GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Helen Zille, destroyer of brands

Welcome to Tweet of the Week. Every Friday I will use this column to hand out an award to one person who has tweeted something of significance. There are no strict rules, only that the tweet in question must offer an important insight, define a debate (notorious or otherwise) or mark an occasion.

This week the Tweet of the Week goes to @helenzille for:

"For those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc."

Profile: Helen Zille is the former leader of the DA and the premier of the Western Cape. A former journalist for the Rand Daily Mail, she moved to politics late in her career, joining the then-Democratic Party (DP) in 1994. Later she became an MP for the DA, and then mayor of Cape Town before being elected as party leader in 2007 and, then, Western Cape premier in 2009. She has just over 1-million followers on Twitter.

Citation: On Thursday morning, for reasons known only to herself, Helen Zille took the personal decision that the best possible thing for the DA, its brand, growth and development, would be to defend the legacy of colonialism as not all bad.

And so it was she set to work on her Twitter workbench, seemingly entirely of her own volition, and quickly fashioned a suitably brand-damaging sentiment, which she then tweeted.

The fallout was instantaneous and significant. And it wasn’t good. Why would it be?

Before looking at the tweet itself, it is worth saying something about the current leader, Mmusi Maimane, and his effect on the party.

There are many different ways to assess the impact of a leader on a political party, but one almost universal by-product of any leader is that the party in question tends to take on their character. In this regard, Maimane has been a boon for the DA, particularly on social media.

Zille, conspiratorial, paranoid, conservative, stubborn and morally indignant, saw the DA consolidate and exacerbate its already confrontational disposition into a fundamentally aggressive, distrustful and angry personality. (And remember, Twitter is a reserved version of any person’s unadulterated personality. If she is like this on Twitter, you can only imagine how Zille is in person, and the things she must say.)

On social media, forced regularly to defend the lead and tone Zille would establish on platforms like Twitter, the party went to war almost every day. As a result, it alienated many, not nearly as much with its arguments as its tone. It exuded aggression and hostility towards disagreement.

So far as the party’s organisational culture goes, the trait Zille engendered is so firmly established it has yet to rid itself of it. Helen Zille’s own emotional shadow is still cast long over the DA. But the situation has improved. Maimane has brought with him a calm, more emotionally intelligent demeanour. Sure, he has strayed into hostile waters himself once or twice but generally he is the tonic the DA so desperately needed. It is slowly becoming less angry or prone to paranoia, more compassionate and composed.

But then there is Zille. She still has her Twitter account and, with it, direct access to 1-million followers — far more than Maimane and the DA’s main account combined. She wields extraordinary influence and yet she has learnt nothing. The former DA leader is a law unto herself, out of sync with the new identity the DA is trying to forge, beyond advice, and set on expressing herself no matter what the DA’s goals and objectives. She seems to exist in an entirely different universe to the one the DA is trying to engage and bond with.

It remains a great irony that, under Zille, the DA tightened its attitude to social media communications, through ever-stricter rules and regulations, to the point that it has become positively authoritarian, in the ANC sense of the idea.

But none of these rules seem to apply to Zille herself, who can happily go about wreaking brand damage to her heart’s content without consequence. Her shadow has fashioned the DA’s character and intimidated the party too, and she is the ultimate beneficiary.

At least, until Thursday.

It was not Maimane who the DA first sent out on damage control but national spokeswoman Phumzile van Damme. She would tweet, soon after Zille had boarded a plane, her parting words exuding the kind of stubborn indignation that defines so much of her rhetoric, "Colonialism was a crime against humanity. There isn’t a single aspect of it that can be said to be positive or beneficial to Africans."

Zille had said, "Getting onto an aeroplane now and won’t get onto the wi-fi so that I can cut off those who think EVERY aspect of colonial legacy was bad." But there were technical difficulties with the flight, preventing takeoff and so, forty minutes later, no doubt after her phone had glowed red hot with calls from the party’s national headquarters, she issued an apology.

"I apologise unreservedly for a tweet that may have come across as a defence of colonialism. It was not," she tweeted.

