Tag: ANC

Tony Leon on Concubinegate

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Former DA leader Tony Leon spoke out today on the Concubinegate affair (that’s my name for it, anyway), in which current DA leader and Emperor of the Western Cape, Helen Zille had a pop at Jacob Zuma’s habits of sleeping around. Whatever “sleeping around” actually means. Floyd?

It’s an excellent analysis of the situation, drawing on his years as leader of the opposition and utilising common sense and logic instead of the knee-jerk, personal tactics of his successor.

I think Bill Clinton got it right when, in appointing his first administration in 1992, he announced: “I want a cabinet that looks like America.” The fact that the Western Cape provincial government doesn’t look like SA, or on the face of it is overloaded with testosterone, doesn’t mean it won’t deliver or won’t be vigilant on feminist issues. But it handed a sword to the party’s opponents, who were delighted to plunge it in with vigour. And politics is often more about symbols than substance.

And while Leon is somewhat critical of Zille, he balances it out with the facts which we never really got to hear in her defence – that the ANCYL’s response was at worse, offensive and infantile (which we knew) and at best, somewhat hypocritical, given the make-up of some of their Provincial cabinets across the country.

When I led the opposition, I made a book- ful of mistakes when it came to an overheated response or an incautious one-liner. And I know how a single phrase in a letter or speech can be wrenched from context, or can obliterate the most thorough defence.

Zille’s reference to Zuma’s personal history was factually correct but tactically questionable. It struck a discordant note in the upwelling mood music which flowed from the president’s inauguration and the wave of optimism it generated.

It seems almost strange to be citing a voice of reason in this whole sorry affair, where mud-slinging, slanderous comments have been the order of the day. But it’s a lesson to us all that sometimes it’s worth stepping back from the heat of an argument and actually THINKING before speaking, rather than just throwing some stupid statement out into the public domain.

While I can understand the ANC’s glee at the gift of the all-male Western Cape cabinet – and their further delight at Zille’s foolish response to their jibes – the people I don’t understand are the angered DA voters in the Western Cape.

Zille’s defence has always been that she didn’t have enough experienced women to appoint to her Provincial cabinet, simply because not enough experienced women were on the DA Provincial lists (something which should surely never have been allowed to happen in the first place). But those lists were freely available to the public in the run up to the election, published in all the newspapers and on the internet. Anyone who had bothered to read the lists would have been aware that this situation was going to arise given the DA’s widely (and rather accurately) predicted ~50% performance in the Provincial elections.
Thus, if you voted DA in the Western Cape and now have a problem with the demographics of the Provincial cabinet – well, it’s actually your fault. Just because you didn’t do your homework in the days before April 22nd is no reason to cry foul now.

So please stop moaning and pretending you wished you’d voted ANC. You’d do well to take a leaf out of Tony’s book and THINK before you speak out (or maybe even before you vote in future).
Otherwise, you really do risk making a fool out of yourself. Or is it too late already?

I’m not Zille-bashing, but…

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This article on news24 does rather seem to continue the “OMG, we’re all… doomed… doomed!”  scare tactics thread that characterised the DA’s final approach to the elections last month. And while I recognise that it is Zille’s and the DA’s job to question the Government, I’m not quite sure what value there is in criticising each and every cabinet appointment. I found her disingenuous use of Angie Motshekga’s quote particularly distasteful.
To whom did the DA expect that those jobs would be given? Were they really thinking that the ANC, having just wiped the floor (again) with the opposition parties would then appoint them into the cabinet?

And if so, why didn’t Helen Zille appoint an all-ANC front bench to the Western Cape Provincial Government?

I just can’t reconcile this:

“With few exceptions, President Jacob Zuma’s new Cabinet is bad news for South Africa,” Zille said.
Zille said Zuma’s decision to revamp the structure of Cabinet raised more questions than it provided answers.

with this:

Zille said the Cabinet needed to be given time before its performance could be properly judged.

Because it sounds to me like you’ve made your mind up already, Helen.

DA landslide ‘destroys Zuma, ANC’

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Democratic Alliance take shock landslide victory in South African elections, suggests exit poll.

According to the results of an exit poll conducted during the National and Provincial elections yesterday and published after the ballots had closed in the late evening, the DA is heading for a unprecedented landslide victory over the much-fancied ANC and seems likely to take as much as 94% of the vote.

The exit poll was taken outside the Polling Station at St. Laadedah Primary School in Cape Town’s upmarket Constantia suburb by independent survey company Census Reviews and Polls (CRaP) and showed that of sixteen voters leaving the station who expressed an opinion, fifteen (93.75%) had voted for the DA.

DA spokesperson Jannie van Wyk was excited by the results:

I recognise that this is just one exit poll, but if we extrapolate the results from this significant survey, we can see that it is obvious that our policies and campaign strategies have borne fruit. A 94% share of the vote is significantly up from our showing at the last election, which was 12%, and I think we can put that down to our hard work in offering the voting public a viable alternative the Jacob Zuma and the ANC.
With this landslide victory, we can work on putting those policies into action as we will presumably control nine of the nine provinces which were contested as well as the national government. In fact, with sure a significant majority in these South African elections, I see this as an opportunity for the DA to move into the rest of Africa and envisage Helen Zille as being Supreme Commander of the World by 2015. It’ll take a bit of tinkering with the Constitution, but that won’t be a problem with this sort of majority.

