South Africa’s Public Works and Infrastructure Minister Patricia de Lille said on Thursday that she had warned outgoing Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane that the party’s “laptop boys” were after him and that he would soon be hounded out of the main opposition party.
Herself a former top DA official, de Lille said she had warned Maimane about the lurking dangers posed by a clique that controls the largest opposition party.
“I warned Mmusi Maimane that if he didn’t stand on principle his party’s laptop boys would swallow him up and spit him out,” she said of Maimane’s resignation following an internal party report that severely criticising his leadership of the DA.
De Lille, the only non-African National Congress cabinet member in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government, left the DA at the time Maimane ascended to the party’s throne.
In his resignation letter, Maimane cited internal conflict and his family’s safety as reasons for his departure from the DA leadership.
He has, however, not resigned from the party itself and said he would continue campaigning for it.
De Lille, however, was not impressed by this stand. She said the DA was on a path of destruction and that none of the party’s leaders had a clue of what principled leadership was all about.
“When I resigned from the DA on my own terms a year ago on 31 October 2018, it was after learning bitter lessons that the party’s stated policies were window-dressings not matched by its practices in government,” De Lille said.
NM/jn/APA