The Attack on Helen Zille is Embarrassing

Identity politics and outrage culture are poisoning our country.

Everybody laughs when Robert Mugabe blames his country's woes on Britain and imperialism. That should scare the hell out of South Africans busy fuming at Helen Zille's innocuous tweeting.

Helen Zille, Premier of the Western Cape, recently travelled to Singapore and was perhaps a little bit over-eager to share the obvious lessons you can draw from one the great post-colonial success stories.

Singapore is a tiny little island country with no natural resources that after decades of colonisation and brutal World War II occupation resisted the surging Communism of the region to become a safe, rich, and stable first world country.

As Zille was boarding her plane to fly home she tweeted the following:

https://twitter.com/helenzille/status/842245461071261696

https://twitter.com/helenzille/status/842249938801197056

https://twitter.com/helenzille/status/842253237763858432

But then she started to react to the typical PC outrage machine that is Twitter:

https://twitter.com/helenzille/status/842260539644497921

https://twitter.com/helenzille/status/842262877805375488

Zille made a political mistake - but not a moral or intellectual one.

She assumed that there are still enough reasonable people out there who can discuss any issue to do with race or colonialism without falling into political sloganeering. The truth is politics is now post-rational. We choose our political identity and throw rocks at each other without ever actually debating in common terms.

The irony is that all of this proves Zille's main point.

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A country like Singapore didn't succeed by dwelling on the past and continually talking about race, colonialism and random enemies of the people, like the PR-industry invented term 'White Monopoly Capital'.

Instead, Singaporeans practised a much more honest form of what we would call 'ubuntu' by actually trying to do things that would help people in the future. They rolled their sleeves up and made stuff work - as much of Europe did after they had finished massacring each other in World War II (another reminder that no race has a monopoly on civilised politics).

For example, they did not rush to adopt OBE in education in order for elites to make themselves feel good about being progressive. They asked themselves what their youth needed to know and taught that. They did not spend their time whining about globalisation. They made globalisation work for them.

This is obviously not to say that Singapore is some kind of utopia or guiding light for all of us to follow in every detail - simply that their lack of grievance politics was at the heart of their nation-building.

And so when Zille tries to make this point, the reaction is all too predictable.

How dare she mention colonialism without condemning absolutely everything to do with it? No matter that her intention was to motivate her followers to make their country better so that fewer people have to live in poverty and the despair which has become so endemic to our struggling country. But that means nothing in our censorious, humourless age.

Quite clearly, by highlighting Singapore, Zille was not making any kind of race-based argument. Singapore is definitely not a white country. It's the PC crowd on Twitter who obsess over race.

Upon her return Zille wrote a fantastic op-ed for the Daily Maverick.

In it she cites Madiba himself:

"I was reminded of what President Nelson Mandela had said of the missionary schools, where so many African leaders of his generation were educated:

"'These schools have often been criticised for being colonialist in their attitudes and practices,' said Mandela. 'Yet, even with such attitudes, I believe their benefits outweighed their disadvantages.'"

Imagine Madiba said that on Twitter today. Although come to think of it Madiba is already being slated by a new generation who find all that rainbow talk and reconciliation pesky inconveniences to their agenda. They would prefer Mandela had turned our country into Venezuela or Zimbabwe - glorious examples of socialism and anti-imperialism, in which you can feel so good about your political and radical bona fides while you destroy people's lives in the name of social justice.

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The ironies keep adding up.

Our ruling party, in all their progressive glory, is officially allied with the SA Communist Party, who bear allegiance to the most pernicious form of ideological colonisation ever devised by man - the Germanic-Russian creed of Marxist-Leninism, directly responsible for more deaths than any other idea or belief system in human history.

I would much prefer the ANC followed their roots in black liberalism and communitarianism as practised by the likes of Moshoeshoe of the Basutho and Albert Luthuli.

So if we are going to start decolonising our country, why don't we start with booting all the old German Marxist nonsense that has been debunked so many times? Our beloved UCT protestors, however, find Isaac Newton more offensive than Marx it seems. Gravity is far more of a threat than gulags and state-enforced famines, apparently.

But we won't decolonise anything that is trendy and left-wing. Instead we will be side-tracked by our game of identity politics, all conveniently played while our government systematically loots our country and oppresses the poor in the most vile way possible - whilst parading as their one true friend and ally.

I have never been one to view the DA as some kind of pure force for political redemption. I don't agree with a lot of the DA's policies. But I do recognize their important place as a technocratically effective opposition party in our democracy.

But if the DA gives in to all of this, it may be time to give the IFP another look, because this kind of groupthink destroys any political party.

Maimane needs to have guts and stand by Zille and say, yes, we can learn a lot from Singapore and let's start focusing on solutions.

We need a national politics that focuses on the big questions - what is the common good? how can we stop crime and corruption? how can we serve the poor? - and not on questions concerning which words we are not allowed to say or think.

What makes me truly sad is that as many people finish reading this, they will quickly write off everything I say because I am a white man.

And this how the Rainbow Dream ends.