”Turncoat”, ”renegade” — these are some of the damning terms being tossed about the corridors of the KwaZulu-Natal legislature to describe former Democratic Party chief whip Belinda Scott.
Scott left the DP, which she represented as provincial chief whip, for the African National Congress last week. Months of confrontation with DA leaders, including Tony Leon, over the party’s burgeoning relationship with the ”morally reprehensible and corrupt” Inkatha Freedon Party had left her with no choice but to join the ANC, she said this week.
Still reeling from Scott’s defection, a former close friend and colleague, national MP Mark Lowe, accused her and Tim Jeebodh, the other DA defector to the ANC, of ”high treason”.
Is she an ambitious opportunist, or a genuinely disenchanted politician who has finally found a political home?
Scott has in a decade travelled an unbelievable road — from the Zulu nationalist Inkatha, to the liberal DP and now to the ANC.
She started off in the mid-1980s as a researcher with the Inkatha Institute and was soon recruited to write IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s international speeches. A close associate of Buthelezi loyalist Walter Felgate — now also in the bosom of the ANC — she was on the IFP’s KwaZulu-Natal provincial list for the 1994 election.
Scott explains her defection to the DP in 1999 by saying she was ”disillusioned with corruption in Inkatha”. She was considering leaving politics when the DP approached her, she says.
She soon became the only female member of the DP’s 15-person federal executive. Even Lowe confirms Scott ”did a lot of work for the party”, while former IFP colleagues acknowledge her commitment to delivery and enormous capacity for work.
While with the IFP, Scott served on the Provincial Housing Development Board, winning the provincial and national ”Housing Person of the Year” awards in 1998.
Much despised in Inkatha circles, Scott shot into the limelight post-1999 for waging a crusade to expose corruption in the IFP-run ministries in KwaZulu-Natal.
Among the notable exposÃ