Dear Madam Helen Zille it’s time to quit and save South Africa!
This week saw you choose your ego over the possibility of the DA being the next government of South Africa. This should make you ashamed. I called into PowerFM’s PowerPerspective last week to engage you and you hung up on me. I am writing this love letter to you to ask you to please quit as premier of the Western Cape.
Being of German descent I wonder whether you have ever made a dinner table joke about how great the Germans are with precision. I wonder whether in your illustrious career as a journalist, a daughter, a wife, a mother and a grandmother you have had a conversation that sought to find something positive about the Holocaust.
Look, don’t get me wrong.
Your Struggle credentials speak for themselves.
South Africa’s history behoves all of us to count our words when it comes to racism and colonialism because so many perished at the murderous hands of both systems.
It is not a luxury to plant the seed of reconciliation and appreciation for the magnanimity of the black nation.
It is a nation that, unlike the Nuremberg trials of your forebears, chose the road of the TRC whatever you may think of it. Yet no one, by the way, says that those trials are a silver lining of the Holocaust.
Everyone understands that you can’t * *** on the graves of 6million Jews who were systematically murdered on the altar on fascism. There is no record of you or any colonial associate making a joke of this by trying to find anything positive about that fruit of fascism.
Hitler is evil personified. But your bosom buddy Dianne Kohler Barnard praised his twin brother PW Botha just recently and who was the first to rush to her defence and comfort her that it was not all that bad - you madam.
Little did we know that you were preparing us for your own PW Botha worshipping moment.
Penny Sparrow who mistook the Durban beachgoers for monkeys found solace in the party that you led, and I don’t have a record of you tearing into her in any significant way with your Twitter vile.
But I may have missed your outrage. The late Allister Sparks (may his gentle soul rest in peace) made a point of praising Verwoerd at your electoral conference and blamed it on being senile. He was a man of many words at home and abroad but in all his books and columns he was never senile enough to find anything nice to say about Hitler.
I suppose it’s about the victims, isn’t it? Verwoerd’s victims don’t matter, have a tough skin and can take it on the chin.
It doesn’t matter the many dead bodies Verwoerd’s policies caused, it was necessary for him to find something that Tsafendas didn’t see when he knifed him in full view of the world, doing us all a favour.
Sparks rained on Maimane’s parade as a black leader and embarrassed the party much the same way you are embarrassing Maimane now. Maimane should flex his muscles with you because until he does a lot of people believe that you are ruling from the grave, Mme Helen.
On Kohler Barnard, you really should have kept your mouth shut and allowed him to lead - same as on Sparrow and Sparks.
But you didn’t and this gives the impression that you have not really given up the reins.
I know that it is not the case - I really do. Because I know that Mmusi would never allow a puppet mastery situation to manifest.
But it’s the perception, Mme Helen. You should know that soon enough they become the reality.
And so your colonialism tune has come to haunt a party that is on such a growth path and on such a high. Having acquired new socialist friends and so on - this is not the time to sprinkle on the parade of the victory of Maimane’s leadership.
Under Maimane the DA is in in charge of more than just Cape Town but has gone on to colonise, I mean to organise, Tshwane, Joburg and Bhayi. You are spoiling the party, Mme Helen.
You are spoiling Maimane’s party and Jesus’ early return. At this point I don’t see how quitting is not an option.
I mean you have done pretty much all you can to build the DA and make it leapfrog; don’t be part of destroying the one alternative the people might just choose in 2019.
You can always retire and stay in some colonial flat in Mowbray that you wrote about in your book, Mme Helen, methinks it is now your time to go. Go now and never return.
There is so much you can do with your time. You could even go back to UCT and lecture in-between taking your job as a granny seriously.
What will surely pain you is when you see the DA lose the black votes after so many praised you for stepping down for Maimane. Your real quitting will change the political landscape.
You could even ask Mmusi to take over the Western Cape as premier as a dry run for the 2019 presidency.
The guy must get used to the smell of bureaucratic memoranda to be signed and managing all those tenders that you have been dishing out to your favourites in the Western Cape.
I am sure given the non-racial nature of the DA the public won’t mind its first African premier. What a way to also prove that the seat is no preserve of the dromedaries. Please Mme Helen, do consider it for the sake of the project to unseat my party, the ANC.
You saw that the red berets are livid over your obstinacy and they may just pull the plug on the DA metros. Please remember that there was a lot of backlash over the fact that they threw in their lot with you. Do you really want to be the one who caused this project to fail?
Your sister,
Lebo Keswa
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.