The parliamentary debate on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation address on Tuesday signalled the early start of the 2024 election season, with Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen saying the president had guaranteed the loss of the ANC’s majority next year.
Steenhuisen recalled that it was Ramaphosa who termed Jacob Zuma’s almost two terms in office “nine wasted years”, before accusing him of faring even worse than his predecessor.
“As we look back now on that early period of the Ramaphosa presidency through the lens of this year’s State of the Nation address, we arrive at one, inescapable conclusion. That you, Mr President, are guilty of something even worse than the thing you once accused Zuma of,” he said.
“For if President Zuma presided over nine wasted years, then President Ramaphosa has presided over five disastrous years.”
Steenhuisen said the “new dawn” Ramaphosa promised when he came to power was a false dawn, his commitment to reform hollow and his biggest mistake persevering with the ANC’s socialist attachment to state control on all fronts.
This, he said, had paved the road to constant electricity load-shedding and failing public services, yet the State of the Nation address saw him — “too weak, too indecisive and too cowardly to take on the cadres” — on the same strategy by announcing a new national state of disaster and centralising more power in his office.
“Instead of getting the state out of the way of private electricity generation, he gave sweeping powers to the same minister who abused the people of this country during Covid,” he said, referring to Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.
“Instead of deregulating and unleashing private sector electricity generation, he centralised even more power in his super-presidency. Instead of removing the incompetent ministers of energy and public enterprises who block reform, he added yet another ministry to his bloated cabinet.”
Nobody was fooled by the president’s speech on Thursday, Steenhuisen added.
“By failing to listen to the cries of the people and doubling down on the failed ideology of state control that caused the crisis in our country, the government has effectively deserted us.”
South Africans could still map a way out of the mess because democracy meant the country was never wholly dependent on one person.
“Now that the president has failed to lead us, we will have to build a bridge across the raging waters ourselves, at next year’s national election.
He said he would not offer hope and idealism, but liberal democracy, marked by decentralised power, and a commitment to the rule of law and non-racialism.
“We tried the idealism of the new dawn, and it turned into a false dawn. Now, let’s try pragmatism. For that is what we in the DA offer this country.”
The 2024 elections offered voters a binary choice, he continued.
“Next year, the national government will either be led by the ANC, or by the DA. We will either have a yellow coalition, led by the ANC, that keeps us trapped on the wrong side of the Rubicon, firmly on the road to a failed state. Or we will have a blue coalition, led by the DA, that leads our country across the Rubicon into a better, brighter and more prosperous future.”
Minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele deviated from his prepared speech to counter Steenhuisen’s electioneering, and said the DA’s promise that if it won power nationally, the whole country would have the good fortune to be run like the Cape Town metro, was also a fallacy.
“When you say the DA does very well it is because you are obsessed with this metro which has passed the test of racial exclusion. All black townships in this metro, services are in a dire state. You go to Khayelitsha, you go to Philippi, you go to Gugulethu, I have been in those townships, Honourable Steenhuisen, the police stations are in a dire state, everything,” Gungubele said, apparently forgetting that policing is a national function.
“The point that I’m making to you is that the Western Cape is a test of resilience of racial exclusion.”
The debate degenerated when Police Minister Bheki Cele suggested that Steenhuisen having an affair and marrying his mistress, meant he could not be trusted to fight gender-based violence.
Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema interjected to tell Cele his remark was improper.
“We cannot sit here and allow the minister to abuse the wife of the leader of the opposition in the name of fighting GBV. That is woman abuse,” Malema said.
The Inkatha Freedom Party’s Narend Singh cautioned, like Steenhuisen did, that Ramaphosa had misread the national mood and his government had proven that it could not be trusted to deliver the solutions the country needed.
“There is such a thing as too little too late. Even if this government were to wake up now and do its job, there is no guarantee it will be enough to claw our government back from disaster,” he said.
“Just as the calamity of our past demanded a severe, unequivocal and urgent response, so too does the calamity of the present. Let us not delude ourselves that South Africa can survive a government that has made promises, reneged on promises, made plans, gone back on plans, changed direction, moved backwards and stood still, all while our country is burning.”
Artmotion S.Africa