It wasn’t true. Her initial tweet was, of course, a defence of colonialism, albeit a qualified one. You can be pretty sure that apology was the result of a party demand and not offered up freely or as the consequence of any genuine contrition on her part. She doesn’t do that kind of regret. As Zille herself has said, "I just tell the truth!". That apology will eat away at her like some kind of cancer. She will hate the fact that she is bound by it. Watch this space, in the months to come, subtly at first, she will be begin by inference to erode its integrity.

By this stage, several other DA public representatives have expressed their contempt for Zille’s position and, with her apology, the record and the mood established, Maimane decided it was safe for him to emerge and put something on the record. "Let’s make this clear," he tweeted, "Colonialism, like apartheid, was a system of oppression and subjugation. It can never be justified." Not exactly brave, given how long he waited, but a firm, clear response nonetheless.

Zille was now trending nationally. Once Maimane went on record a few other "brave" DA souls ventured an opinion. The culture of fear Zille engendered likewise lingers in the DA.

But, in the party’s response, there are signs it too is fracturing. Had Zille tweeted that three years ago, the party faithful would no doubt have gone to war on her behalf. Now, the disciplinary machine has been set in motion against her. That is a first.

This could well be a breaking point. Now that really would be irony, to be hung by the very authoritarian rules she encouraged and developed.

Likewise, this is possibly a key moment in Maimane’s leadership. It is unprecedented for Zille to go dark after apologising or being rounded upon. Normally, there follows an endless stream of justifications and retorts as she slowly dies in the ditch defending her every word. It can last weeks, this kind of trench warfare. On Thursday there were only a few. There must have been some kind of ultimatum. A line in the sand. And Zille complied. It was a big moment for Maimane’s leadership.

Likewise, it might well constitute a tipping point for Zille. Many will have swallowed hard over the years to indulge Zille’s compulsions. But politics is a brutal business. As evidenced by the party’s response on Twitter, an open goal is often pounced on by many of those who quietly wait in the wings, ’til they can see the whites of their enemy’s eyes. There will be internal consequences for all this, least of all because an apology is by its nature an admission of wrongdoing.

Everyone knows colonialism was a devastating, brutal and inhumane system. There have been books and theses, even entire schools of thought, dedicated to its consequences, intended and otherwise. But what you cannot do, which Zille at the very least implied, is to draw an ethical conclusion from a material by-product. It is like saying torture is not all bad because at least it resulted in a chamber. Bricks and mortar are not metaphors for morality.

 And to try to have that debate on Twitter, of all places, in a tinderbox environment? It was stupid. The legacy of colonialism was responsible for a great many destructive things. Damage to self-esteem was one of the most brutal and long lasting. Zille seems entirely insensitive to that fact, her crusade for "truth" rendering her more machine than human. For all her IQ, its the size of her EQ that leaves you scratching your head.

Strategically, what is the point, least of all politically, of trying to find some upside to colonialism? What purpose does it serve? Is the suggestion, at some point, that a return to colonialism might prove helpful? That we should study and learn from it? Why try to make this point at all? It seems to be an observation devoid of value, moral or political. Why, on a Thursday morning, in the year 2017, did Zille feel the urge to make this argument? It was as stupid as it was selfish.

Helen Zille exists in the political Twilight Zone. In the Western Cape, she is battling tooth and nail to control the province and city of Cape Town and keep out Patricia de Lille at all costs. She will not go quietly into the night. But on Twitter, with her 1-million followers, she looms far larger than her formal position. She dominates the DA’s online presence and, by just being herself, she undermines the DA’s brand almost every day.

Online, she is a very real threat to the DA’s prospects. She can’t help herself, unable to introspect, to adapt or change, she is trapped by her own personality, set as it is in some kind of iron-cast mould.

Thus, her Twitter account, effectively her personality writ large, is a hazard. It has been for a long time, only now it enjoys little of the blind loyalty and support it had in the past. Now it is an aberration, not a commodity. It is a time machine. Look into it and you will see anger, indignation and paranoia. And it’s to a different future the DA wishes to direct attention, one far away from that particular past.

Just like colonialism, it is the legacy of Helen Zille that the DA really needs to deal with. She has now brought matters to a head and, whatever you make of the intensity of the party’s response, it is an important step in putting some distance between it and the virtual nightmare that is Helen Zille. We shall see how big that gap grows in the years to come.