GodZille #5: Bonginkosi Madikizela

Bongi is Helen Zille's douchebag. She made him a leader of 7 million people, and they now share responsibility for their party's crime. I debated him on radio.

This is an In the Public Interest recording of me in a radio debate about corruption with Bonginkosi Madikizela. He was the Western Cape Leader of the Democratic Alliance (DA), the main opposition party of South Africa. It was 2018.

He recently popped up like a horror clown jack-in-the-box, inspiring me to rearrange my schedule for this series. I’m sure my American readers have met idiot fake liberals like him.

I’ll describe this inferior Public representative afterwards. If you listen first, you won’t think I’m cruel.

Listen to him present his own calibre and the class of his party. Hear him refusing to accept responsibility for investigating evidence against his own party members (who once described themselves as anti-corruption).

Bongi’s as pathetically self-serving as the ANC’s Richard Dyanti (who I shared last week). It’s because of people like them that corruption is destroying my country! But Bongi deserves some credit - he worked hard to earn my disgust. For that, I give him a Masters degree.

RADIO CALLED THE POLITICS STAR

Parliament ruled in my favour, and a few channels reported on it before coverage got choked. It’s lain dead, beside our zombie president, the past 6 years. But we’ve got the evidence that truth existed.

The 14th of June 2018 started with a 5-minute interview which led to the feature event.

That afternoon, I had my first and last radio debate. Say hi to Bongi. I challenge you to find one moral or fact in his dribble. Hey, there’s one fact, but I want you to dig for it.

Kudos to Koketso Sachane. Hard to find top-notch radio presenters. Pity he’s gone. And I’ve never been invited back to that undoubtedly shocked DA-supporting Cape Town radio station.

BONGINKOSI MADIKIZELA

His name is Bonginkosi Madikizela, instantly famous for his auntie being Winnie Madikizela Mandela (the big man’s wife whilst he was imprisoned on Robben Island).

From the ashes of a township in Cape Town, rose a Bongified warrior for the DA. Well, it was a journey. First he was a warrior for the ANC. Then a warrior for the UDM. Then the DA. But his middle name, I kid you not, is Success, so he had to keep trying. Or, rather, he needed Helen Zille, the boss of the DA, to lift him up (it would be great if a politician would do that for all of us).

It surely didn’t hurt his rise, if the allegations are true, that Bonginkosi Madikizela betrayed the UDM by recruiting people for the DA. Before he became an assassin, Velile Waxa was doing that for Bongi in my town of Knysna - must be DA tradecraft. It’s certain, that Bongi, in a flash, went from the streets of the Khayelitsha to working in Helen’s fancy office. There, he would share Geordin Hill-Lewis, Jaco Londt and Alan Winde’s annointed whiteness greatness, adding some colour to DA posters.

Helen needed black people to get black votes, so adopting a douchebag was strategy. Obviously justified if the DA was to satisfy its overseas funders and their African project. Hey, they must’ve had some reason for the all the crazy things they were doing.

The Western powers Plan A failed when black DA leader after black DA leader admitted they were puppets. Their indignant departures, whilst suspiciously keeping Helen’s secrets, possibly lubricated their journey into universities, think tanks and NGOs.

Plan B, Cyril Ramaphosa, had to take over the country for a while. And now people are talking about the forthcoming elections as if A+B = South Africa.

Poor Bongi. He wasn’t smart like the political refugees, so he had to stay as the DA Leader for the Western Cape, a state/province the size of Greece. 7 million citizens (minus me) would bow before him.

Brett Herron, from the GOOD Party, partly summarised Bongi’s white black efforts to change the effects of Apartheid on black and brown people as follows:

"Madikizela served as [Provincial] MEC for housing for a decade and failed to deliver a single affordable housing unit in the city centre or [the] surrounds [of Cape Town, the DA’s seat of power]. Yet, I managed to identify 11 inner city sites for affordable housing projects within months of being appointed the Mayoral Committee member responsible for housing in January 2017."

THE DOUCHEBAG RETURNS (EVERY LOYAL LOSER DESERVES A ‘DEMOCRATIC’ SEQUEL)

2021 was Bonginkosi Madikizela’s year of scandal.

The Daily Maverick, the DA-friendly ‘investigative’ newspaper that will not publish their corruption, suspiciously exposed Bongi as having lied about his qualifications - he did not have the Bachelor of Commerce degree he had put on his CV and that Helen Zille had claimed when she appointed him to her cabinet in 2009.

My cynicism is that the DA always tells us how well they vet their candidates, and criticises the opposition for not doing the same. They’re also quick to yell when fake qualifications enter the news.

Maybe the uncomfortable situation is that Bongi was competing against Helen Zille’s ex-assistant, Geordin Hill-Lewis, to become the Mayor of the City of Cape Town. That was the job that initially made her famous. Suddenly Bongi’s naked and out of the race, but strangely not screaming foul or acting embarassed as Zille’s favourite took the spot.

The DA said that they were investigating Bongi, and then we never heard from them again. Under national law, the National Qualifications Framework Act, the ANC-led government should have prosecuted him but they did not.

Somehow ‘independent’ media were silent too.

Instead, Bongi was suspended by Premier Alan Winde who then miraculously gave him a where-the-Public-can’t-see-Bongi job as ‘special adviser’. They first tried to give him a R2million pay-off salary in Winde’s office, but settled for R1.7m, only 23 times more than the minimum wage. Lying and loyalty are good for personal business.

Unsurprisingly, Winde was one of Helen’s loyal henchman, and he had the job she had in between being Mayor and becoming the Big Boss of the DA. Even less startling is that Winde is implicated in the corruption that Bongi pretends doesn’t exist.

BONGINKOSI MADIKIZELA IS A CROOK

Bongi is implicated too. You know that if you caught the one fact he shared in the debate - he’s had been aware of my corruption complaints since 2013.

We have a law called PRECCA, the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Act, which makes it a crime for leaders and managers to not report crime they’re aware of.

Bongi was in and out of our town of Knysna to meet the criminal Waxa for vote gathering. He was also there to silence two DA politicians who reported crime in their party (that I had exposed).

Bongi never found the time to visit me despite me making the extra effort to courier him evidence (5 months before our ‘debate’).

PROOF SENT

PROOF RECEIVED BY STAFF

DA-STYLED DEMOCRACY IN ACTION

In November 2023, Bonginkosi Madikizela failed at returning to his previous post as DA Western Cape Leader. The important takeaway is that the DA allowed him to run.

Or maybe he was supposed to run and lose so that Tertius Simmers, who did nothing when a threat against me was read to him in the Western Cape Parliament, would win a role in a staged play in the DA’s theatre of democracy.

The DA is excellent at preserving the status quo. The crooks get rich, the innocent get punished, and Helen Zille gets douchebags for her home-made cushion.

That’s our democratic alliance, our absence of hope for a better future.