In fact, according to the exit poll, Jacob Zuma’s ANC have been wiped off the South African political map completely, having gained exactly 0% of the vote in Constantia Ward 76, while newcomers the Congress of the People (Cope) managed just 6%.

Cope heavyweight Mbhazima “Sam” Shilowa was disappointed by the poll:

I have to say that we were hoping to make double figures in this election. The party is just four months old, but I though we had gained more popular support than this on our anti-corruption ticket.
However, looking at the overall result, I think it will finally lay to rest the rumour that we were going to enter into a coalition with the ANC after the election. They clearly have less to bring to the table than we thought they would. Well, absolutely nothing actually. Not a sausage. Shame.

Other large parties who, according to the CRaP poll, failed to get a single vote nationally included the Independent Democrats (ID), Vryheids Front Plus (VF+) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP).
The Afrikaner VF+ were however, quick to disregard the results the Constantia poll though, saying that they preferred to base their predictions for the final outcome on an exit poll from Durbanville in Cape Town’s Northern suburbs, in which they had polled 100% of the votes cast, based on a sample size of 3.

Has Lekota named his new party?

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It now seems certain that the ruling party in South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) who fought their way to freedom through the appalling Apartheid era, will split. Those members who disagree with the the policies, ethics and behaviour of the ANC leader, Jacob Zuma, and those of his supporters, are setting up a new party under the (apparent) leadership of former ANC chairman and defence minister, Mosiuoa Lekota. Aside from the obvious questions of who and how many would join this new party came the additional issue of what it would be called.
It now seems that the proverbial cat has vacated the proverbial bag following an appearance by Mr Lekota at Orange Farm yesterday:

Lekota’s supporters wore white and yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the former ANC chairperson’s face and the words “South African National Congress”.

I think it shows some wonderful imagination. I feel though, the intricacies may be beyond many people’s vision, so please excuse me if I attempt to explain to those that don’t get it.

To recap, Mosiuoa Lekota was a high-ranking member of a political party called the African National Congress, or ANC for short. What has occurred over the past few weeks in South Africa has led (or rather will lead, allegedly) to the forming a breakaway faction from the ANC. In choosing a name for their new entity, what Mr Lekota and his allies have done is taken the name of their previous party, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and added the word “South” in front of it, thus seemingly choosing their new party’s name to be the South African National Congress.

Do you see? It’s simply genius.
I’ll run through it one more time for those at the back. Instead of the African National Congress, they will be called the South African Nation Congress. Because while the continent is called Africa, the country we are in is called South Africa. Hence South African National Congress. Yes?

Words cannot describe the awesome.

One can only hope that their manifesto is a little more distinctive than their party name.

Whites want Zuma in now!

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In an extraordinary show of solidarity with ANC President Jacob Zuma, a poll today* suggests that a huge number of white South Africans want JZ to become President of the country as soon as possible. While this may come as a surprise to many political analysts, there is a very simple explanation: pronunciation.

It seems that many white South Africans have become used to having a president who has an easily pronounceable name, like Nelson Mandela or Thabo Mbeki. The suggestion that Kgalema Motlanthe is being lined up as acting president following Mbeki’s resignation has caused widespread concern amongst paler Saffers.

My wife asked me who was replacing Mbeki and by the time I’d told her, she needed to wash her face and hair. Look, he’s a great guy and all, but I just can’t do a K followed by a G without spitting. In retrospect, I suppose it didn’t help that I was eating a boerie roll at the time.

It was originally thought that the speaker of Parliament, Baleka Mbete, would act as stand-in President until the election next year. And that seemingly wouldn’t have been a problem for most whities:

You can just mutter the surname and then you look all knowledgeable. No-one is going to hear the difference between Mbeki and Mbete after a few beers if you say it quickly and quietly.

Other potential contenders for the post, such as Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka (“Phumzile” to the whities) and Nkosozana Dlamini-Zuma (“That Zuma woman”) would have caused equal difficulties for white tongues.

What we need now is for Zuma to call an election as soon as possible. And then get elected. We don’t care about his policies. Frankly, it’s just embarrassing not being able to say the name of your country’s leader without covering the everyone surrounding area in saliva.
A Zuma presidency can save us from that.

In related news, ambulance service ER24 has also made an urgent appeal to Zuma and the ANC to sort out the presidential vacuum as quickly as possible, as it was hampering their triage routine in head injury cases. Spokesperson Daniel van Wyk** explained:

When our staff attend an incident in which there has been a head injury, they assess the level of  consciousness of the casualty using three simple questions: what their name is, what day is it and who the president of the country is. The current lack of a president is causing our staff difficulties and causing perfectly healthy patients to panic, as they think they are actually much more badly injured than they really are.

More later, sports fans!

* which I just made up.
** more make believe.