The parliamentary debate on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address on Tuesday marked the early start of the 2024 election season, with Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen saying the president had guaranteed the loss of the majority of the ANC next year.
Steenhuisen recalled that it was Ramaphosa who called Jacob Zuma’s nearly two terms “nine wasted years,” before accusing him that he was doing even worse than his predecessor.
“As we now look back on that early period of Ramaphosa’s presidency through the lens of this year’s State of the Union address, we come to one inescapable conclusion. That you, Mr. President, are guilty of something even worse than what Zuma once accused,” he said.
“Because if President Zuma presided for nine wasted years, then President Ramaphosa has presided for five disastrous years.”
Steenhuisen said the “new dawn” Ramaphosa promised when he came to power was a false dawn, his commitment to reform was hollow and his biggest mistake was persevering in the ANC’s socialist attachment to state control on all fronts.
This, he said, had paved the way for constant power outage and utility failure, but the State of the Union address saw him, “too weak, too indecisive and too cowardly to stand up to the cadres.” , in the same strategy. by announcing a new state of national disaster and centralizing more power in his office.
“Instead of taking the state out of the way of private electricity generation, he gave sweeping powers to the very 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 freeing electricity generation from the private sector, he centralized even more power in his super presidency. Instead of removing incompetent energy ministers and public companies blocking reform, he added another ministry to his bloated cabinet.”
No one was fooled by the president’s speech on Thursday, Steenhuisen added.
“By not listening to the cries of the people and duplicating the failed ideology of state control that caused the crisis in our country, the government has effectively abandoned us.”
South Africans could still chart a way out of the mess because democracy meant that the country was never completely dependent on one person.
“Now that the president has been unable to guide us, we will have to build a bridge over the rough waters ourselves, in next year’s national elections.
He said he would offer not hope and idealism, but liberal democracy, marked by decentralized power and a commitment to the rule of law and non-racism.
“We tried the idealism of the new dawn, and it turned into a false dawn. Now, let’s test pragmatism. Because that is what we in the DA offer to this country”.
The 2024 election offered voters a binary option, he continued.
“Next year, the national government will be run by either the ANC or the DA. We will have a yellow coalition, led by the ANC, keeping us stuck on the wrong side of the Rubicon, firmly on the path to a failed state. Or we will have a blue coalition, led by the DA, leading our country across the Rubicon to a better, brighter, more prosperous future.”
Minister of the Presidency Mondli Gungubele deviated from his prepared speech to counter Steenhuisen’s election campaigns, saying the district attorney’s promise that if he won power at the national level, the whole country would be lucky to function as the Cape Town metro was also a fallacy.
“When you say that the DA is doing very well, it is because you are obsessed with this subway that has passed the test of racial exclusion. All the black townships in this metro, the services are in a desperate state. Go to Khayelitsha, go to Philippi, go to Gugulethu, I’ve been to those townships, Hon. Steenhuisen, the police stations are in a terrible state, everything,” Gungubele said, apparently forgetting that policing is a national function.
“The point I’m making to you is that the Western Cape is an endurance test of racial exclusion.”
The debate degenerated when Police Minister Bheki Cele suggested that Steenhuisen was having an affair and marrying his mistress, meaning he could not be trusted to fight gender-based violence.
Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema chimed in to tell Cele that her comment was inappropriate.
“We cannot sit here and allow the minister to abuse the wife of the opposition leader in the name of fighting gender violence. That is abuse of the woman,” Malema said.
Narend Singh of the Inkatha Freedom Party warned, as did Steenhuisen, that Ramaphosa had misread the national mood and that his government had shown 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 that it will be enough to rescue our government 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 made promises, broke promises, made plans, backed down from plans, changed direction, backed down and stood still, all while our country burns.”
