Pretoria - DA leader Helen Zille and her right-hand man, Federal chairman Wilmot James, have hit back at critics who accuse the party of having abandoned its liberal roots.
In separate forums on Friday, Zille and James labelled former DA leader Tony Leon and commentator RW Johnson “rank conservatives” who spoke “nonsense”.
Zille did not mention them by name.
Leon, a former DA leader, on Friday dismissed as “nonsense” claims that he was a rank conservative.
He said it was “profoundly illiberal” to label and question the motives of those who held different views. Johnson did not respond to calls and an e-mail for comment.
The two men had recently launched an assault on Zille’s leadership after the party supported the Employment Equity Amendment Bill (EEAB). Zille subsequently reversed the decision.
They had said the party was “messy”, lacked policy direction and had drifted away from its liberal traditions in the quest for the black vote. The duo had publicly accused the DA of pretending to be a non-racial party while supporting a law which sought to propagate racial classification at the expense of whites, coloureds and Indians.
Johnson, who had also accused the DA of deliberately distorting history by claiming to stand for Nelson Mandela’s values than the ANC, was unforgiving even after Zille’s U-turn.
Writing in Politicsweb this week, he said: “Helen Zille did a 180 degree return and said that the party should not have supported the bill… by then, however, the damage was long done… In the sort of party that the DA – or the old Progs – used to be, both these bills would have been thrown out in two seconds flat because it represented the very antithesis on liberal thought.”
In a letter on Friday, Wilmot said Leon and Johnson’s statements were “naïve” because South Africa’s “unspeakable poverty” required that every possible avenue be found to create opportunities and jobs for the poor. He said that their views were also “shallow” because liberalism was not simply about the fairness and justice in the distribution of public office, assets and jobs.
“The failure to embrace distributional justice disqualifies the commentators as liberals. They are in fact rank conservatives who would like nothing better than to keep things precisely as they are. We are not interested in those who wish to preserve the status quo,” said James.
Zille on Friday said she wouldn’t use Johnson as a character reference because she thought very little of him. “I do not take Bill Johnson seriously. He writes well but he panel beats facts to fit his theories. So I take it with a pinch of salt,” she said.
Zille said that while it was a mistake to support the EEAB, it was “nonsense” for him to suggest this meant the DA under her leadership was rudderless.
“That is also nonsense. One mistake, although major, does not mean the DA is rudderless. I do not use the term liberal, because that is easily confused with functional liberalism, which I do not think is sufficient to correct the wrongs of the past. I use the phrase: the Open, Opportunity Society for all which involves REDRESS, but not the type that entrenches race classification and enforces quotas. It is pure mythology that our predecessor parties embodied liberal purity from which we are now departing,” Zille added.
Asked why Leon and Johnson were attacking her leadership, Zille’s responded: “Who knows. Your guess is as good as mine. The comedian, Anne Hirsch, calls it FOBLO: “fear of being left out.”
Leon said James was blaming and characterising others for his “unfortunate error”, because he was both the DA’s parliamentary caucus chairman and party policy chairman when the EEAB was embraced. “I presume that Dr James is not suggesting that Ms Zille is conservative or anti-redress?
“Setting up your own skittles in order to knock them down is easy, as is stigma-labelling. Dr James and others today stand on the platform which I, and at crucial times very few others in past years, helped to construct, at the time that Dr James was safely in academia,” Leon added.
He denied claims by Zille’s supporters that he was the face of a right-wing group in the DA who were against the party embracing changes. - Pretoria News Weekend