University student representative councils – the breeding grounds of some of our future leaders no doubt, and also a position that brings with it a certain degree of responsibility.

You would have to feel then that declaring your love for Adolf Hitler might be considered a little reckless and offensive, but that didn’t stop Wits University’s SRC president Mcebo Dlamini from posting those sentiments on Facebook.

Oh dear, time to backtrack frantically. Nah, not Dlamini, who stood by his comments when questioned by the media. This from TimesLive:

What I love about Hitler is his charisma and his capabilities to organise people. We need more leaders of such calibre…

There is an element of Adolf Hitler in all white people and I still maintain that. They have blood in their hands.

We are not saying George Bizos went [out] and killed but [that] white people colonised us, displaced us and enslaved our people…

In as much as he was bad, there is a good side of him. He managed to uplift the spirit of the German people, after it had went [sic] down in 1938.

Stick to your guns there son, don’t let things like common sense get in the way. His comments didn’t go down well with the university’s vice-chancellor, Professor Adam Habib, who deemed them offensive and said an investigation was underway to determine whether Dlamini should be charged

The rest of the Wits SRC weren’t such big Hitler fans, distancing themselves from the comments and outlining the atrocities the Führer committed.

The chairman of the SA Union of Jewish Students Nathan Pollock also weighed in to the matter:

[He] said Dlamini’s comments were particularly inappropriate in light of the recent xenophobic attacks and constituted “a complete act of racism”.

Kind of hard to disagree with you there, Nathan, it seems Dlamini might have a few history books to read.

[source:timeslive]