ANC spokesperson Dakota Legoete. Picture: Oupa Mokoena/African News Agency (ANA)
THE ANC says it takes proud ownership of its cadre deployment policy and will forge ahead with its responding application to the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria opposing the DA’s motion to have the policy outlawed.
The DA has grappled with the ANC in the past over cadre deployment, but the ANC has refused to back down on the policy that was first adopted at the party’s 50th National Conference in Mafikeng in 1997.
Last year the DA submitted its “End Cadre Deployment Bill” to the National Assembly in what it described as an attempt to ensure merit-based appointments throughout the public administration sector, and to make it a criminal offence for the ANC to meddle with appointment processes.
The DA expects the National Assembly to vote on this bill before the end of the year.
In the fifth and final instalment of the state capture commission report, Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, who chaired the commission, was scathing about cadre deployment. He said it created “conditions and conduct that enable state capture and systemic corruption” and recommended that it be abolished.
The DA’s bid to fell cadre deployment was launched in the North Gauteng High Court before the latest report was released. Law firm Krish Naidoo Attorneys filed the ANC’s responding court documents.
ANC chairperson Gwede Mantashe was critical of the commission’s stance on cadre deployment, but the party said this week it would review the policy.
However, Dakota Legoete, ANC NEC member and party spokesperson, said that they would forge ahead with the court case as the ANC takes ownership of the policy, and that the DA applied it with their governance of the Western Cape.
“None of the people who are deployed in the municipalities of the Western Cape, including provincial departments, are ANC members and we have never fought them over that. They must not make us fools because what we want is loyalty and skills. Any South African who is loyal to the country and has skills can be deployed,” Legoete said.
He said there was fundamentally nothing wrong with cadre deployment because this was commonplace, even in modern democracies like in the US. “It’s only in South Africa that we sometimes expect too much and too much of what we can’t do where we are in charge.
“When the DA took over through Helen Zille in Cape Town, the first person they fired was advocate Wallace Mgoqi who was the municipal (city) manager under Nomaindia Mfeketho,” Legoete said. “They replaced him with their own people and today the list is endless; even in Johannesburg they’ve brought in their people and we are not fighting them.
“This is just an agenda against the ANC. They’re worse than us, including how they cover up their corruption,” Legoete said.
Leon Schreiber, DA MP and spokesperson on Public Service and Administration, said the ANC’s desperate decision to continue defending cadre deployment corruption in court amounts to open defiance of the commission’s findings.
“If the ANC were in any way committed to ‘effecting the measures required to eliminate conditions and conduct that enable state capture and systemic corruption’, the party would have supported the DA’s case to proceed unopposed so that South Africa could be freed from this policy and corruption as soon as possible.
“Fortunately, the DA has always anticipated that the ANC, an organised crime syndicate for whom cadre deployment is the single most important mechanism to capture and corrupt the state, would choose its own corrupt interests over the needs of the country, even if that meant defying the Zondo Commission,” Schreiber said.