Patricia de Lille’s fate in the hands of the DA is the party strategy gone wrong

Dear reader, if you still have doubts, you would do well to ask Agang SA founder Dr Mamphela Ramphele and former DA parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko. I have no doubt Ramphele would take comfort in narrating the Agang SA story of narrowly escaping from the DA’s politics of deceit, smoke and mirrors, manipulation and parasitism.

I have no doubt in my mind that Mazibuko, who left her post as a DA parliamentary leader under acrimonious circumstances in 2014, would grab the opportunity to expose the malicious strategy of how the party, in the absence of transformation policies, turns black people into Trojan Horses and pawns to become relevant and win elections in our hard earned-democratic dispensation.

Mazibuko would also relate to her own story of how quick the white neocolonial liberals and conservative Afrikaner illiberals within the party become intolerant, defensive and hostile towards the very same blacks when they feel they are no longer tamed and fit for purpose due to resurrection of their Pan Africanist political consciousness. This group, a real group think, Mmusi Maimane, always see and think of a revolutionary political consciousness as a threat to their apartheid ill-gotten privileges and white domination within and outside the DA.

People like Mazibuko within the party have become and would continue to be causalities of this group think because of their progressive ideas. It is exactly for this reason that I do not see any future for the Mayor of the City of Tshwane, Solly Msimanga, in the DA. It is only stooges like Bonginkosi Madikizela, DA leader in the Western Cape, who are celebrated, protected, touted and backed for leadership positions.

Thus, the DA’s zealous fight for the removal of the Mayor of the City of Cape Town, Patricia de Lille, masquerading and glorified as a fight against corruption, should be viewed within the above context and be seen for what it is, a push against the proliferation of Pan Africanist political consciousness within the ranks of the DA and the protection of the white minority hegemony. Nothing else. And all indications are that they did not anticipate the intensity of the war that De Lille is prepared to wage against the party.

How myopic can they be? Did the DA really think that De Lille, a veteran politician, would allow herself to be used and flushed down the drain after investing so much with not only her own political party, Independent Democrats (ID), but also with her own political track record. This saw the DA winning the Western Cape with an unprecedented margin during the 2014 national and provincial elections.

The DA political strategy of fronting and devouring smaller parties became rife since Helen Zille took over the reins from Tony Leon in 2007. And it has worked for the the party if one considers its national electoral performance which grew to 22.23% in the 7 May 2014 general elections from the 12.4% it received during the 14 April 2004 elections and Western Cape provincial results for the very same period which grew from 27.11% to 59.38%.

But, let me hasten to argue, this sinister strategy has partly worked because of what Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and intellectual from Martinique, would have regarded as the remnants of colonialism and apartheid if he were to rise from his grave and continue to write his book, Black Skin, White Masks. In this book Fanon shares his own experiences in addition to presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanisation, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche of blacks, who in the final analysis would try to appropriate and imitate the culture of the coloniser.

Second, this DA strategy largely succeeded because of the fertile ground created by the rogue elements, thieves and nincompoops that hijacked the African National Congress, the oldest liberation movement in the continent, under the leadership of former president Jacob Zuma.

The strategy met the ANC at its weakest point ever since 1912, and it can only get better. It is exactly for the same reason that the election of President Cyril Matamela Ramaphosa by the ANC at its 54^th national conference at Nasrec in Gauteng plunged the DA into unprecedented panic to a point of hatching the very befitting phrase of Ramaphoria. Now that the facilitator for the drafting of the South African Constitution, strategist, unionist and a jurist is at the helm of the ANC, I dare say the DA would not find an easy ride with its obfuscation and cosmetic changes.

It is even worse that their parasitic strategy has been laid bare to the public by a desperate and clumsy fight for the removal of De Lille as the Mayor of the City of Cape Town in a bid to replace her with another useful black. And I say, without any fear of contradiction, that the ground is no more fertile for the DA to continue misleading South Africans. Watch this space. DM

David Vakalisa Ka-Ndyalvan is an ANC member at Akaso Branch and writes in his personal capacity.