DA SONA Debate Speeches

The following speeches were delivered today during the debate on the State of the Nation Address and are under embargo until delivery.

Samantha Graham MP – Without trust, the consensus you seek Mr President, will remain elusive
DA Shadow Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure
083 409 9196

Dr Leon Schreiber – Courage, dear heart
DA Shadow Minister of Public Service and Administration
078 395 6374

Noko Masipa MP – Without basic support systems, agriculture cannot support economy
DA Member on the Portfolio Committee on Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development
082 339 1626

Dean Macpherson MP – It’s time to move the needle on economic reform
DA Shadow Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition
083 776 0202

Luyolo Mphithi MP – Mr President, back your words with action
DA Shadow Minister on Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities
079 551 9791

Isaac Sileku MP – Resurrect infrastructure to provide services, growth economy
DA Member of the NCOP
084 810 5907

Sonja Boshoff MP – Regering se mooi beloftes waardeloos sonder implementasie
DA Member of the NCOP
082 489 0280

Ashor Sarupen MP – President stuck with moribund party committed to failed ideologies
DA Member of the Appropriations Committee
067 729 2412

DA calls on ANC government to condemn Russian aggression towards the Ukraine

Please find attached soundbite by Darren Bergman MP.

The DA calls on the ANC national government to condemn the ongoing Russian aggression towards the Ukraine. Any refusal or silence by the national government is a condonement of Russia’s actions.

We also call on the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Naledi Pandor, to speak out against Russia’s aggression in BRICS.

While, the Minister made quick mention of the situation, it is unfortunate that other than her, there seems to be little appetite within the ranks of the ANC government to address the rising threat of violence at the Russian/Ukraine borders.

The current situation between the neighbouring countries have been escalating since 2014, and are creating precedents of sovereign countries determining the borders of other sovereign countries. It is also creating a precedent of a country being able to object to the membership of another country to a body such as NATO even when the opposing country is not a member of said body. This could also have major consequences for African countries.

The problem with us comfortably hiding between the Minsk 1 and 2 agreement is that history has shown us that Russia will apply its own interpretation to the translation of those agreements after the fact. This does not bode well for world peace.

South Africa must tread these diplomatic waters carefully and cannot hide behind the ANC’s heavy handed historic blind loyalty.

Why SA needs a new cabinet

Yesterday, I tabled a motion of no confidence in President Ramaphosa’s cabinet of ministers. Section 102 (1) of the Constitution enables this action:

If the National Assembly, by a vote supported by a majority of its members, passes a motion of no confidence in the Cabinet excluding the President, the President must reconstitute the Cabinet.

I explained the reason for this motion in my reply yesterday, as leader of the opposition, to the President’s State of the Nation Address. Here is a summary.

In the July riots last year, 354 people lost their lives and billions of rands of property was destroyed. The independent report into the cause of these riots, produced by an expert panel lead by Professor Sandy Africa, specifically stated that:

Many reasons were proffered for this failure, but in the end the response remains that they (the police and the intelligence services) failed to do the necessary to protect life, limb and property. The reasons are set out in the body of our report. The Executive, however, carries some of the blame too and must take responsibility for its lapse of leadership.

In a functional democracy, this report would have triggered the replacement of the entire cabinet, and this should happen. Except, the alternative to President Ramaphosa, Deputy President David Mabuza, is too corrupt, ruthless, useless and self-serving to contemplate, so we have specifically not brought a motion against the president himself.

Furthermore, numerous members of his cabinet have failed spectacularly to perform their role in government or are implicated in acts of alleged corruption and maladministration. Some of these are:

  • Police Minister Bheki Cele, for SAPS’ failure to protect lives and property during the July 2021 riots;
  • Then Minister of State Security Ayanda Dlodlo, for intelligence failures before and during July 2021 riots;
  • Tourism Minister Lindiwe Sisulu – for multiple delivery failures and for her recent despicable attack on the constitution and the judiciary;
  • Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe – for ongoing load-shedding and for his commitment to coal interests;
  • Public Works Minister Patricia de Lille – for the Beitbridge border fence fiasco and for the fact that Parliament was burnt down on her watch;
  • Education Minister Angie Motshekga – for the 5.9 million school dropouts during her 13 years in office;
  • Minister of Small Business Development Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams – Ramaphosa clearly has no faith in her ability to cut red tape for small business, which is why he has appointed a czar in his office, to do her job in parallel – and for her flouting of lockdown regulations during her previous role as communications minister;
  • Social Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu, for spraying destitute people with a water canon for the “crime” of waiting in a queue to collect a SASSA grant;
  • Transport Minister Fikile Mbalula, for the collapse of our railway infrastructure on his watch, and for the drivers licence debacle;
  • and Trade and Industry Minister Ibrahim Patel, because he is a sworn communist who has played a leading role in growing our broad joblessness rate to 46.6%, and because he will never support Ramaphosa in implementing the reforms South Africa needs to fight poverty.

Furthermore, we believe President Ramaphosa to be a lone voice in the ANC backing real reforms that would bring down poverty and unemployment. He has admitted this much by setting up a parallel state in his own office.

President Ramaphosa lacks either the courage or the political support within his own party to replace his cabinet. The only way to achieve it, therefore, is with the support of opposition members of parliament.

With a simple majority needed to pass this motion in the House, only 50 or so ANC members of parliament need to support this motion for it to pass. If the motion is rejected, it will stand as conclusive evidence that Ramaphosa is indeed a lonely president, and nothing more than a convenient front, lending a sense of legitimacy and decency to a wholly self-serving, useless, corrupt governing party.

SONA DEBATE: A Little less conversation, a little more action, Mr President

Note to Editors: The following speech was delivered by the DA Federal Leader, John Steenhuisen MP, during the SONA Debates in Cape Town today. A Notice of Motion to the Secretary of the National Assembly is attached here.

 

Madam Speaker

Honourable President

Honourable Members

This is a strange SONA to debate, because large parts of the president’s speech are straight from the DA’s playbook.

Let’s be clear: That’s a good thing.

What we need, if we want to fight poverty, is agreement on where and how jobs are created. And for the first time someone from that side of the House seemed to get it.

On Thursday evening the president didn’t sound like a man leading the ANC, a party obsessed with centralised control of the economy and reliant on a massively bloated public sector.

Channeling the DA, the said. “Government doesn’t create jobs; businesses create jobs… government must create the conditions that will enable the private sector”.

What remains unclear though is which of these views represents the real ANC?

For almost three decades this government has done just about all it can to discourage job creation in the private sector through terrible, draconian regulations and labour laws.

For almost three decades the ANC has stuck to its ideological guns of putting government and the state at the centre of economic growth and job creation.

And for almost three decades it has treated the small business owner as its enemy, doing all it can to extract their taxes and their goodwill, while forcing them to jump through extraordinary hoops of compliance with labour legislation, BEE and a raft of other irrational requirements.

And then suddenly, on Thursday evening, we hear a different story. So what changed?

Mr President, I’m sure you’ve seen all the analysts’ comments that you must have been reading the DA’s manifesto.

But that statement needs some correcting. A manifesto is just a declaration of intentions, not achievements. Anyone can talk about the things they want to do.

None of the things in your speech that you seemingly appropriated from the DA came from a wish list. They are things we already do where we govern.

You borrowed from the DA’s track record, not its manifesto. And that’s an important distinction to make when trying to understand why our economy, under your government, remains trapped in quicksand.

It all comes down to the difference between talking and doing. And that’s what we need to keep in mind when we debate the positive things you said on Thursday. Are any of them likely to happen?

You talk about building a capable, professional state, but you still insist on deploying unsuitable party loyalists to every corner of the state. Meanwhile the DA has shown you exactly what a capable, merit-based state can look like.

You talk about solving the energy crisis and ending load-shedding, and you’ve been talking about this for well over a decade now. But as we speak, DA governments stand ready to buy their own power directly from independent producers.

You talk about making it easier for small and medium enterprises to operate and comply with regulations by cutting red tape, while the DA does exactly this. The Western Cape government has an incredibly successful Red Tape Reduction Unit, and we introduced a similar Bill in Parliament, only to have it shot down by your party.

