Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Geordin Hill-Lewis and senior party adviser Ryan Coetzee started a social media spat with former Freedom Front Plus (FF+) leader Pieter Groenewald, who serves as correctional services minister, over a report that almost 30 000 parolees have absconded and cannot be traced by the prisons department.

A wandering albatross reports that the pair was hoping to take attention off the nightmare of a week experienced by their colleague, Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, who was severely reprimanded by a court for his own scurrilous behaviour around the foot-and-mouth-disease pandemic.

The pair took to X to create the impression that the parolees had absconded under Groenewald’s watch.

Hill-Lewis stated, falsely, that the parolees “are missing on your watch”. Coetzee even used the word “outbreak” to create the, again false, impression that the parolees had broken out of prison while Groenewald was minister.

They then went on to suggest that Groenewald was a threat to public safety.

It turns out that the data in question dates to 1991, that the 30 000 did not escape under Groenewald’s term, and that the minister has, in fact, taken many of the right decisions to fix the chaotic parole system he inherited.

For his part, Groenewald said “the 29 000 [the number of missing parolees] is since 1991. I stated in public that I am in a process of electronic bracelets for parolees. There is progress. I had a parole summit last September on the revision of the parole system. We are busy with legislative amendments. Don’t practise cheap politics.”

Hill-Lewis responded to that statement with snideness and sarcasm.

South Africa does not need to see the DA fighting with the FF+. The DA is polling in the high 20s and the FF+ at not even a 10th of that – lions, as a member of this editorial board is wont to say, do not concern themselves with the opinions of sheep. The two parties are on the same side in trying to fix the country, and so are their voters.  South Africans beyond the DA and FF+ voter bases do not want to see the DA leader, who should be a serious figure of gravitas and statesmanlike, descend to the level of squabbling on social media. Especially not given how serious the troubles facing the country are, how urgent it is to fix these, and how great an opportunity the DA now has, given that President Cyril Ramaphosa has been ensnared in a corruption scandal. And more so in the same week that the DA did so very well in winning its first black township ward.

But the worst thing of all is that the two, in practice, lied, as they knew the data came from 1991 and yet sought to create the misleading impression that the parolees had all vanished under Groenewald, and that is very bad because it means they cannot be fully trusted to always tell the truth.