Dear Editor.-
The response by DA leader Councillor Doug Rawlins was both predictable and understandable. Essentially it was his injudicious attack on the ANC leadership, with all its offensiveness, which became the ‘issue’.
His unsubtle missive against the party and the president appears incongruous with his traditional rationality and his tempered character. My reaction was precisely against this strange behaviour!
Irrespective of his intention, Cllr Rawlins’ fraternisation with ‘ardent ANC leaders’ who confide in him, is conniving and dangerous. Unscrupulous dealings of this nature make one’s commitment to one’s own party questionable.
Cllr Rawlins should be cognisant of the processes involving leadership determination. In the ANC this is a democratic one initiated at the branch level, the outcomes of which have to be sanctioned at provincial and national levels. The organisation does not possess a mechanism to arbitrarily remove leaders and consign them to foreign lands or remote villages.
On the issue of governance, Cllr Rawlins reveals his party’s limited experience. The catchphrase for all its members relates to Cape Town. It has become the ever-flashing icon that surfaces in all argument.
The reality is that the DA possesses neither the capacity nor the experience to govern complex municipalities like Durban, Johannesburg or locally, Izingolweni, Umzumbe and Hibiscus Coast. This fact is amply substantiated by their fearfulness to contest many rural wards during elections.
Their reluctance to contest ward 29 in the recent bi-elections is a case in point. By such actions there is an admission of its inability to govern all of the country’s people, rural and urban.
The gripe that the ANC does not base its governance on planning cannot be further from the truth. The Millennium Development Goals and the more recent NDP is testimony to ANC’s commitment to long and short-term planning. There is an understandable stubbornness of the opposition to accept our celebrated successes.
Why would Rawlins descend to the level of a personal attack and relate the apparent failure of the district council to me as an individual and part-time councillor? He seems to have accepted the fact that DA representatives at Ugu have abrogated their corporate responsibility as co-governors.
On the Palestinian question, Cllr Rawlins should be informed that the ‘two state solution’ was not the issue. Reference was made to the genocide that we saw in the media – blitzing of thousands of homes with families inside, bombing of hospitals with helpless patients and cannonading of schools and UN shelters, where woman and children sought refuge.
That was the ‘issue’! Helen Zille’s ‘two state solution’ has neither relevance nor justification for these acts of barbarism.
Leadership and governance goes beyond the likes and dislikes of individuals. It cannot locate itself within the narrow confines of ideological obsessions. Nor should our actions and expressions kowtow to the desires of our funding masters.
In this beautiful country that we are destined to live in, we need leaders to show a sense of objectivity, inclusive of understanding and respect. In doing so, we take our country with all its people forward.
RONNIE NAIR
