15 December 2006
	Piquant Owen clichés Helen Zille, Regional chair of the Western Cape Metro, Cape Town Owen's latest broadside exposes him as the serial flip-flopper, especially when it comes to defining true liberalism

Many commentators have long announced ex-Sunday Times editor Ken Owen's political obituary, so there is something piquant about Owen relishing Tony Leon's imminent retirement (On My Mind December 7). But the rancour of Owen's remarks as well as his factual errors cannot go unchallenged. Owen claims the DA "calls for the death penalty". Not true: the party retains a conscience vote among MPs on the issue. Secondly, it was the DP-NNP alliance that, ahead of the ANC elsewhere in the country, rolled out antiretrovirals and actively promoted quality education in the Western Cape in predominantly black areas - which flies in the face of Owen's contention that Leon "stamped the party as irretrievably non-African, if not anti-African". The DA's central project is to move SA beyond the politics of race to that of shared values, and today the party has more members of colour than whites. One of Owen's trademarks is to drive wedges between individuals where none exists. Accordingly, he charges Leon "set out to destroy F W de Klerk's consociational politics, and did so with such success that De Klerk quit politics". In fact, De Klerk was an enthusiastic supporter when the DA was formed in 2000, resigning from the NNP only in 2004 when that party joined the ANC. Owen berates Leon for "seeking confrontation", but what has happened to opposition parties that cosy up to the ANC? The dismal failure of the NNP to exert any meaningful influence in government, but rather to end up being cannibalised, is all too obvious. It was the same De Klerk whom Owen belatedly admires who took the NNP out of the government of national unity in 1996 because he correctly perceived it was losing its independence under ANC dominance. Moreover, the notion that the ANC was "provoked to break off all communication" with the DA because of Leon's confrontational approach is rich, given that the ruling party under President Mbeki is notoriously inaccessible. In the same vein, Owen tries to drive a wedge between ex-PFP leader Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert and Leon, claiming "Leon showed [Slabbert] the door" when the latter suggested a DP-ANC alliance ahead of the 1999 elections. Slabbert's book Tough Choices reveals he was half-hearted about the proposal in the company of his "friend" (Slabbert's word) Leon anyway. In sum, then, Owen's latest broadside exposes him as the serial flip-flopper, especially when it comes to defining true liberalism. He peddles clichés about Leon's obstructionism, illiberality and diminution of opposition and minority-group interest. Truth is, the DA leader has grown his party into the strongest opposition formation in SA, consolidating the very concept of opposition itself that threatened to disappear in the false optimism about ANC governance after 1994 - a false optimism Owen still promotes.