ANC issues fake DA pamphlet: All parties should responsibly respond

I found the fake DA pamphlet some members of the ANC allegedly distributed to make a mockery of the DA somewhat funny, especially the caveat at the end, “Warning: do not show this pamphlet to your maids and garden boy … . We need their votes”. We see this kind of humour in Madam & Eve, Zapiro and Leon Schuster movies quite a bit. The pamphlet should have been more or less left at that, allowed to implode in its silliness.

The interesting thing is, if people, especially the DA, left the spurious pamphlet alone, it would have very little effect. That is to say, the DA should not take the issue to court. All Helen Zille & Co needed to do was write a refutation of the pamphlet in the Middelburg newspapers and perhaps distribute a pamphlet in the shape of a toilet roll saying “we want to wipe the … um … slate clean” and deflate the “Swart Gevaar” flyer with similar dumbass humour.

What the DA has done is get too serious and got on its high horse about the brainless prank. Getting the whole thing into the public light, where we watch yet another futile court case drama unfold, increases divisions among political groups and stirs up memories of all the evils of the apartheid days. Old resentments are fired up about “die swart gevaar” and demeaning titles like “garden boys”. Fresh bitterness is nursed. This can play into the ANC’s hands and get them more votes

You fight fire with fire. When you laugh, the world laughs with you, but when you whine, jy’s alleen, boet. You’re all alone.

And who’s to say the ANC member apparently responsible for the pamphlet, Ms Jaenette Mahlangu, will not just deny responsibility for the pamphlet? This is how politicians are: denial is part of the political game while tempers simmer and racial tension increases. This is not going to get the DA more votes. Why?

As I have said in a previous blog, “what are we thinking (if we are thinking) when we vote?” I argued that people cast their vote based on emotion, not reason. And if it is seething emotion, well that’s even better. Seeing a black ANC member going up against a party led by a white woman over the fake DA pamphlet is guaranteed to exacerbate all sorts of tension. It will evoke memories of the disenfranchisement of blacks and other races, and how the courts were simply not on the side of blacks in apartheid. Mandela, a lawyer in the 60s, unfairly lost his court battle and went to jail for rather a long time.

Don’t get me wrong; I think the pamphlet was in poor taste, though it made me chuckle, which I think is the more appropriate response. Then use the pamphlet to line your birdcage. Off-colour as the pamphlet is, don’t take the pamphlet writing of a curmudgeonly blatherskite seriously. (There! I’ve always wanted to use “curmudgeonly blatherskite” in a blog!)

I thought of actually writing a pamphlet in this blog in response to the fake DA one, as if it were written by the ANC to win ANC support. Of course there is no shortage of material for me to create the pamphlet. Oh, there’s dripping showerheads to offerings of machine guns on glittering trays and a Malema-esque endorsement of an inability to spell or write English seen as a considerable advantage in getting a senior government post.

But that is, contextually, somewhat puerile. One is then just as irresponsible as the writer of that pamphlet. The future of South Africa is a serious matter, and mudslinging at different opponents shows immature behaviour.

Let the various parties focus on what they can offer SA, based on what contributions they have made. And then please, my liewe hemel, this time round, deliver.