Ditch ANC before we ‘head down the same road’ as Zimbabwe – Maimane

DA leader Mmusi Maimane delivered his “alternative state of the nation address” on Wednesday, an annual opportunity for the DA leader to play president and campaign for his party.

The gist of his message, this year, as summarised on the DA’s website where you can read the speech in its entirety, is that “South Africa doesn’t need a new driver. It needs a new bus”.

“The ANC is a broken bus – dangerous and unroadworthy – hurtling down the road with all of us on board. What they now have in Cyril Ramaphosa is just another driver of the same doomed bus,” Maimane said. 

Later, Maimane – sticking to the analogy – said that under Ramaphosa, South Africa “would still find ourselves hurtling down the road in the wrong direction. That’s why we don’t need a new driver of the old bus. We need to switch buses”.

The DA leader didn’t just compare South Africa to a bus, though; he also brought up “our neighbours north of the Limpopo” – Zimbabwe.

READ MORE: Maimane says he can’t tell the ANC and EFF apart – The Citizen

Maimane recently met with members of the country’s opposition, the MDC.

“Their harrowing stories of the brutal clampdown by Mnangagwa’s government on the people of Zimbabwe were hard to listen to,” Maimane said. 

The main lesson the DA leader believes we need to learn from Zimbabwe is that it is “extremely naïve to place blind faith in a new leader of a failed governing party”.

“Zimbabweans are fast discovering that Zanu-PF is still Zanu-PF, with or without Robert Mugabe,” he continued.

Later, Maimane posted that the ANC simply didn’t have the competence to lead South Africa as “liberation movements never make good governments”.  

“This is the lesson that we must learn before we head down the same road as our Zimbabwean brothers and sisters: swapping out leaders to save a party is only ever in the interest of the party, not the country,” he added.

READ MORE: Maimane sends Mnangagwa meeting request ahead of Zimbabwe trip

Maimane is no stranger to the “South Africa could be the next Zimbabwe” comparison. In a speech in November, 2018, he reacted to the recent vote in the Constitutional Review Committee (CRC), which saw the ANC, EFF, and NFP form a coalition that voted for the of amendment section 25 of the Constitution to allow for land expropriation without compensation.

Maimane said the outcome of the vote was proof that “a vote for the ANC [was] a vote for the EFF”, calling it a “populist move to rig the economy in favour of the politically connected”.

He also said that this was an example of “power residing in the hands of a few politicians” which had led to “mass injustices” in places such as Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

Before this, in 2017, he wrote on Politicsweb that both Venezuela and Zimbabwe should serve as “warnings” to South Africa, of what he saw as the dangers of land expropriation and socialism.

“It is the deadly concoction of land expropriation, nationalisation, centralisation of power, corruption, and populism that leads to collapse,” he wrote.

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