The DA’s response to De Klerk’s offensive apartheid remarks created further bad feeling when it might just have kept quiet
One of the more unpleasant sights last week was that of EFF leader Julius Malema and his red brigade in parliament disrupting the state of the nation address and making South Africans wait an hour and a half to hear President Cyril Ramaphosa. What looked like
This being SA, the madness didn’t stop there. Who would have put money on the EFF emerging as the winners out of all that? But somehow they did. By the end of the week, the main topic of discussion was not their childish and undemocratic behaviour, but the opposition DA’s troubled relationship with the country’s past.
De Klerk himself issued a statement on Monday acknowledging this was unwise, having received a deluge of condemnation from across the country, including from the champions of reconciliation, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his wife Leah. Tutu, one of the last of the great South Africans and the man who gave us the term “rainbow nation”, must have been especially hurt by these utterances, noting that they had the potential to reverse the gains made since apartheid ended.
MP Ghaleb Cachalia felt the need to jump straight into it. People who used this term with reference to apartheid were “cavalier”, he said. It’s not clear if he was referring to UN resolutions from decades ago or to those who merely referred to them.
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