Dear Mmusi Maimane, Bleeder of the Opposition.
Congratulations on finally getting rid of your mayor in Cape Town. Patricia de Lille is extremely dangerous and I’m not saying that just because she is a woman.
She was born in Beaufort West, for heaven’s sake. You’ve had a rough time of it lately. There will always be barbarians banging at your gate, but more worrying is the enemy that lurks within.
The old Democratic Party should never have allowed the New National Party to wheel its Trojan horse into what is now your house. Not your fault. You were fresh out of school at the time. You addressed a rally on Freedom Day and made the rookie mistake of suggesting that white privilege was getting in the way of ending black poverty and needed to be addressed. This might have gone down with the great unwashed, but not with some of the senior members of your party. By senior, I obviously mean white.
Your remarks struck a jarring chord with your volatile shadow minister of public enterprises, Natasha Mazzone, who held up her father as an example of why not all whites were privileged. You’ll be familiar with her tweet but here it is again: “My father arrived from Naples in Italy, he was dark, and could not speak English or Afrikaans, but he was a great chef. He built himself up from nothing to make a good life for his family.”
She has a point. I remember seeing the signs along Durban’s beachfront in the 1980s, “Whites Only - No Blacks or Italians”. Not being able to speak English or Afrikaans clearly counted in the Mazzone patriarch’s favour. Whoever hired him and helped him on his way to becoming a great chef must’ve mistaken him for a well-tanned mute from Margate. If word had got out that he was Italian, he would have been lucky to find work at the Wimpy.
There seems to be a pattern here, comrade. May I call you comrade? I know the honorific is generally reserved for revolutionaries, but as a white man I find it prudent to call all black people "comrade". Unlike AfriForum, some of us think it a bad idea to continue hammering nails into our own coffin.
But getting back to the pattern. Most of your problems seem to be caused by women. Who among us can forget Lindiwe whats-her-name who claimed to have been human trafficked into the DA and was eventually granted asylum by Harvard University?
You also tried to muzzle your predecessor, Helen Zille, who seems to have developed either a drinking or a thinking problem. She does have her moments of lucidity, but then gets onto Twitter and all hell breaks loose.
Then you had Dianne Kohler Barnard sharing a Facebook post by a flaming cockwomble who suggested that life in South Africa was better under the Fuhrer PW Botha.
So, in the end, it was De Lille’s radio interview with Eusebius whats-his-face that enabled you to sever all ties with her.
“I will walk away from the DA once I have cleared my name,” she said, brutally violating the party’s code of conduct.
Big mistake. Firing her on those grounds, that is. What you should have done is gone to her house with a baseball bat and made it clear that even if she did succeed in clearing her name, she wouldn’t be walking anywhere anytime soon. If there’s one thing the DA could benefit from, it’s the Mafia’s code of silence. Even the president is with me on this.
Because nobody really knew why you wanted De Lille out so badly, the charge sheet was released this week. It seemed a bit limp, to be honest. I’ve been accused of way more serious stuff over the years and have never been asked to leave anything apart from a couple of pubs and one or two marriages.
People say the DA is misreading the mood of the voters. They are only half right because 50 percent of your voters are preoccupied with menopause and you’d be a fool to guess what kind of mood they might be in. As for the men, well, it’s hard to say. When South African men get in a mood, they might murder their wives and girlfriends or drag the family off to Perth, but it would take more than a palace coup in the mayoral chambers to get them to vote for the ANC.
Besides, a thundering tsunami of fresh crises and scandals will crash down on us between now and next year’s elections. The dogs will keep barking for as long as the caravans keep coming and going. It’s when the dogs fall silent that we need to start worrying.
By the way, condolences on what President Ramaphosa did to you in Parliament the other day.
“We will be the first to defend Mmusi Maimane against those in his own party who deny racial inequality,” said the wily coyote.
It was like handing a thirsty man a poisoned chalice.