Former president Nelson Mandela in 2008.
The Democratic Alliance has come under fire this election season for using Nelson Mandela’s name, image and voice in its campaign. A television advert and posters featuring the former president and world icon were part of the DA’s arsenal, and the Mandela family and the ANC were outraged.
Undeterred by it all, party leader Mmusi Maimane delivered a ‘Do it for Madiba’ speech at the DA’s final election rally at Dobsonville Stadium in Soweto last Saturday.
He made sure to emphasise that President Jacob Zuma and the ANC were failing to live up to Mandela’s legacy.
Maimane mentioned Mandela 18 times in his speech. Take a look:
1. I was nine years old when Nelson Mandela was released from prison.
2. Dobsonville came alive on the day of Madiba’s release in 1990.
3. What Madiba did for us and what he meant for us cannot be put into words.
4. His dream for a South Africa free from violence and poverty was our dream too. Madiba made it possible for us to believe in that dream.
5. I voted here for the first time in 1999, down at the DSJ Primary School. We knew what we had to do: We had to vote for the man that helped liberate us – the party of Nelson Mandela.
6. There was no debate. We were ANC, and the ANC was us. And that’s how everyone I knew voted. We did it for Madiba.
7. That day [when Jacob Zuma was elected ANC president] marked the end of Madiba’s ANC.
8. The ANC has turned its back on everything Nelson Mandela fought for.
9. And so, when I decided to make a different political choice, I did it for Madiba.
10. We call him Tata Madiba because he was a father to all of us.
11. As Madiba said: “If the ANC does to you what the apartheid government did to you, then you must do to the ANC what you did to the apartheid government.”
12. Nelson Mandela fought for us to have a choice.
13. We are the only party that is carrying the values of Nelson Mandela forward.
14. We are doing it for Madiba.
15. People are using the freedom that Nelson Mandela gave them to make a different choice.
16. They are doing it for Madiba.
17. Fellow South Africans, we have the power that Madiba gave us.
18. So let’s do it for Madiba on Wednesday.
Read the speech here.