DA leader Helen Zille and her right-hand man, Wilmot James, have hit back at critics who attacked the DA’s leadership.
|||Cape Town - DA leader Helen Zille and her right-hand man, federal chairman Wilmot James, have hit back in the battle for the soul of the DA, attacking critics who accuse the party of having abandoned its liberal roots.
In separate forums on Thursday, Zille and James labelled former DA leader Tony Leon and commentator RW Johnson “rank conservatives” who spoke “nonsense”.
Leon, a former DA leader, on Thursday 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 failed to respond to calls and an e-mail for comment.
The two men recently launched an assault on Zille’s leadership after the party supported the Employment Equity Amendment Bill in Parliament.
Zille subsequently said this had occurred in error.
Leon and Johnson said the party was “messy”, lacked policy direction and had drifted away from its liberal traditions in the quest for the black vote.
The two 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 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 of liberal thought.”
In a article sent to the Cape Times on Thursday, James said the statements by Leon and Johnson were “naive” because South Africa’s “unspeakable poverty” required that every possible avenue be found to create opportunities and jobs for the poor.
He added their views were also “shallow” because liberalism was not simply about 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,” said James.
“There is wistfulness in Tony Leon’s efforts to reinvent the environment that propels him.”
Zille said on Thursday 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 while it was a mistake to support the bill, 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.
“It is pure mythology that our predecessor parties embodied liberal purity from which we are now departing.”
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 Employment Equity Amendment Bill 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,” he added.
Cape Times