You talk about paying government suppliers on time. DA governments consistently pay their suppliers within thirty days.

You see, Mr President, talking is easy. But doing makes the difference. The DA difference.

Cape Town Mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, has promised to make Cape Town the most business-friendly city on the continent, and put it right up there among the best in the world.

You might also know that Cape Town already tops the “Ease of Doing Business” rankings in South Africa. This has had a profound effect on new investments, which in turn has spared its residents the worst of the country’s unemployment bloodbath.

But that’s not good enough. The rest of South Africa cannot be the benchmark, because it’s just too low. Cape Town wants to measure itself against the world, and it wants to roll out the red carpet for every possible new job-creating business.

That’s what we mean by the DA difference. The measurable way in which people’s lives improve where the DA governs.

And arguably the biggest DA difference of all is that we get things done.

You talk – year after year, SONA after SONA – while the DA gets things done.

It could have been so different though. When you embarked on your presidency some four years ago, you had all the goodwill and support you needed to put our country back on its feet.

It wasn’t going to be easy, but it was perfectly teed up for you. You were the darling of the media and business fell over its feet to help you out and give you money.

All you had to do was to start acting on some of your promises of the first SONA. Just a little bit of progress, and then some more the next year, and the year after that.

But the reality is, very little happened.

And so South Africans heard the same old empty promises each year about how jobs will be created, how load-shedding will end, how broadband spectrum will be auctioned and how corruption will be dealt with.

Every year another task team, another commission, another road show, another social compact, another stakeholder engagement. All just kicking the can down the road, at taxpayer expense.

Now you tell us your government has given itself “100 days to finalise a social compact to grow our economy, create jobs and combat hunger.”

No one can argue with those goals.

But what were you doing for the last 100, or 1000 days, for that matter? We’ve been in this crisis for a very long time. It’s incomprehensible that you’ve come to SONA to tell us you’re now going to start thinking of a plan?

You should have used SONA to announce the plan. And not only the plan, but the progress on implementation.

Don’t say. Do.

And again, on Thursday, you told us that those responsible for State Capture will be punished.

But if you read the first two Zondo reports you’d know that you still continue to employ many of the implicated in your cabinet.

In your fifth state of the nation address you’re still promising prosecutions, yet not one implicated cadre has been charged and convicted.

Don’t say. Do.

So while I’d love to feel buoyed by your newfound insights into job creation, small enterprises, cutting red tape, simplifying labour laws, and supporting our nation’s employers, I’ve seen this film enough times to know that this is where it likely ends.

And so does everyone else, which is why the common theme of the post SONA media analysis was: “Nice words, pity it won’t happen.”

After all that goodwill and hope four years ago, you have today become the president of the comforting catchphrase, the soothing reassurance and the empty promises. Dr Do Nothing.

But here’s the thing, Mr President, we cannot have a conversation about this inaction without turning our attention to the elephant in the room. Or, should I say, the 64 elephants in the room.

You know what I’m talking about, right? Your cabinet ministers and their deputies – 64 of you, including 28 ministers, 34 deputy ministers, plus your deputy president and yourself.

Even after trimming and consolidating ministries a couple of years ago, you still ended up presiding over one of the biggest cabinets in the world. A massive jobs-for-cadres scheme where no one is too corrupt, too lazy, or too useless to land one of these plush jobs.

Every energy reform, every measure to unshackle our economy, every intention to support businesses and grow jobs sinks like a tonne of bricks the moment you walk into your next cabinet meeting.

Almost no one on your Executive would be employable in the private sector, and some of them should frankly be behind bars.

But instead of cleaning out your cabinet you simply reshuffle the inept and the corrupt, again and again, until every single ministry has the grubby fingerprints of failure all over it.

You stand up in your SONA and you talk about building a capable state. But you’re not prepared to walk away from the very essence of state capture and the incapable state: the ANC policy of cadre deployment.

Clearly, you know your cabinet cannot be trusted to get things done. You have effectively admitted that by setting up a parallel state in your own office.

