsibility of the others; she wanted to be part of it, and she remains so still. We cannot miss the opportunity to say WELL DONE!

*Diko is a political commentator

**The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.

Pretoria News

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