Time for a rebellion against cadre deployment

27 February 2024

Note to Editors: The following speech by Dr Leon Schreiber MP - DA Shadow Minister of Public Service and Administration - was delivered during a hybrid sitting of Parliament today in the second reading debate on the Public Service Amendment Bill.

Honourable Speaker,

This House will recall that, on 19 August 2021, the DA tabled the End Cadre Deployment Bill before it.

As the name suggests, this Bill was designed to bring an end to this evil system.

Over the past week, South Africans have again seen the need for this, as the DA exposed the ANC’s dirty cadre deployment secrets.

The records of over 1 300 pages have revealed the biggest political racketeering syndicate in the history of our democracy.

Thanks to the DA’s Constitutional Court victory in this matter, we now know that the ANC has run our country into the ground from a WhatsApp group, where they pre-select cadres for appointment from a secret database, in-between making bad jokes.

The interference in appointments from the cadre deployment WhatsApp group includes critical institutions such as the Auditor-General, the Hawks, the Information Regulator, and deputy-general positions in the Department of Justice and the Department of Communications.

In all of these instances, ANC loyalty is paramount to deciding who is “deployed.”

I quote from inside the ANC’s own cadre WhatsApp group: “Please add the name of [redacted]. She has applied for the MDDA board. An activist of the ANCWL and ANC. That will be our submission.”

Because of its desire to protect this racketeering syndicate, the ANC stood virtually alone when it voted against the DA’s End Cadre Deployment Bill in September last year.

Fortunately, the story did not end there.

Despite the ANC’s vehement defence of cadre deployment, the diligent officials who drew up the Public Service Amendment Bill before us today, quietly copied-and-pasted an entire section from the DA’s End Cadre Deployment Bill that bans those who hold office in political parties from being employed as senior managers.

The Bill also embraces the DA principle of devolution and the need to begin separating party from state, by devolving appointment powers from politicians and vesting those in heads of department.

Because the ANC has long given up on paying attention to the actual legislative work of Parliament, they never even picked up on the insertion of DA policy throughout the Bill.

It is a metaphorical case of turkeys voting for Christmas.

The adoption of this Bill reveals that, beneath the ANC’s bluster, a rebellion is brewing in society against its corrupt cadre deployment system.

We see this rebellion expressed in the Public Service Amendment Bill, but also in the Framework for the Professionalisation of the Public Sector, which explicitly calls for ANC cadre deployment to be scrapped.

We saw it in the State Capture Commission’s report, which confirmed that ANC cadre deployment facilitates state capture.

The DA not only supports the Public Service Amendment Bill for copying directly from our End Cadre Deployment Bill, but we recognise honest officials who have begun to openly defy ANC dogma on cadre deployment.

To be sure: this Bill is not a silver bullet to un-capture our state.

We still need to go much further to make cadre deployment a crime, to ensure all appointments are based on merit, and to reform the Public Service Commission to enforce fair appointments.

But the adoption today, right under the ANC’s noses, of the first elements of the DA’s policy to rescue South Africa from cadre deployment, could mark the beginning of the end for the cadres.

To the people of South Africa, I say: if you want to build on this historic adoption of DA policy even before we are elected into government, if you want to rescue South Africa from corruption, then on 29 May, join the rebellion against ANC cadre deployment, by voting DA.

Thank you.

Issued by the DA, 27 February 2024