Zille Rescues Child, Entire City.
by Roger Young
“She’s deformed because of all the drugs and things.” – Helen Zille, who does not have a medical degree.
Roughly a month ago, on August 15th, the DA’s municipal campaign posted a video to its social media channels, with a viewer advisory warning for graphic content. The warning was warranted as the video showed Helen Zille potentially violating the privacy of an at-risk infant, and showing contextual details, as well as shoddy masking of the faces of the child’s alleged parents and other people struggling with substance dependency and in extreme poverty.
The manner in which Zille referred to these humans, dismissively, without addressing them directly, as “drug addicts,” does nothing but shame and stigmatize them. Zille exclaimed that the conditions were dire, and that “no child should have to grow up like this.” Very few would disagree with that statement, but under the outrage there is a worldview.
It is almost impossible to know what that worldview is, but we do know that Zille did not rescue that child, as the video implies. It is apparent in the video that she hands the child over to a social worker, who took the child to a place of safety, doing exactly what social services are meant to do in that situation. And Zille did exactly what a person should do in that situation: she reported it to social services. Did the pressure of the camera force social services to act faster? This is a possibility. Can Helen Zille rescue every child in precarious circumstances on camera? Probably not. And why are the parents of the child not deserving of rescue?
It's worth noting that Zille and her social media team were in Reiger Park to visit a family whose child had taken their own life, and were diverted by this, possibly more aesthetically amenable, situation.
Helen Zille has the right to speak about anything she likes in any tone that she desires. I want to make this explicit: I am not tone policing Helen Zille. I am linking her tone, her way of speaking about people, to the actual outcomes of DA policies in the City of Cape Town (COCT). This is a campaign video, and a campaign is a series of promises.
In no way do I mean to imply that the ANC are successfully managing the infrastructures of municipalities and national government. What I mean to ask here is what we can expect from the DA should they win a majority and Zille becomes mayor.
In Cape Town, where Zille was premier and the DA runs the City of Cape Town, management of the city is business centred. The homeless are managed and displaced, but there are no sustainable interventions to the long-term problems of the unhoused, children at risk, or the ravages of spatial displacement on the larger sections of the population. Instead the focus is on making the city work for business, which further drives displacement. Out of sight out of mind economics. What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t feel.
One of my favourite DA campaign videos is Zille talking nostalgically about the well-maintained Orange Grove of her youth, you know, during apartheid.
In the DA’s campaign manifesto there is an explicit promise to reclaim hijacked buildings; there is no stated strategy for the people who live in those hijacked buildings. There is a promise to stop the rot, which includes getting the water and electricity working and making the CBD a safe space for businesses, but where do the inconvenient unwashed go? If it’s anything like Cape Town, the answer will be away from the business district, making it hard for those people to access the opportunities of a revitalised business district — opportunities they could realistically access if there were actual interventions such as harm reduction, skills training, housing grants, and so on. It could be argued that these are not the ambit of a municipality, but that is merely convenient.
To make a city work, one has to ask who it is being made to work for. And it is so much easier to reclaim buildings and stigmatize the suffering than to actually meaningfully address the current social issues. You can’t just harken back to the golden times of apartheid and spirit people away.
The ANC is demonstrably now a party that is not aligned with the welfare of the people it is elected to serve. The DA is demonstrably a party that predisposes business interests over people. These should not be the binary.
There is also the DA’s management of its social media spaces, or rather the noticeable lack of it.
“If you can’t feed your children, you shouldn’t be allowed to breed.” – Facebook comment.
When a comment like this surfaces on the Reiger Park Facebook post, there is no visible response by the DA team. The endorsement is implied by allowing it to remain unchallenged. This comment is but one example of the kind of viewpoints that are in support of a business-friendly city. A city working for business, with the poor invisible, somewhere else, in another place that is not this place. A two-party-state solution. Separate but equal.
On a Reddit thread I posted about the issues around the child and its parents, in all the debate the child and the parents were never mentioned by a single redditor. Mostly the comments were all in the “Better Than The ANC, What Choice Do We Have” range. One of my favourites: “I would vote for Darth Vader if I thought he would make the city work again.” Be careful what you wish for.
When Helen Zille dismisses the vulnerable as drug addicts and points to their inability to care for their child as disgusting, she is ascribing that inability as agency, without any concern for the agency available to those parents. When Zille decries the lack of social workers and then successfully engages with one who actually does their job, Zille claims this as her own victory. When the DA manages the less advantaged of the Western Cape, any failure of them to comply with the conditions of help is relegated to personal failure on the part of the disadvantaged. If they can’t feed their children, they shouldn’t breed. Ah, the White Utopia of my youth.
Zille made claims that she got the child into a safe space with the help of a social worker. Unnamed social worker. A mere cog in Zille’s white saviour narrative. This was not even the metro she is campaigning for; the DA Mayoral candidate for Ekurhuleni, Khathutshelo Rasilingwane, was also relegated to a background prop. The mechanics of the situation are different than what is presented. The social worker was alerted by a member of the public, Zille, and this triggered a section 152 intervention.
Once handed to the social worker, the infant should have entered the statutory process. The child would have been removed without a court order, placed in temporary safe care, the parents would have had to be notified within 24 hours, and the matter brought before a Children’s Court for review. The law does not simply remove the child and abandon the family; the court would have to consider whether reunification was possible, with state support, or whether longer-term alternative care was necessary. That these services are not responding adequately, on a provincial or national level, is the issue. When the evidence shows that the DA does not adequately engage with this issue themselves, claiming that mayoral intervention by social media, or even just mayoral concern, is disingenuous.
The very same video could be made in Cape Town right now. There is a huge substance dependency issue in the DA’s home city that they have failed to address adequately. Helen Zille making social media videos about one child does not help the homeless and at-risk children of Cape Town, who are subject to intimidation and removal from public spaces by a private security force every day, through policies initiated during Zille’s tenure there.