“I don’t require affirmation and reminding,” says Tony Leon of the fact that he has apparently been written out of the DA’s history.
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“I don’t require affirmation and reminding,” says Tony Leon of the fact that he has apparently been written out of the DA’s history in favour of those with Struggle credentials.
The new campaign, titled “the DA’s untold story”, was launched last week in Alexandra, where party leader Helen Zille detailed the party’s roots from Helen Suzman’s Progressive Party, and the contributions to the Struggle of members such as Patricia de Lille, Nosimo Balindlela and Joe Seremane.
Leon, interviewed about his book The Accidental Ambassador: From Parliament to Patagonia, a memoir of his three years as ambassador to Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, said he was “perfectly relaxed” about it.
But he warned of the party’s new direction. “You’ve got to stay in the future business; if you get into a contest about the past, the ANC is going to beat you every time.
“We can have an argument about what the ANC did, and I am aware that their Struggle wasn’t as heroic as they pretend, but they have all the moral authority, because they represented the disempowered.
“There is always a danger if you start reliving the past that a lot of inconvenient truths come out.
“Some of them are good, some of them are bad, some are heroic and some not so heroic,” he said.
For instance, the Progressive Party, which has been hailed as the predecessor to the DA, operated under the apartheid government, and most Africans would not have been able to vote under its policies at the time.
Leon also wondered why the party’s alliance with the New National Party, which had helped win the Western Cape for the party, and the “die-hard NNP voters” that came from the Cape Flats, were left out of the party’s story.
“The reason we formed the DA, let’s not be too precious about it, was to expand the opposition with what was available, and what was available was the NNP.
“And the reason the DA governs the Western Cape today is because the NNP voters, via the NNP machine, came into the DA.
“People are questioning why the white men are being left out of the story – what about the coloured men and women?”
But, as Leon points out, he’s no longer in politics, and he doesn’t see himself taking up an ambassadorship any time soon, and he’s also unlikely to secure such a position, having spilled many of the secrets of his three years there.
For example: how he hung up his own pictures of Suzman and the Dalai Lama in the official ambassadorial residence to offset the compulsory pictures of President Jacob Zuma and Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane.
And how his first thoughts upon meeting Argentinian president Christina Fernandez de Kirchner for the first time centred rather largely on how her lips resembled those of Angelina Jolie.
He’s convinced she’s had large amounts of plastic surgery, and flips to pictures in his book to prove his point.
“She is older than me,” he says pointing to a picture of her, her skin perfectly unlined.
If Leon was looking to be employed by the government again, calling Zuma’s cabinet “morally flexible, perhaps ethically challenged”, in the book, probably won’t help his cause.
Leon says: “There are very bad cabinet ministers and there are very good ones.”
He hosted about a dozen ministers and deputy ministers during his time in Argentina.
Some, such as Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, he invited. Others, he says, invited themselves, to “check up on what Tony Leon is doing”.
And while he has glowing things to say about Gordhan (“he’s a pharmacist by training, so he knows how to create various winning prescriptions”), his time as an ambassador taught him that there were many people in the public service who were not doing their jobs.
He said Trevor Manuel’s speech about the public service two weeks ago had echoed “exactly what I experienced”.
“I cannot tell you the number of times I picked up the phone to Pretoria and never got a response and the opportunities that were lost or had to be salvaged because the people at the other end weren’t doing what they should be doing.”
Leon says he’s happy with his performance as an ambassador, having increased the country’s exposure in a “closed society”, “empowered” his team and given them increased levels of responsibility, and pointing out the huge opportunities that exist in South America. - Sunday Independent