DA’s motion – a precipitate, reckless and futile distraction of SA society

5 April 2016

This afternoon’s DA posturing motion in the National Assembly to recall President Zuma as state president is a precipitate, reckless and ultimately futile distraction from the fundamental challenges we must confront as the ANC, the ANC-led alliance, and as South Africans more generally. The ANC enjoys over 60 percent of electoral support in our country. With all of its historical achievements, but also with all of its many shortcomings and challenges, the ANC’s overwhelming majority status has been the decisive factor in stabilising and consolidating a non-racial, constitutional democracy in a society riven with deep racial inequalities.

Any South African with an iota of understanding, anybody who can think beyond electoral short-termism, should appreciate that tearing the ANC apart at this point, is a recipe for disaster for our country as a whole. As the SACP’s political bureau statement following our Friday meeting clearly stated, the Concourt decision on the Nkandla matter, and the response of both President Zuma and the ANC’s national leadership to it, are an important beginning, but only a beginning, in a necessary process of critical reflection, self-correction, and decisive action for renewal. It is a process that must take place within the ANC and across the alliance it leads.

It is in this context that the SACP calls on all ANC MPs and, indeed, on all MPs in the National Assembly to reject the DA’s opportunism and, instead, to focus on the hard collective lessons we need to learn from the Concourt’s important judgement.

Issued by Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo, National Spokesperson, Head of Communications, SACP, 5 April 2016