Your appointment of outsiders like Sipho Nkosi, Mavuso Msimang and Daniel Mminele to do the job of your cabinet says it all.

In a functional democracy, you would have fired most of your cabinet ages ago, but we all know why you haven’t.

We’ve all seen the video where, without a hint of shame, you state, and I quote: “I would rather be seen as a weak president than split the ANC because that is not my mission. My mission is to keep the ANC united.”

In other words, you see your job as holding together this rag-tag mob of crooks and free-loaders, even if that means the destruction of our country.

Why else would minister Bheki Cele still have a job in your cabinet after the spectacular failure of SAPS to protect people and property during the riots of July last year? Over 300 people lost their lives.

You should hold him accountable, but you don’t.

Why does Minister Ayanda Dlodlo still have a job in your cabinet? As Minister of State Security, the lack of state intelligence during and preceding the July riots fell squarely on her shoulders.

You should hold her accountable, but instead you simply redeployed her to Public Service and Administration, while the third person responsible for July’s chaos, Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa Nqakula, found herself redeployed as Speaker of this House.

Why does Minister Lindiwe Sisulu still have a job as Tourism Minister? Over the past 28 years she has left her trail of mediocrity across five different departments. And if that wasn’t enough to get rid of her, surely her despicable attack on our constitution and our judiciary was.

Why does Minister Gwede Mantashe still have a job as Energy Minister? We have now entered our fourteenth year of load-shedding. We have children at high school who have never known a time without these constant blackouts.

You can’t speak to the world about green energy and fixing our electricity crisis while Mr Coal over there can’t see beyond fossil fuels. Will you hold him accountable for dragging our country backwards into the Dark Ages? Of course not.

Why does Minister Patricia de Lille still have a job with Public Works? If the Beitbridge border fence fiasco wasn’t enough reason to dismiss her, then surely the fact that Parliament burnt down on her watch was.

Why does Minister Angie Motshekga still serve as our Education Minister? She’s had this same job for 13 years now, and during this time almost 6 million children dropped out of school before their matric exams.

Forget about the pass rate she crows about every year, because this means nothing when half our children don’t even sit down to write the exams. If our widening inequality is something that worries you, that is where you should start looking.

Why does Minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams still have a job as Minister of Small Business Development? Her transgressions in her previous role as Communications Minister as well as her flouting of lockdown regulations were already enough to fire her.

So why promote her to this crucial portfolio, only to appoint an outsider to come and do her job of cutting red tape?

Why does Minister Lindiwe Zulu still have a job in your cabinet? Surely, when you saw her spraying destitute people with a water cannon for the “crime” of waiting in a queue to collect a SASSA grant, there should’ve been no doubt that she’s not suitable for the job.

But there she is – still your Minister of Social Development.

Why on earth does Minister Fikile Mbalula still have a job as Transport Minister? Or any minister, for that matter? How is this the third ministry he’s headed up?

If the collapse of our railway infrastructure on his watch wasn’t grounds for dismissal, then surely this mess with our only drivers licence printing machine should’ve been the final nail in his coffin.

But it seems, like every other deadbeat minister, he is unfireable.

And finally, why does Minister Ebrahim Patel still serve on your cabinet? If indeed you believe, as you said last week, that the private sector and not government should be creating jobs, why put a sworn communist in charge of trade and industry?

A large part of our country’s 46.6% unemployment rate rests squarely on his shoulders. Have you held him accountable? No, of course you haven’t.

Accountability is something you only talk about, because actually doing something about it would mean firing most of your cabinet and upsetting your comrades. And we all know you’d rather be a weak president than do that.

So here is what’s going to happen, Mr President. Because you are a president of talk and not a president of action, we will make it easier for you by tabling a Motion of No Confidence, not in you, but in your whole cabinet in terms of Section 102 of the Constitution.=

If it’s not possible for you to hold your Executive accountable and still survive as president, then we will take that burden off your hands and let this House fire them for you.

