16 March 2011
The SACP in the Brian Bunting District (Cape Metro) has noted the nomination of Patricia De Lille as the DA`s mayoral candidate for the City of Cape Town for 2011 local government elections. By lending herself to the DA´s project to resist transformation in our City and South Africa, Patricia de Lille has abandoned all pretence of representing any progressive change.
The DA has contrived the alliance with the ID in an attempt to extend its support among Coloured voters of the Western Cape and gain credibility for its reactionary objective of reversing the gains of the national democratic revolution led by the ANC since 1994. Fundamentally the DA represents the interests of a minority white constituency determined to protect its ill-gotten privileges derived in the era of apartheid and colonialism. If it can win over a section of the Coloured vote, it is better able to preserve white privilege, and Patricia de Lille as Mayoral Candidate helps them do that.
Patricia De Lille, a former PAC member, is best characterised as an opportunist. She abandoned, first, her professed Pan-Africanist ideology for narrow personal interest, when PAC support amongst the electorate declined. She established the Independent Democrats (ID) and through it pursued a Coloured chauvinist agenda to extend her political shelf life. Alliance with the DA and the opportunities that confers on her now rescues her political career from the declining fortunes of the ID, which she has now effectively liquidated. Politically, she exploits and perpetuates the conditions and thinking created by the apartheid regime. This is negative and reactionary.
As a voluntary puppet of the DA, she will be required to maintain the status quo ante, ensuring that Blacks are divided on the same lines that apartheid imposed, with Coloureds marginally favoured over Africans in the interests of white privilege. In this, she plays the same role as those who succumbed to the poisoned chalice of P J Botha´s tri-cameral Parliament. Coloured people adopted a revolutionary stance to reject that in favour of equal political rights and engaged in a struggle to build a non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous democratic society.
Patricia has no interest of uniting people of this country. She has succumbed to the apartheid dogma of divide and rule in order to entrench subjugation and impoverishment of black people in general. Progressive people of Coloured descent will once again as part of the liberation movement mobilise and reject this reactionary contempt for the dignity and unity of the oppressed working class and the poor in this country and the Cape Metro in particular.
For more information please contact:
Benson ka-Ngqentsu
Brian Bunting (Cape Metro) District Secretary - 0827966400