Ramaphosa’s attempt to scare grant beneficiaries is reprehensible, says civil rights organisation
11 January 2024
The last thing that poor people and the country’s millions of unemployed can afford is to be misled by pres. Cyril Ramaphosa about social grants that will supposedly disappear if the ANC should lose the election. Attempting to gain electoral support in this way is reprehensible.
This is the opinion of the civil rights organisation Cape Forum as expressed by its Executive Chairperson, Heindrich Wyngaard. Ramaphosa made this controversial statement when he spoke at an ANC birthday rally in Mpumalanga earlier this week.
Wyngaard says: “The president seems to play games with beneficiaries and their dependents as he pleases about state intervention that should improve their lives, while his ruling party should rather focus on promoting more favourable conditions for job creation.”
The latest statistics indicate that unemployment in general remains consistently above 30% and that the figure for unemployed youth between the ages of 14 and 35 is even higher at over 40%.
“Ramaphosa and the government do not seem to be bothered much about this; it is completely as if they want to keep the poor and unemployed South Africans in a state of permanent dependency on state grants,” says Wyngaard.
Cape Forum believes that the ANC has had sufficient opportunity over the past thirty years to make a significant difference in terms of economic growth, but that state interference is prioritised for this party in what is supposed to be a free market system.
Wyngaard says the organisation is therefore encouraging those who can vote to register for the 2024 election and to go and draw their crosses on voting day. “We will all be complicit if we allow the decline in our country to continue,” he says.
He also says: “But Cape Forum calls on voters to generally listen carefully to the promises and scare tactics of all the parties competing for their support for the upcoming election.”
Issued by Heindrich Wyngaard, Executive Chairperson, Cape Forum, 11 January 2024
