Cadre deployment helped ANC loot SA, says ‘vindicated’ DA

The Democratic Alliance (DA), who like the rest of the country has been paying careful to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s reappearance before the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture on Wednesday, says it has been “vindicated” by testimony given. 

Of particular excitement for the official opposition party was the revelation that the ANC’s cadre deployment committee meeting minutes from 2012 to 2017 weren’t available, when Ramaphosa was chair of the structure.

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“When I was chair of the deployment committee, I do not recall ever having to go through the minutes of the previous meeting. We always tended to deal with the issues at hand on a contemporaneous basis as they were presented,” Ramaphosa said during his testimony.

The DA said its “relentless campaign against the evil ANC policy of cadre deployment” had been “vindicated”, and that the party had subsequently “secured a historic victory for all South Africans”. 

At the start of 2021, the DA wrote to the commission, chaired by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, to subpoena records and minutes of all cadre deployment committee meetings from 2013. 

The commission’s evidence leader advocate Paul Pretorius revealed on Wednesday they were told no minutes were available for meetings from 2012 to 2017, a fact he remarked as being “improbable”. 

ALSO READ: Ramaphosa defends ANC cadre deployment, says committee only makes recommendations

The DA said the disappearance of the records was part of a “desperate attempt to hide the truth about Ramaphosa’s personal role in deploying the cadres who captured and destroyed our state”, slamming cadre deployment as a “system deliberately designed for the ANC to capture and loot the state”.

The party credited its pressure to showing that the cadre deployment committee “even influenced the appointment of two Constitutional Court judges as well as a judge at the Supreme Court of Appeal” in 2019.

The DA now plans to write to the Zondo commission to get cadre deployment records, saying they refuse to believe that the records do not exist. 

The DA’s End Cadre Deployment Bill has also been formally tabled in Parliament.