Once we’ve done that, we’ll bring back all our Bills of reform to this House:

Our ISMO energy reform Bill, our Ease of Doing Business Bill, our Red Tape Impact Assessment Bill, our Public Investment Corporation Amendment Bill, our Small Enterprise Ombudsman Bill and our End Cadre Deployment Bill.

And then we’ll let this House help you do your job by implementing the reforms you could only talk about.

While we’re doing that, our governments in metros and municipalities across the country will help you do your job by becoming less dependent on Eskom, by taking over more policing duties from national government, and hopefully by taking over and fixing commuter rail.

Our governments will do all they can to fix the mess you created in our schools.

And our governments will continue to make it easier to run businesses and create jobs as we try to undo decades of your destructive economic policies.

Because we cannot sit through another year of your talk while our country slides backwards and millions more fall into poverty and joblessness.

So you can either stand back and watch us take over your duties one by one, or you can let us help you break the paralysis of your presidency by pushing through your own reforms in this House.

I assure you, as I have many times in the past, that you will find much support on this side of the House for a reform agenda

Mr President, you might just have enough time left to rewrite the story of your Presidency and salvage your legacy, but that would require taking action, now.

So what do you say, Mr President? Are we going to help you fire your cabinet and give your Executive a fresh start?

Will you let us help you drive through the economic reforms that your comrades don’t support?

Or are you content to see out your time in office as the president too afraid to put his country before his party?

The choice is yours.

DA clarifies position on extended school days, following confusing reporting

Note to Editors: Please find attached soundbite by Baxolile ‘Bax’ Nodada MP.

Reports that the DA is calling for the extension of school days by at least one hour is incorrect. The Party has not explicitly called for the extension of the school day, instead, we have put it forward as a possible proposal, among many others, to be considered to ensure pupils catch-up on lost learning time.

It is unfortunate that some members of the press has resorted to ‘clickbait’ reporting instead of facts in covering the DA’s position. This has only caused unnecessary confusion.

According to the CRAMS-TIMMS survey, some learners have experienced between 50-75% of lost learning time. This has a magnitude of implications on learners and it is important that the feasibility of various methods are considered to ensure that they catch-up on the curriculum.

The DA is looking into a variety of solutions for pupils to catch-up on learning and teaching-time lost, of which the extension of the schooling time is a possible option. This, of course cannot go without the adequate funding to support it or without the consultation of a variety stakeholders; including learners, teachers and parents. As well as investigating how beneficial and practical this option is, other aspects such as the provision of incentives to teachers, considering learner transport and school nutrition must be considered.

The DA’s proposals for catching up on the curriculum also include the following:

  • Trim the curriculum and focus on the basic skills.
  • Address the teacher vacancy rate as a matter of urgency.
  • Provide extra lessons through absorbing graduates and calling back retired teachers, with the consideration of remuneration.
  • Work with the Departments of Higher Education and Treasury to consider increasing the number of bursaries for teaching with a focus on STEM subjects.

The Department of Basic Education needs to work together with teachers’ unions, SGBs and communities to find the most suitable and viable options, with adequate funding to support accelerating curriculum coverage in order to make up for learning time lost.

DA SONA Debate Speeches

The following speeches will be delivered today during the debate on the State of the Nation Address.

Siviwe Gwarube MP – Parliament should not be a lapdog for government but a watchdog for SA
Deputy Chief Whip of the Democratic Alliance
068 113 0835

Baxolile ‘Bax’ Nodada MP – Poor education adds to unemployment woes, prioritise it Mr President 
DA Shadow Minister of Basic Education
063 795 7519

Kevin Mileham MP – Don’t blow it, Mr President, put SA at the forefront of the green economy NOW  
DA Shadow Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy  
083 463 8858

Andrew Whitfield MP – We are a nation at war
DA Shadow Minister of Police
072 613 9265

George Michalakis MP – More promises with no action from the President
DA Member of the NCOP
082 793 6071

DA exposes planned ANC coup against school governing bodies

Note to Editors: Please find an attached soundbite by Baxolile ‘Bax’ Nodada MP

The DA is alarmed by the latest version of the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill. The Bill, which was submitted to Parliament in December last year, is set to carry out a coup against the parents and children of South Africa by usurping the powers of school governing bodies to determine the admissions and language policies of schools in their communities, and by enhancing the powers of ANC cadres to merge and to rename merged schools.

