Tag: helen zille

Credibility issues

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As Sarah Britten penned an article documenting Helen Zille’s slow but steady meltdown on Twitter and with political commentator Eusebius McKaiser even suggesting:

For its own sake, the DA might need a new leader.

suddenly the rug has been smartly pulled from beneath DA supporters’ feet, as their previously solid and reliable leader seems almost to be suffering some sort of breakdown, resulting in her, her party’s and her supporters’ credibility being eroded; the sage advice of arguing only with logic and not emotion seemingly forgotten.

But while the own goals of opposition politicians are important in our democracy, there are bigger problems involving credibility facing our country. Hot Cross Buns.

Yep – Woolworths (and as we’ve said before, this isn’t the same Woolworths as went bust in the UK, this is the SA equivalent of M&S) are out and about offending christians again. But after their previous capitulation on the decision to remove loss making christian magazines from their shelves back in 2010 (a decision which resulted, incidentally, in a loss of credibility for the store), “surprisingly” this time it’s the christians who have lost the plot. This just a couple of weeks after their “Jesus is alive/Jesus is dead” car crash of an argument over the Red Bull ad.

Because today, christian people (not all christian people, it should be said, but some very vocal christian people) are ever so upset about there being a Halaal marking on Woolworths’ Hot Cross Buns.

And yes, they’re really annoyed:

I hate woolworths… How can you do that to the Christians, I hope that God will have mercy on you. And dnt be surprised if your shops run bankrupt.. I will pray to my living God and you will see what he is capable of!

Let’s pop back and review that threat in a few weeks, months or years, shall we? Because while your bloke upstairs is allegedly both omnipresent and omnipotent, Woolies do sell awfully nice chocolate brownies, very decent fresh fruit and veg, and have a huge selection of quality clothing as well. With their latest results indicating a turnover up 11.4%, profits up 26.8% (despite not selling very many christian magazines) and total assets of R9,218,000,000, it seems unlikely that they’ll go under any time soon.

But with several people up in arms over some seasonal bakery products, who knows what the future may hold?

Even the SA Catholic Bishops’ Conference spokesperson Chris Townsend said “people were overreacting and needed to be more understanding”:

Hot cross buns are only a symbol, and not a central tenet of Christianity. There are a lot more weighty issues to deal with in SA than a few ‘hot cross Christians’

However, for me, it’s just another nail in the coffin as far as christian credibility is concerned. And to be honest, we’re running out of space on the lid now. When members of a religion (or any other group) display such stupid, irrational (shock) and intolerant behaviour, there comes a point when society will simply stop listening.

And if they want their reasonable and sensible suggestions to be considered in the future, just like dear Helen, someone needs to tell them to pipe down before that moment comes.

UPDATE: Here’s some opinion from Georgina Guedes. You may recall that I also agreed with her thoughts here back in 2007.

UPDATE 2: Oh dear – there’s precedent! Tesco in the UK has lost market share, profit and has been infested by mice (twice) – all “since supporting Gay Pride“.

UPDATE 3: Hayibo’s response is brilliant.

UPDATE 4: This is also worth a read for a different perspective on this.

6 months on…

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UPDATES in the comments section below.

…and a day, because I forgot to post this yesterday.

Remember this post, when I suggested that things are slowly but surely falling apart in the City of Cape Town. Well, here’s a good example – a pothole on a shared pavement/cycle path that I reported back on the 7th September last year.

(as long as you don’t expect a pothole filled in within 6 months) (and one day)

Looking at the email thread, I reported it to the appropriate city email address at 9:18am and received a reply:

Dear Sir
We hereby acknowledge receipt of your e-mail dated 07/09/2011
Please be advised that we have forwarded your concern to the relevant department for their action.

together with a case number, at 9:44am – a turnaround time of 26 minutes. Brilliant.

Sadly, in the intervening 263,520 minutes (yes, that took some rudimentary calculations on my part), precisely bugger all has been done about fixing said pothole.

During these minutes (each one of which I have paid my municipal rates for), I enquired why there had been no progress on the 26th September and was told:

All complaints are worked on a first come first to be served basis and on the availability of manpower and equipment. So we cannot determine or give out timeframes.

I reported the pothole again on 2nd November and got this:

Please be advised that we will follow up with the relevant department and will keep you informed of the outcome of this issue.

But they didn’t. And I had cause to report it again on 24th November after a little kid (not mine) fell off his bike having hit it.

