Zille unfazed by monkey jibe

HELEN Zille says she won't hit back at Julius Malema for implying that she "dances like a monkey".

Yesterday, DA head of election communications Gareth van Onselen said the DA would "not engage in personal attacks" because their election campaign was designed to communicate a positive message to voters.

Last Saturday, Malema asked hundreds of ANC supporters in Polokwane if they had ever seen "an ugly woman in a blue dress dancing like a monkey because she is looking for votes".

Zille normally wears her party's colour, blue, when dancing around on the campaign trail. Zille and Malema have been embroiled in several verbal spats over the past two years - normally just before elections.

Malema said two years ago that Zille was "racist, colonialist and imperialist". He also called the DA Youth "the garden boys of Helen Zille".

Zille then called Malema an inkwenkwe (an uncircumcised boy in Xhosa culture), and said he was "rude and disgusting".

Malema then retorted that Zille would only know that he was uncircumcised if she had held "private sessions" with him.

"Malema reminds me of Robert Mugabe," Zille then told one newspaper.

Malema hit back: "Helen Zille is racist and fake, even her face is not original. Her real face is ugly, that is why she had plastic surgery. DA's policies are just as fake as her."

He continued on the offensive: "Zille is so ugly that she looks like an apartheid agent. Her dancing is worse. When she dances it seems as if she misses apartheid."

In October last year, Malema resumed the war of words, telling a crowd at a rally in Stellenbosch, Western Cape, that they had "put a cockroach in cabinet, and we need to remove that cockroach by voting the ANC into power".