By Rob Hersov
The split vote between the DA and PA in the Swellendam by-election last week allowed the ruinous ANC to take the municipality and sent shivers down my spine. It should have been a clear win for a DA/PA partnership.
As it should be across South Africa now, with the ANC permanently ejected from the Western Province, as well as other key cities and municipalities.
Surely, after the Zondo commission report indicting the ANC and its cadres, the ANC’s blatant looting of South Africa’s SOEs, world-leading unemployment numbers, the ANC-induced load-shedding that has brought our economy to its knees, and the obvious attempt to kill off Andre de Ruyter by ANC-backed mafia elements, you would think by now most of this country would be desperately voting for change?
Well, they aren’t.
The lemmings are still following spineless Cyril (the President who let the lights go out) and his fellow incompetents and kleptocrats into the abyss. And this abyss may well unite the corrupt and incompetent ANC with its evil and racist cousins in the EFF.
And that will truly make us the failed state we are so close to becoming. Which means that, on the back of the recent by-elections and Frans Cronje’s polls saying the ANC’s decline has been halted, you should start to pack your bags and be ready to leave the country in 2024.
Where is our Rainbow Coalition (or Coalition of the Good Guys) riding to the rescue, now that we so desperately need it? Fighting tooth and claw. And against one another.
We are running out of time for this natural grouping to come together and, once and for all, save the country by voetsek-ing the monsters and clowns of the ANC.
The DA and PA are natural allies, and that obvious partnership should make it so much easier to pull this Rainbow Coalition together along with Action SA, Inkatha, VF+ and ACDP. While I am a DA supporter, and a great admirer of the DA team and very much Helen Zille, I am a strong believer in Gayton Mackenzie, and like his (much smaller, less prominent) team of Kenny Kunene, Charles Cilliers, Eugene Botha, and Marlon Daniels.
They are brothers-in-arms and very much my type of rugged individuals who want the best for ALL South Africans. They are Judeo-Christians, free market capitalists (and fiercely anti-communist like me and against central control), democrats, pro-West, and firm believers in unlocking human ingenuity. They are honest, transparent, principled and Gayton certainly tell it like it is.
Sounds a lot like the DA to me……………….
The PA as a brand and culture is rather antithetical to the DA, since Gayton is a charismatic leader with the tendency sometimes to come across as a political strongman. Liberals are suspicious of that, and it doesn’t help that Gayton was imprisoned by the age of 20 for being an armed robber. Try as they might, my DA seem incapable of trusting Gayton today, despite the overwhelming evidence that he has transformed his life into a force for good – this distrust constantly leads to offence being caused and taken.
That aside, however, the DA does seem even to me to have a sense of entitlement and arrogance that extends well beyond the PA. All other parties who have worked with the DA tell me this. The DA seems to believe that only they can govern properly despite evidence in Tshwane, which has been under the DA’s control since 2016, that they too can fall victim to the sins of incumbency. Notwithstanding the excellent work the DA does elsewhere (compare that record to the corrupt ANC destroying all the municipalities they run), the AG’s report was scathing about how the capital city was being run badly.
The DA also has a tendency to insult the basic intelligence of others. They act as though they are not in it for power, but I am not sure what other word describes their situation of literally being in power, as they are in Cape Town and the Western Cape. Power matters. Without it, you can’t do anything, good or bad. Power is not bad in and of itself. It’s what you do with it that defines the nature of that power. I would have thought this obvious enough, but when Gayton is honest and points out that he entered politics to gain and wield power, the snowflakes in the DA stamp their little feet (nod to Rodd Liddle here) – these snowflakes are a minority in the DA but are rather vocal.
Gayton McKenzie has no time for corruption. He is happy for businesspeople to make money so that we can build a healthy and sustainable economy, but that needs to be the product of businesses offering genuine value for goods and services (unlike the patently useless ANC tenderpreneurs who have cost the country billions).Tthe ANC version of this is nothing but looting.
Gayton has already shown how he deals with any official who abuses public funds (90% of these abusers are, as you would expect, ANC appointees) and yet he gets no credit for that, with the media instead accusing him of “purging” people. Oh please. The vile deeds of every person he has “purged” could easily see every single one of them put on Transnet (if the ANC hadn’t already looted it to death) to the ninth level of hell.
