Is the DA helping to re-elect the ANC?
The opposition party’s unwitting message is that a better ANC is waiting in the wings — when it should be telling voters the DA can fix SA, writes Gareth van Onselen
The politics of unintended consequences is perhaps one the hardest arts to master. For example, as the ANC made its case before Parliament, in support of the government’s decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), it evoked time and time again the idea of "ubuntu". The ANC’s Honourable LKB Mpumlwana put it like this: "The foreign policy of the ANC government is anchored on the values of ubuntu." It is madness to reduce something as serious as the doctrine of human rights to an ill-defined platitude but it does give the ANC a get-out clause for that very reason. If no one knows what ubuntu is exactly, it can be anything. The problem is the DA plays this game too. As it has tried to reposition itself, it has adopted — often for no reasons other than populism or political correctness — words and phrases it cannot define either. And ubuntu is one of them.In the 2015 parliamentary debate on the white paper on foreign policy, DA foreign affairs spokesman Steven Mokg...
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