By robbing governing bodies of these powers, the Department of Basic Education plans to centralise control over public schools not in the hands of the communities and parents who know what is best for their children, but in the hands of ANC cadres like Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi.

Should the Bill be passed, the national Department of Basic Education, led by Minister Angie Motshekga, will be handing a loaded weapon to the likes of Lesufi to finish off the war he has long waged against governing bodies and mother-tongue education.

Specifically:

  • Section 4 of the Bill empowers officials and MECs to amend the admissions policies of any of the 24 000 public schools in the country;
  • Section 5 of the Bill – the “Lesufi clause” – gives MECs like Panyaza Lesufi what he has always yearned for: the power to change the language policy of any of the thousands of public schools in the country and to direct any public school to change its language(s) of instruction; and
  • Section 13 of the Bill gives officials and MECs the power to merge and name any merged public school in South Africa.

Although the Bill lays out a number of procedural steps to be followed in each of these cases, it explicitly stipulates that “the final authority” vests not in the school community, but in HODs and MECs like Lesufi. In cases where governing bodies or communities are unhappy with changes to their school policies, they only have the right to appeal to the same MEC who leads the very department forcing these changes upon them. In other words, MECs like Lesufi will become both player and referee.

Lesufi’s shameful track record of agitating against governing bodies and mother-tongue education to distract from his failure to fix the Gauteng education system is the perfect example of why it would be a costly mistake to give ANC cadres absolute power over our schools and the education of our children. There can be little doubt that Lesufi will abuse these powers from day one to further politicise education, side-line school governing bodies, and eradicate the Afrikaans-language schools he despises so much.

Outside of the DA-run Western Cape, South Africa’s basic education system is in crisis. The roots of this crisis lie in the fact that the ANC and its allies, including the South African Democratic Teachers’ Association (SADTU), have captured and corrupted the education system to serve their political interests. In many cases, school governing bodies and involved local communities serve as the final bulwark against the outright collapse of the education system. Year after year, the top performing public schools in the country are those where local communities work together to empower learners to excel, not because of, but in spite of, cadres like Lesufi.

In cases where governing bodies are struggling, the solution is to support them to perform their important duties, rather than neutering them. The correct response to underperforming schools is also not to try and punish schools that are delivering good results, but to fix struggling schools by providing better funding, standing up to SADTU, and enforcing accountability mechanisms for teachers to ensure that all learners receive a quality education. And in cases where governing bodies unfairly discriminate against learners, those specific governing bodies must be held accountable rather than giving politicians sweeping powers over the admissions and language policies of all 24 000 public schools in South Africa.

Sacrificing the futures of our children at the altar of ANC ideological control is a price too ghastly to contemplate, and the DA calls on all South Africans to join us in rejecting this planned coup against the children and schools of our country.

DA rejects RAF’s attempts to hide audit report

Note to Editors: Please find attached soundbites in English and Afrikaans by Chris Hunsinger MP

The DA notes the Road Accident Fund’s (RAF) attempt to block the Auditor-General of South Africa (AG) from making its annual audit report public.

The RAF filed an urgent application with the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria to stop the AG from releasing its report and tabling it in Parliament.

Not only does the RAF want the AG to pay for all costs should they oppose this ridiculous application, it also wants the application to set aside the findings of the report to be heard at a later date.

Alternatively, the RAF wants the AG’s “declaration of invalidity” to be suspended for 6 months so that they can “meaningfully engage with the applicant to remedy the defect”.

The RAF seems to be trying to dodge accountability. The Fund knows no end to its financial woes. According to reports, court proceedings revealed the audit’s conclusion that the RAF’s liabilities exceeded R361 billion. The RAF’s contention that their liabilities are merely R30 billion does not engender trust.

Whether it’s R300 billion or R30 billion, the fact remains that the RAF is a sinking ship. And now it’s attempting to muzzle the AG. What is the Fund trying to hide?