The DA really has no hard evidence of any corruption against Gayton because I am convinced it doesn’t exist.
All I get from the DA, when I ask them, is mumblings and murmurings and “General of the 26 Gang” nonsense and “the PA screwed us in Knysna” and the like. Or I will get outrageous and what I am convinced are lies about Gayton, as Helen has recently done (she does keep saying to me “we have to meet on Gayton” but I have yet to get that meeting).
The DA is terrified of losing power in the Western Cape. It is the DA Motherland. But my beloved DA don’t want to accept the naked truth that they have taken the so-called coloured vote for granted for too long now, and that it is no longer enough for the DA to simply present itself to this important constituency as the “best alternative to the ANC” (and it clearly is a vastly better alternative to the clowns of ANC).
The PA’s constituency has come to trust Gayton, even if they are forced to work with the ANC out of necessity, because the PA makes sure they deliver tangible change on the ground wherever they are entrusted with power.
To be fair, the PA itself has not conducted itself flawlessly in coalition. Some of the criticism they receive is warranted, but the DA should be wary about high-horsing in this regard because the rest of the rainbow coalition has, on many occasions, observed flaws in the DA’s leadership of coalitions.
The reality is that the PA can either be a strong ally to the rainbow coalition or they can be an adversary driven into the arms of the ANC and EFF in 2024. How the DA treats the PA will define whether they become friend or foe to the crucial and last-chance project of unseating the morally corrupt and clearly incompetent ANC in 2024.
In Gauteng the DA has treated the PA with scorn even though the PA, its leaders and its supporters would more naturally affiliate with the rainbow coalition, but they have now aligned with the ANC and EFF after falling out with the DA. Surely, given the crushing weight of another five years of ANC abuse at national level, differences need to be put aside given that the PA is growing and can contribute significantly to the good guys by adding another shade of (rather bright) green to the rainbow.
The DA’s problem is simply that they don’t trust the PA and a relationship is therefore always going to be strained. With the ANC, the PA do not trust them and they don’t trust the PA, but the PA is teaching the ANC how to behave in PA company. The PA can’t do much about municipal departments they don’t control, but the ANC are learning fast that they can’t protect any corrupt officials where the PA is in charge (despite desperate calls from the likes of Paul Mashatile for Gayton to not suspend the ANC cadres so they can continue to steal).
The DA mistakenly believes that by calling the PA gangsters the coloured people will turn against the PA, but the recent by-election results should be a wake-up call to the DA that this strategy is not working. I genuinely think the DA needs to accept reality that they may very well need the PA to form a coalition to keep the ANC out of the Western Cape next year.
The DA needs to change its attitude towards working with the PA – and fast.
The superb Dr. Corne Mulder and I have personally witnessed (Corne way more than me) the PA try to negotiate coalition governments with the DA in Oudtshoorn, Knysna, TWK, the whole of the Central Karoo, the whole of the Northern Cape, Bloemfontein, Potchefstroom, Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni, Tshwane, Nelson Mandela Bay and literally everywhere else where the PA even have the tiniest say. I have seen numerous WhatsApp exchanges to prove this.
For Helen Zille to announce that the PA is nothing more than a proxy vote for the ANC is, believe me, absolute nonsense, and a grave mistake for which we will all pay the ultimate price by letting the gangsters of the ANC win a majority in 2024.
I am convinced that Helen has profoundly misunderstood Gayton McKenzie, and whomever is going to take the DA forward (John Steenhuisen is a good option and already in the saddle) needs to override Helen on this matter. And now.
There isn’t a war between the PA and the DA yet, but I am not going to pretend it isn’t bad. It’s very bad, and the DA have made it that way because they seem to be terrified of legitimising the PA any further in the eyes of the coloured voter. And it seems that as long as Helen is making this call, progress will not be possible.
The time has come (the walrus said)………….to team up with the PA and kick the ANC out of government, before we hit rock bottom.
Wake up, dear DA, and do the right thing.
Please.
