In a parliamentary debate on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Union address on Tuesday to mark the start of the 2024 election season, Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen said the president had ensured the ANC would lose its majority next year.
Steenhuisen recalled that it was Ramaphosa who called Jacob Zuma’s almost two terms in office “a wasted nine years”, before accusing him of being worse than his predecessor.
“When we look back at the early period of Ramaphosa’s presidency through the lens of this year’s State of the Nation address, we come to an inevitable conclusion. If you, Mr. President, are guilty of something worse than the things you accused Zuma of,” he said.
“Because if President Zuma led nine wasteful years, then President Ramaphosa has led five disastrous years.”
Steenhuisen said the “new dawn” Ramaphosa promised when he came to power was a false dawn, a commitment to empty reforms and the biggest mistake that continued with the ANC’s socialist attachment to control the country in all aspects.
This, he said, had paved the way to reduce the constant electricity burden and failing public services, but the State of the Nation address saw him – “too weak, too uncertain and too cowardly to take cadres” – with the same strategy. by declaring a new state of national disaster and centralizing more powers in his office.
“Instead of ridding the country of private power generation, they are giving power to the same minister who abused the people of this country during Covid,” he said, referring to Minister of Cooperatives and Traditional Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma.
“Instead of deregulating and releasing private sector power plants, he focused more on the super-presidency. Instead of eliminating the incompetent energy ministers and public companies that are blocking reforms, he added other ministries to his bloated cabinet.
No one was fooled by the president’s speech on Thursday, Steenhuisen added.
“By failing to listen to the cry of the people and doubling down on the failed ideology of state control that has led to the crisis in our country, the government has effectively abandoned us.”
South Africans can still map their way out of the mess because democracy means that the country is not entirely dependent on one person.
“Now that the president has failed to lead us, we must build a bridge across the troubled waters ourselves, in next year’s national elections.
He said he would not offer hope and idealism, but a liberal democracy, marked by decentralized power, and a commitment to the rule of law and non-racism.
“We tried the idealism of a new dawn, and it turned out to be a false dawn. Now, let’s try pragmatism. Because that’s what we offer in the DA in this country.
The 2024 election offers voters a binary choice, he continued.
“Next year, the national government will be led by the ANC, or by the DA. We will have a yellow coalition, led by the ANC, which has 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, who led our country across the Rubicon to a better, brighter and more prosperous future.
Minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele deviated from the speech prepared to counter Steenhuisen electioneering, and said the promise of the DA if it wins national power, the whole country will have good fortune to open like the Cape Town metro, also a fallacy.
“If you say that the DA is doing well, then you are very interested in this metro that has passed the test of racial exclusion. All the black towns in this metro, the services in the country are dire. You go to Khayelitsha, you go to Filipi, you go to Gugulethu, I have there are in these cities, His Excellency Steenhuisen, the police stations are in terrible conditions, everything,” Gungubele said, apparently forgetting that policing is a national function.
“The bottom line I want to tell you is that the Western Cape is a test of endurance for racial exclusion.”
The debate collapsed when Police Minister Bheki Cele suggested that Steenhuisen was having an affair and was married to her husband, meaning she could not be trusted to fight gender-based violence.
Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema intervened to tell Cele that what he said was not true.
“We cannot sit here and allow ministers to abuse the opposition leader’s wife in the name of fighting GBV. That is the persecution of women,” Malema said.
Narend Singh of the Inkatha Freedom Party warned, like Steenhuisen, that Ramaphosa was misreading the national mood and that his government had proven it could not be trusted to provide the solutions the country needed.
“Something is too late. Even if this government wakes up and does its job, there is no guarantee that it will be enough to save our government from disaster,” he said.
“Just as the disasters of the past demanded a heavy-handed, unclear and swift response, so do the disasters of today. Never forget that South Africa can survive governments that make promises, break promises, make plans, go back to plans, change course, retreat and stop, all while our country is burning.