DA slams NDZ’s ‘toxic’ cadre deployment views

The Democratic Alliance (DA) claimed on Monday that ailing municipalities would not be mended if “the wrong cadres” are replaced by “the right cadres”.

The DA’s comments comes after Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma on Sunday said, while addressing the OR Tambo School of Leadership in Johannesburg, that municipalities must appoint “the right cadres for the job”.

“We need a new attitude on how we deploy our members to the local sphere of government. Cadre deployment is good but it must be done properly. All those deployed must possess the required skills and capacity to do the job,” Dlamini-Zuma said .

In a statement, the DA said it believed that Dlamini-Zuma has “misdiagnosed the ailment, and that her prescription is toxic”.

“Cadres are in fact responsible for the decline of municipalities, and their “deployment” should be abolished altogether. The policy of cadre deployment enjoins African National Congress (ANC) politicians to reserve technical and otherwise non-political jobs in state institutions for ANC members,” said DA MP Cilliers Brink.

Brink said the cadre deployement was also a means of gaining control over society while using public resources to maintain that control.

“This is what the ANC calls hegemony,” he said.

He further said that cadre deployment also demolished the constitutional wall between party and state, and destroys the government’s ability to delivery services.

“When the ANC adopted the policy in 1997 it didn’t bother with the most basic of questions: what if the best engineer, accountant, lawyer, or city planner applying for a job in a municipality or government department is not an ANC member?

“As it turns out the best public servants tend to stay out of politics. They know that they can either meet the work standard set for them by their profession and the Constitution, or they can be involved in party politics, but they cannot do both,” he added.

Brink said ANC-led councils usually results in the same, despite attempts to “improve” what was an essentially corrupt policy.

“The results includes people who excel at the dynamics of internal ANC politics are appointed to technical jobs they cannot do and technically competent people who have no interest in politics are passed-up for promotion, and eventually leave the public service altogether,” he said.

The MP continued to say: “As municipalities are drained of technical expertise they become more reliant on consultants and service providers and eventually there aren’t enough in-house expertise to manage the performance of these service providers, and the service providers themselves take control of municipal systems and controls which is the gateway to state capture.”

Brink further said public money was spent on the provision of lesser services to local communities.

“Ailing municipalities will not be mended if ‘the wrong cadres’ are replaced by ‘the right cadres’. When it comes to filling non-political jobs in municipalities, there can be no right cadre. There can only be a right candidate,” he said.

He added that the DA would place in a written parliamentary question to Dlamini-Zuma about her comments.

“In particular whether her endorsement of cadre deployment is not at odds with her statutory duties as the minister responsible for local and provincial government,” he concluded.

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