Guess what?

Dear Sir/Madam
We hereby acknowledge receipt of your e-mail dated  2011/11/24.
Please be advised that we will follow up with the relevant department and will keep you informed of the outcome of this issue.

And guess what? They didn’t.

Yesterday marked 6 months of constant inactivity on the City’s part. If this pothole was an e-toll, millions would be vocal in support of me withholding my rates until it was scrapped. Or filled in. Whatever – you get the analogy.

I’m sure that someone will forward this to @HelenZille – even though this is a City issue and she doesn’t really have anything to do with the City. Sadly, no-one will forward it to our actual mayor, @PatriciadeLille, because we all know that that would be a complete waste of pixels.

Dan’s PR disaster

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With the second biggest event of the year due to take place in Cape Town this weekend (remember that World Cup thing we did?) and following on from his extraordinary comments over the Makhaza toilet saga, City Mayor Dan Plato has lurched into yet another PR disaster.  Helen Zille was always going to be a hard act to follow, but this man makes Nomaindia Mfeketo look good.
And she really wasn’t.

This time it’s all to do with who gets to press the button to bring down the Athlone Cooling Towers. And as the Mayor was pointing out on local radio just a couple of weeks ago, it would be a great honour for some worthwhile member of the community to be able to be the one to trigger the blast. A local charity, Reach For A Dream, which gives dying children the chance to carry out their last wishes was also hopeful of giving some kids the chance to say that they were the ones who demolished the towers.

As Councillor Clive Justus, the mayoral committee member for utility services commented earlier in the week:

It might be the contractors, the mayor, the premier, the Reach for a Dream Foundation – we haven’t made up our minds yet. I will be taking a decision in consultation before the end of the week.
Whoever it is will be outside the 300m perimeter, and it will be very, very sophisticated. The plunger of days gone by is no longer with us.

“It’ll be like pressing a cellphone button,” he explained.

And today – the name of the lucky plunger button presser was revealed – and that person will be…

Mayor Dan Plato!

Why? WHY?!?

Even if this decision was taken “in consultation” and he wasn’t involved in said consultation, why doesn’t he, someone, anyone see what a complete and utter PR disaster this is?
Cape Talk was inundated with calls criticising the decision this evening. And what did Dan have to say about the whole thing?

As time comes nearer I think it will become emotional. I will go down to the towers later this morning to take my own pictures and so on.

Soundbite heaven.

There are still 39 hours before big bang time. It’s not too late to change this stupid decision and to give someone who really deserves something special, the honour. Be it upstanding Athlone community member, be it dying child.

If you’re reading this, Dan (stop sniggering people: I’m going to email it to him and the big lady upstairs) – please just stop and think what sort of message this sends out. Again.
Do the decent thing, give it to someone and make a difference to their life. Be remembered as the man who gave this opportunity to someone else, not as the greedy mayor who kept it for himself.

You can email the Mayor’s office and voice your opinion here: mayor.mayor@capetown.gov.za.

Helen doesn’t love me anymore

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Oh for a politician with a sense of humour. Or at least one with my sense of humour.

It’ll never happen.

We had a great time at the game on Saturday. Beers and prego rolls at &Union, heated debate over the Luis Suarez handball, the awesome Cape Town fan mile and then an entertaining, if rather one sided match at the Cape Town Stadium.
I wouldn’t have even thought about Helen Zille on Saturday if I hadn’t spotted her walking down Bree Street on the way to the match. This is one of the things that impresses me about Zille: she’s so down-to-earth (or if she’s not, she’s a damn good actor). I couldn’t see Zuma or Mbeki or even Tony Leon ever wandering down the back streets of Cape Town CBD to the stadium before heading up to the VIP section.

Anyway, I saw her, I tweeted, I moved on, stadiumward.

The first half went by and we further watched football, drank further beer and had further heated debate over the Luis Suarez handball. I took a quick pic of the front row of the VIP section: Blatter, Zuma, Merkel, Khosa, Zille, Jordaan – they were all there.

It was only when the second half began that I noticed a problem. Helen Zille had not returned to her seat. I was (obviously) filled with concern and I told my followers so:

7 mins of 2nd half gone. @helenzille still not back in her seat. Bad curry last night?

The first two thirds of this was first hand eyewitness stuff. The final third may have been pure speculation, but it was at least based on my own football watching experiences. Why else would anyone miss the first 7 minutes of the second half of such an important game? Or indeed any game?
Surely Delhi Belly is the only reasonable excuse for such behaviour.

