Don’t lie to us Mbete, it’s not just whites who are sick of Zuma

Unless Cosatu and Vuwani have suddenly become centres of whiteness?

Baleka Mbete. Picture: Refilwe Modise

There is a continued narrative that those who want the president gone are groups that represent white people or have the interests of white people at heart.

This narrative is not helped by the fact that the #ZumaMustGo movement originated from within the ranks of the tax abuse protest organisation Outa.

Just this weekend, the chairperson of the ANC, Baleka Mbete, took to the podium at the funeral of 15 of the children who tragically lost their lives in a horrific minibus taxi accident to lambast those who, in her eyes “only learnt to toyi-toyi now that the ANC is in power”.

Where were they during the anti-apartheid struggle?”

No guessing who she’s referring to; she’s simply feeding into the narrative that a certain faction of the ruling party has chosen to present: that only white people want the president to leave office before the end of his term.

Forget that she used an inappropriate platform to spew her clearly political diatribe. That’s what desperate people do. They hijack clearly non-political events for such purposes because their continued defence of the indefensible has denied them platforms at political events.

Mbete was booed during a May Day rally in KZN because of her association with President Jacob Zuma’s faction.

One wonders whether she asked for the platform at the solemn occasion of the kids’ funeral or she was invited to give the speech, but clearly she was still sore from having been denied the opportunity to express to real comrades how white people want the president gone.

The problem is the comrades who booed her in KZN are not white people, they are black workers who are clearly fed up with the abuse of the mandate they gave to her government.

The man whose rule she was defending on stage then went to address the people of Vuwani, an area that has been in the news for the past two years because the people have been demanding to have their area included in the Makhado municipality instead of the Malamulele municipality, a request that was only considered after protracted battles on the streets.

Vuwani has been left to fester for all this time, with the people resorting to even denying their own children education, but the presidency did not lift a finger. Instead, the president has chosen to send delegations led by what people consider junior leaders in Cabinet.

At first, it seemed the president had taken the brave step of going all the way to Vuwani to address the residents. People waited, and waited.

And for the second time in a week, the president abandoned a political meeting, citing security concerns.

Last time I checked, Vuwani was 100% black – but they too are tired of the misrule.

The most telling blow though was the one delivered at the May Day rally in Bloemfontein last week.

Cosatu members refused to be addressed by the president.

“We don’t want to listen to that man,” was one of the simple sound bites from the event.

It’s been reported that Jessie Duarte had a heated exchange with Gwede Mantashe for sending the president to a rally where it was obvious he would be “torn apart”.

What happened to the narrative that black people don’t want the president gone? Surely a Cosatu rally should have been safe space for the president to attack those “who learnt to toyi-toyi after 1994”?

The fallacy has been exposed for what it is. All rational people want an end to the misrule.

Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.