Submitting financial statements is a statutory obligation, and the DA will do everything to ensure the release and tabling of the audit report to Parliament. We will not allow institutions like the RAF to undermine the essence of our democracy and constitutional design.

DA rejects Ramaphosa’s plan to create a new SOE to manage bankrupt SOEs

Please find an attached soundbite by Ghaleb Cachalia MP 

The DA rejects the announcement made by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his State of the Nation Address in which he revealed that preparatory work has begun for the establishment of a state-owned holding company to house all commercial SOEs.

This is a regressive move which does nothing to solve the current systematic challenges affecting these entities, but keeps them beholden to the state for endless bailouts.

Instead of creating a new SOE to manage bankrupt SOEs, Ramaphosa missed a leadership moment to open up SOEs for private sector investment and innovation.

Just recently, we learned that South Africa Post Office, Land Bank, Denel, SAA and SA Express and Armscor failed to meet the September 2021 deadline to submit their 2020/21 annual reports in Parliament. This is just the tip of the iceberg for a sector that is infested with governance and operational inefficiencies.

The least that the government should be doing now is to be preparing SOEs for the unavoidable eventuality of private participation. The DA has been advocating for such an approach for years, with our latest proposition being the Public Finance Management Amendment Bill, 2020.

The bill aims to “provide for additional measures in instances where the executive authority fails to table an annual report and financial statements of a department or a public entity, and the audit report on those statements, in the National Assembly or the relevant legislature”. The DA calls on all parties represented in Parliament to support this Bill.

Thinking that such deeply entrenched shortcomings can be solved through a new holding SOE company is not only naïve but reckless. 

SOEs were at the centre of the state capture project, driven mainly by the state’s iron fist control over their operations. The proposed new holding company will only make it easier for the state to interfere more in areas of procurement, financial management and on who gets appointed to what post. In short, it will be a perfect platform to re-institute state capture and further entrench cadre deployment in the public service.

The DA will reject any legislation brought to Parliament, by the President or the Department of Public Enterprises that seeks to establish this proposed state-owned holding company for SOEs.

Cadre deployment is collapsing the Land Bank

Please find attached soundbite by Noko Masipa MP.

The DA calls on the Minister of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, Thoko Didiza, to engage the board of the Land Bank, National Treasury and the Minister of Finance, Enoch Godongwana, to forge a feasible path to support farmers. This follows the resignation of two top executives at the Land Bank.

Farmers are feeling very insecure about their loans held at the Bank, and need an urgent update.

The resignation of Land Bank CEO, Ayanda Kanana, and Executive Manager of Agricural Economics and Advisory, Dr Litha Magingxa, hardly comes as a surprise.

The DA has always maintained that financial bailouts are not the solution to the myriad of problems plaguing the Land Bank.

In truth, the Land Bank’s woes stem from the ANC policy of cadre deployment that placed unqualified, incompetent and corrupt people, who failed to understand the role and appreciate the complexity of the capital loan structures of institutions like the Land Bank, in crucial positions.

The DA believes that these resignations demonstrate the lack of confidence in the ANC government’s direction regarding the Bank.

In recent years, the Bank went 18 months without a CEO due to poor succession planning. It received a disclaimer audit opinion by the Auditor-General (AG) for the 2020 financial year, which was followed by a qualified audit in 2021. The Land Bank has also been riddled with corruption which resulted in losses of over R160 million. This past corruption has ruined any possibility of a capital adequacy recovery program.

The resignation of theses senior executives, coupled with adverse audit findings by the AG, and its poor liquidity position is the final nail in the coffin of the Land Bank remaining a vehicle towards supporting transformation in agriculture and land reform.

Under the ANC government, the Land Bank has failed to fulfill its mandate to support, promote and facilitate the development and transformation of the agricultural sector.

The steady demise of the Land Bank clearly demonstrates that the ANC-government’s commitment to land reform is mere lip service. The ANC has shown no intention to use agricultural finance structures to secure and create more jobs, speed land reform and improve food security in the country.