Ramaphosa’s turns to hypocrisy on cadre deployment as public sector rebellion intensifies

4 March 2024

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s hypocrisy on the issue of cadre deployment sunk to new depths in the newsletter he published yesterday. Over the past few weeks, Ramaphosa and his party have steadfastly defended the practice of cadre deployment, despite a mounting rebellion against this practice from across society and from inside the public sector. Since the DA’s victory in the Constitutional Court forced the ANC to publish its cadre deployment records, we have been inundated by whistle-blowers from inside the state joining our rebellion against cadre deployment.

Ramaphosa’s newsletter yesterday was a transparent attempt to appease officials in the public sector who have grown increasingly restless as the DA continues to expose the ANC’s dirty cadre secrets. Writing in his weekly newsletter, Ramaphosa sang the praises of the Public Service Amendment Bill, which saw the officials who drafted this bill copying meaningful sections straight out of the DA’s End Cadre Deployment Bill and from the DA’s policy platform. Ramaphosa then goes on to claim that this reform ‘…will also help prevent the kind of undue political interference in the administration of the state that the State Capture Commission found sometimes enabled corruption.’

By acknowledging, for the first time, the State Capture Commission’s finding that ANC cadre deployment “facilitated state capture,” Ramaphosa has exposed his own cowardly hypocrisy on this issue. On the one hand, he is trying to take credit for the work done by departmental officials in using the DA’s anti-cadre deployment policy to shape the Public Service Amendment Bill. On the other hand, he continues to defend ANC cadre deployment, including during his recent rant about this issue at the ANC’s manifesto launch.

Ramaphosa has clearly realised that the DA’s work to expose cadre deployment has triggered a full-scale rebellion against this corrupt ANC practice. Even as he continues to defend this evil practice, he has simultaneously been forced to try and appease officials inside his own government who are tired of being insulted through the preference for incompetent and corrupt cadres over skilled professionals.

Just last week, it was revealed that the Public Service Commission, which is designated by the Constitution as the custodian of ethics and good governance, joined the DA-led rebellion against cadre deployment in a new report, noting that:

“The fact that senior appointments are political appointments, and the role of the ANC deployment committee, cannot be ignored…Central to appointments, cadre deployment has been denied many times in the past mostly based on legalistic arguments that the constitutional and legislative framework do not allow for it. The Zondo Commission, by contrast, shone a very clear light on it…The current emphasis on ‘political deployment’ needs to be replaced by a focus on building a professional public service.”

In his scramble to appease the growing number of officials rebelling against political interference inside his own administration, Ramaphosa has inadvertently vindicated the DA’s ongoing war against cadre deployment. The DA takes the open hypocrisy displayed in his newsletter as a sign of weakness, which further fuels our determination to wage this fight until we have fully exposed Ramaphosa’s complicity in state capture as the former chairman of the cadre deployment committee, and until we have outlawed and abolished this practice from the face of South Africa.

The DA will press ahead with our duel court actions to achieve both of these goals, by holding the ANC in contempt of court for failing to disclose its complete cadre records and by declaring the practice unconstitutional and unlawful. Every person who is tired of the corruption, state capture and service delivery failure caused by ANC cadre deployment, can help us rescue South Africa from cadre deployment before it is too late, by voting for the DA on 29 May.

Issued by Leon Schreiber, DA Shadow Minister for Public Service, 4 March 2024