- President Cyril Ramaphosa is scheduled to deliver his state of the nation address on Thursday.
- Civil society groups want Ramaphosa to deliver concrete plans to solve the country’s problems.
- Ramaphosa is under immense pressure to fix Eskom, but the spotlight is also on the changes he needs to make to his cabinet.
Civic organizations want President Cyril Ramaphosa to deliver more concrete plans for fixing the country in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Thursday.
On Wednesday, the civil society organization Defend our Democracy held a demonstration in Cape Town ahead of the seventh Ramaphosa SONA.
In a memo, the group said they wanted honesty from Ramaphosa when he addressed the nation.
“As you address the nation at the opening of Parliament, we urge you to ensure that you reflect honestly on the gravity of the problems facing the country.
“We hope there is no whitewashing of the role of the government – both the previous administration and the current one under his leadership – in creating these problems or simply not addressing them,” they said.
Referring to the country’s plight, the SACP’s first deputy secretary general, Solly Mapaila, said the country was suffering from a crisis of corrupt political power.
“The people must take back power. We need to transfer and create people power. It no longer serves the people. We have bad political decisions and this creates inequalities.
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“We have an excessively dominant capitalist system. It concentrates power in the hands of a few. Let’s transform the system that oppresses the people. We have left these problems in the hands of people who only seek profit,” he said.
Ramaphosa is under immense pressure to fix Eskom, but the spotlight is also on the changes he needs to make to his cabinet.
The president has no plans to appoint new ministers or let go of old faces in his cabinet before addressing the nation on Thursday night.
Ramaphosa will announce a government action plan for next year, and uncertainty remains over who among his executives will be ousted.
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Cosatu’s parliamentary liaison, Matthew Parks, said Ramaphosa had made progress but much remained to be done.
“The government can’t do it all. We need the companies to play their part. Expose those who are stealing from Eskom with inflated prices and low-quality coal.”
“Let’s end the apartheid pay gap, unless we think it’s morally acceptable to pay a CEO 300 million rand and try to deny mine workers a meager 150 rand a month raise,” he said.
According to Parks, coalition politics is the future of South Africa.
“As we enter the 2024 election and the era of coalitions, it will be uncharted waters for all of us. It will require all of us to listen, hear each other and find each other. Our crises are too big and can only be solved if we all do our bit to the progress of the nation.”
Tessa Dooms, a political analyst and director of Rivonia Circle, said: “The depth of our crisis is that we are doing exactly what [the late former president] Nelson Mandela and Chris Hani did it. We are so far from free. Our democracy is killing us. It is killing our future. It is despair and disappointment. We are choosing not to live because it is difficult to live in a democracy.”
