Stop messing up the DA with talk of racism

The reason voters are leaving the DA and moving to “extreme” minority parties, says former DA panjandrum Douglas Gibson, is “this constant harping on racism, which is making white people tired, very sick of it”.

“It’s not only Afrikaans-speaking white people,” he explained to SAfm’s Stephen Grootes on Tuesday morning. “It’s all of them.”

Seriously, black South Africans! Why are you messing up the DA by endlessly harping on racism when we all know racism doesn’t exist anymore? Why keep dredging up the past when the economic crime of apartheid has been resolved with full and fair compensation to all its victims?

Can’t you see how sick and tired we are? Not just the Afrikaans-speaking white people! All of us!

As for you critics of the DA, don’t you libtards and snowflakes understand that the moment we all stop talking about race the DA will start growing again?

And no, Helen Zille’s tweet about “black privilege” wasn’t about race. It was about, er, privilege ... of people who happen to be ... black?

As for the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) calling for a “white man” to replace Mmusi Maimane, well, they were talking about merit and not race, OK? Race had nothing to do with it when they tweeted: “The seed of the DA’s recovery has been planted by a white man in the Western Cape.” It was about ... seeds?

OK, enough of that. Trying to get your head around that level of bullshit is fun in short bursts but next thing the clock strikes 12 and I’m stuck being an IRR shill forever.

To be fair, however, Gibson’s self-pitying little whine wasn’t much sillier than most of the stuff coming out of the party this week.

Consider Herman Mashaba, tweeting in March how much he admired Helen Zille before deciding that the party was a disaster the moment she returned to it. Consider Zille promising to “stay in her lane” and then succumbing to Twitter eight seconds later.

Consider Phumzile van Damme, tweeting a link to a Linkedin.com article yesterday called “A Toxic Work Culture Is Forcing High-Performing People To Quit”. (In other news, entries for Subtweet of the Year, 2019, are hereby closed.)

And let’s not forget about Mmusi Maimane praising Mashaba as his “hero” moments after Mashaba delivered the sort of scorched-earth farewell that gets most former Politburo members deleted from official photographs. Seriously, let’s not forget it. I know that everything Maimane says is coated in a kind of barbiturate syrup made of anticharisma and ground-up head prefects, but that’s one for the books.

So what happens next? Well, Maimane and Athol Trollip have some very secret meetings with consultants about the pros and cons of starting their own party. The DA-IRR discusses the best way to position itself as, in Ferial Haffajee’s words, the Freedom Front Plus Lite. This will take some careful tuning of dog whistles.

As for the rest of us, well, we’ll just continue pointing and staring. After all, it’s not every day you get to watch a major opposition party whose most major opposition is itself.