11 minutes later and there’s still no sign.
Germany are planning their second goal and Helen is going to miss it.
I let people know:

@helenzille still stuck in toilet. Wilderness Search & Rescue have been called.

By now, “Where is Helen Zille?” and “Bad Curry?” were trending topics on twitter. Possibly.
Concern was mounting, as @simonwillo’s tweet testifies. Germany were anxiously passing it around at the back waiting for Joachim Louw’s signal that Helen was back in her seat and that they were now cleared to go up and pop another one in. The Rand had dropped 2% of its value based on the political instability caused by having the leader of the opposition MIA in a VIP toilet and Mayor Dan Puppet Plato was wondering who was going to tell him what to do now.

But thankfully, the chaos was averted as Helen returned to her seat:

@helenzille is back, but can we have some new loo roll to the Ladies in the VIP please? Thanks.

Dan breathed a huge sigh of relief, the Rand recovered instantaneously and the JSE rose slightly on buoyant toilet tissue sales figures. On the pitch, Miroslav Klose effectively put Argentina out of the World Cup.

All was right with the world and I thought nothing more about the whole politician stuck in the toilet saga until I got up on Sunday morning, all bleary-eyed and bushy-teethed, and checked my email.
And there it was:

At first it seemed as if my somewhat purile tweeting of the previous day had been taken out of context; that somehow, Helen thought I had been poking fun at her. But to unfollow me seemed like a huge over-reaction and wholly pointless, since now she’s hit the QUIT button, everyone can still read what I’m writing about her (or anyone else for that matter), except Ms Zille.

But then I saw the serious side of things.
What if Helen Zille had had a bad curry the previous evening. How would I have known that?
Not only would I have had to have followed her to her restaurant of (poor) choice, I would also have had to have been sat close enough to her to gain the knowledge that she was unhappy with the quality of her main course.
And then – how would I know of the unfortunate and dramatic half-time repercussions of that dodgy balti?

I need to go on record right now and say:
I did not film Helen Zille on the loo on Saturday afternoon.
Nor was I stalking her on Friday evening. I was watching the Ghana game, like the rest of you.
If my tweeting was suggestive that I had access to the VIP loos at the Cape Town Stadium, a la Pavlos Joseph, then it was never meant to be that way. It was merely speculation and if it was actually 100% accurate, well, that was just the fickle nature of fate.

Helen, if you’re reading this (and you surely are), I’m sorry if – by chance – my supposition around your temporary disappearance was concerningly correct in its allegations. I didn’t mean to scare you or insult you (I know you have issues with toilets).

I just didn’t want you to miss the football.

Helen talks mainly sense

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Grand Emperor of the Western Cape, Helen Zille has been talking up a storm after a police briefing on World Cup security. She warned of the dangers of sensationalist media and their attempts to stoke up negative sentiment about the country and the tournament.
Well said, Helen. We warned you about that over 3 months ago.

“There are a lot of journalists who want sensational stories in the run-up to the World Cup. Be very careful not to be caught off-guard with a sensational quote,” she said.
Zille said it was important not to “pump up” international fears, and mentioned the recent attack on the Togolese football team during the Confederations Cup in Angola as an example of how perceptions could go wrong.
“They don’t differentiate between countries,” she said, adding that she herself had been on the receiving end of journalists “trying to squeeze alarming statements” out of her.

While this is obviously of concern, those journalists should have known better than to mess with Zille. Even when squeezed really tightly, all that comes out is rhetoric; stuff like “ANC”, “totally unacceptable”, “President Zuma” & “morally questionable” with the odd transitional phrase thrown in so it all makes sense.
To her, anyway. 

After savaging the media, she then turned her attention to the equally menacing vuvuzela.

“The vuvuzela is great fun until you sit and hear thousands,” she said.
“You need to warn people. You need to have earplugs on sale at the stadium.”

Seriaas, Helen?

“It is a serious point I am making, I am not being frivolous.”

Oh…  right.
Well, that’s nonsense.
One vuvuzela is annoying. Thousands of them honking together like an army of mad geese is just great.

Also, this gives the ANC a great indication as to how to disrupt the next DA rally that they want to disrupt. No – not the thousands of vuvuzelas thing, the opportunity to sell earplugs to people on the way in.
And then they could do the thousands of vuvuzelas thing just to annoy Helen.