Speech by Democratic Alliance parliamentary leader, Athol Trollip MP, in the debate on the budget vote of the presidency, June 23 2009

The Zuma administration is being dictated to by the ghost of Thabo Mbeki

Mr Speaker, Hon President.

Much water has flowed under the proverbial bridge since this budget was conceived and allocated to your office.

During a recession the adage of cutting one's cloth according to what one can afford is the most prudent thing to do.  In this case you have done the opposite, to a certain extent though it is to be expected that when a new President comes into office he or she will have different priorities, strategies and implementation plans but your plans are beyond your budget.

Not only have you chosen an enormous cabinet that appears to owe its existence to a not too unapparent appeasement strategy, you have also created two surrogate departments within your own office.  The planning and monitoring commissions are not headed by lightweight junior ministers and they will therefore develop an appetite for already scarce financial and management resources in your office.  The funding proposals and actual mandates of these two departments need to be very clearly explained to this house.

The cost of service delivery in this country is already excessively high due to the fact that cadre deployment and the expunging of civil servants from the previous regime have left us with a corps of public officials that are not adequately skilled and equipped to perform their functions effectively.  This has led to us having to employ and fund effectively a "dual" civil service which is made up of consultants.

These people are effectively the expunged former civil service corps that now "advise" government on what and how to do things.  This is not very clever because firstly, they don't come cheap and, secondly they don't transfer skills because they are hardly going to consult themselves out of business and they don't trust the government that put them out on the street.

My next question is who actually is governing South Africa? I know you are the President and that you are the President of the ANC. But one must ask why it appears that the tail is wagging the dog.

Why do new cabinet ministers, deputy ministers, affiliate union organizations, political parties and your own youth league seem to feel that they have the right to pull the purse strings and manipulate the agenda of government?

The Secretary General of the ANC is not the Director General of Government and unless there is a clear separation of powers between the ANC and your government, you will become a marionette controlled by those that believe you are a dispensable tool.

I caution, Mr President, that you not be fooled by people like Minister Shiceka who say one thing and mean something else.  He says for example "SA is one country with one leader, and no one is expected to be out of tune." Not only is this patently unconstitutional - it smacks of double speak and the worst kind of obfuscation. This obfuscation was exposed for what it is by the Minister's acknowledgement this week that the ANC government intends to scrap the provinces and that it is forging ahead with the Constitution 17th Amendment Bill. The DA unequivocally opposes both these measures that threaten to undermine our constitutional democracy and we will not allow the ANC to stop us governing the Western Cape which we won in a free and fair election.

If you allow the party and its interests to trump those of the people, if corruption and incompetence are tolerated and overlooked, and if the Constitution is considered secondary to the political purposes of the ruling party, this will threaten our constitutional democracy.

When one views the current basket of proposed legislation in its entirety it is clear that there is a systematic assault on our constitutional democracy.

Allow me to raise my concerns about some of the proposed legislation, but my concern is not limited to these examples:

• There are a series of bills on the judiciary which collectively undermine its independence, increase the executives ability to define its nature and impose the political agenda of the ANC onto this institution;
• The proposed 17th Constitutional Amendment Bill that I referred to earlier seeks to centralise power in the hands of the executive which is now apparently held to account by Gwede Mantashe in Luthuli house and the monitoring commission under Minister Chabane.
• The Single Public Service legislation that threatens the ability of municipal councils and provincial governments to determine and implement their own policies and practices when it comes to their employees. Rather, it centralises this power at a national level thereby empowering the ANC government to force its own policies on these two spheres.
• The bill proposing a National Health Insurance scheme, which will destroy what is actually working by bringing all health services to the lowest level instead of addressing the core problems in the health sector - This will compromise the access to proper health care even further for the poor.
• The Expropriation Bill which seeks to empower the relevant minister to intervene directly in land reform by doing away with the constitutional pillar of land tenure, the concept of "willing buyer willing seller".

In most fields of government the ANC seems hell-bent on diminishing the independence of civil society and those institutions designed to support the State. 

• In Education the state now seeks to deploy teachers as it does with doctors, nurses and the police. Then you wonder why there is an outflow of people from critical posts in the civil service.
• The National Health Amendment Bill proposes that the Minister may determine what doctors charge and where they can or cannot practice.
• The Built Environment Amendment Bill will prevent the engineering industry from being self-regulating.
• Elsewhere independent boards such as nursing councils and school governing bodies are having their right to decide on their own course of action curtailed or even ceased.

As this power becomes more and more centralised with the evergrowing administration, the cabinet grows and expands its bureaucracy with the following consequences:

• The lives of ordinary South Africans become increasingly dependent upon and influenced by the State
• The ability of state entities to provide proper services declines due to bloated bureaucracies that are renowned for being inefficient. The collapse of the SABC is a classic case in point.

These two consequences will ultimately result in a passive citizenry that becomes more and more frustrated by poor service delivery.

Mr. President, you must rein in the ANC's tri-partite alliance partners' insatiable desire for centralised control.  This is not a "gogga maak vir baba bang" or a "rooi gevaar" story.  It is clear as day to see if you piece all the pieces of the puzzle together.

This is essentially why we have a Parliament, so that the representatives of the people can convene to consider all legislation proposed by government, to provide oversight of the executive and hold government to account.

No one voted on the 22 April 2009 to have a one party state that controls all aspects of civil society with a hand that controls everything in a deathly grip.

Mr President, our nation and its people need to be led and governed with respect, their independence is sacred, and our Constitution sacrosanct. Your early undertaking to uphold the Constitution, respect our Parliament and treat the opposition with due consideration are not compatible with these issues that I have raised today. 

What is clear from the issues raised is that that the Zuma administration is being dictated to by the ghost of Thabo Mbeki.

Firstly, this is evident by your recent reappointments of underperforming cabinet ministers as well as the appointment of two failed former cabinet ministers to be your advisors. They were part and parcel of President Mbeki's failed centralisation strategy.

Secondly, it is evident by the pieces of legislation that I have mentioned today.  It is clear that this legislative agenda before Parliament does not belong to the ANC of Jacob Zuma.

Mr President, it is imperative that you distance yourself from the failures of your predecessor. You must be unambiguous about how you intend to govern and lead this country out of the morass of the Mbeki era.

Mr President the euphoria of an electoral victory has vanished like the morning mist. Your government must address the issues that affect our citizens on a daily basis. You must put the citizens first now.

Source: Democratic Alliance

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