One settler, one outraged tweet

Typical. A column I write appears in Business Day, a sister paper to the Sunday Times. I am writing about the wreckage of the combination of colonial, apartheid and ANC industrial policy and making the point that creating a "new" Iscor, Eskom or Sasol is fantasy. Our industrial future is bleak.

I am building up to an argument for more liberal immigration regulations, to allow in more skilled people and double the number of tourists who come here each year.

Tourism, you see, is an export where you barely have to move a muscle to make a dollar. The people with the dollars bring them here themselves. Like magic, I say.

Near the top of the piece I include this paragraph: "We no longer face the threats that made Iscor, Eskom and Sasol necessary. About all that remains useful of the apartheid industrial legacy is the arms industry where, although we might not like to admit it, we're still pretty competitive."

A few minutes after this appears online I am swamped by Twitter outrage, led by Helen Zille and her one million permanently dyspeptic followers.

Jacques Maree, a DA staffer (Zille faction), kicks it off with: "I know you didn't mean to defend part of the legacy of apartheid here, but see how easy it is. You don't have to resign though."

Zille is thrilled. "Brilliant," she immediately tweets. "(ps, I never defended any part of apartheid legacy, yet PB demanded I resign for saying colonial legacy was not ONLY negative.)"

There. I've "defended" apartheid the way she defended colonialism. It goes on, literally, for hours, I discover when later I look at my phone.

Jennifer, with an immaculate and tattooed body which she shows as her Twitter photo, says she "detests" me. You sure know how to hurt a guy, Jennifer. I suspect you're a man.

Debbie Schafer tweets: "Oh the irony!!!!"

You'd hope the Western Cape's education MEC would better understand how to use that word. (Hint, Debbie: almost never.) Jeremy writes: "Oh god she's run out of wool", which makes me laugh so hard stuff nearly comes out of my nose.

Of course Zille's followers were happy with the false equivalency they'd created.

I never called on her to resign because she defended some aspects of the legacy of colonialism. I think she should go because, in the process of defending her remarks, she's become a menace to her own party's prospects of being able to form a government after the 2019 general election.

I have it on good authority that the DA's own polls show they do better without her than with her.

It can sometimes seem like she and her followers would rather win an argument than an election. And I'm sorry to let them down again, but I still don't think anything good came out of colonialism or apartheid apart from, as a white, those few brave whites who fought both systems and risked lives and careers in the process. Colonialism and apartheid poisoned everything they touched, including the arms industry.

Everything, but everything, they did was done to maintain whites in a superior position to blacks. They didn't even think about it.

It was European culture, propelled by its own sense of racial superiority, that drove it and it is still with us. Of course, you use the roads and drink the "piped" water, but what idiot thinks, as they're driving along or drinking or selling a rifle: "Thank heaven for these gifts from the past"?

What episodes like this reveal is the extent to which we are all the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.

I am and Zille is. So is Jacob Zuma. He lives on land given to his family by the British.

The ANC exists because of colonialism and apartheid. So does the DA. So does the Sunday Times.

All the people who popped up on my Twitter timeline on Thursday to defend or criticise Zille are likewise the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.

The vital thing now, though, is to get rid of Zuma and if that's not possible, then his party needs to lose in 2019. It'll be very, very close.

It's exactly why Zille should consider leaving politics. She'll have a grand life out of office and I would not begrudge her a moment of it.

She brought the DA to the point where it can seriously challenge for power; a huge achievement. But circumstances have changed.

Nationally, she's a problem. She is in the way.