Every Ramaphosa plan will be stopped by the ANC – Steenhuisen

Every plan that president Cyril Ramaphosa has for the country will be derailed, not by opposition parties but by the ANC. This is according to Democratic Alliance chief whip and MP John Steenhuisen who tabled how the ANC would be the ones to oppose, if not derail, Ramaphosa’s plans for the country.

Steenhuisen, during a state of the nation address debate on Tuesday, said the president needed to deal decisively with those implicated in the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture.

“You’re never going to achieve many of the lofty goals you’ve set for yourself because your party and alliance partners just will not let you. Your plans to restructure Eskom will be scuttled, not by the opposition, but by your own Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions) alliance partners. Your plans to fix schools will be undermined, not by the opposition, but by your own Sadtu (South African Democratic Teachers Union) alliance partners. Your acceleration of the NDP (National Development Plan)… will be blocked, not by the opposition, but your own fellow travellers in the SACP (South African Communist Party).”

The time to deal decisively with corruption is now, according to Steenhuisen, who added that Ramaphosa had to deal with corruption in his own party first.

“You cannot expect anybody to take you seriously about your efforts in corruption when the chief protagonists and architects of state capture still sit on these parliamentary benches today.”

.@jsteenhuisen details how every single lofty plan that President Ramaphosa has for the future of South Africa will be stopped, not by the opposition, but by his own political party, and their alliance partners.#SONAdebate pic.twitter.com/VA2b3BIpD3

— Democratic Alliance (@Our_DA) February 12, 2019

The DA’s public enterprises spokesperson, Natasha Mazzone, also weighed in, calling for Ramaphosa to rid government of the corrupt officials who robbed the state of billions.

“Mr President, send them to jail, don’t bring them to parliament,” Mazzone hammered in her speech, in which she implied that government was still filled with people who are facing corruption allegations.

Mazzone said the evidence before the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture had left the country reeling to the point where taxpayers would not mind if their money was spent on a special prison wing to house them.

“In fact, the more people that are named in various inquiries, the more I look around parliament seeing those very people seated alongside me. What an embarrassment. What an indictment on everything we stand for.”

Turning to the Eskom crisis, she said the country was no longer experiencing load shedding but rolling blackouts that risked killing the economy.

Four days after Ramaphosa announced that the power utility would be unbundled in a bid to haul it out of crisis and guarantee affordable electricity, Eskom implemented what it termed stage 4 load shedding, cutting 4,000 megawatts of power rotationally, after six generation units went down on Monday.

“It is persistent rolling blackouts. It is killing our economy,” Mazzone said.

(Compiled by Gopolang Chawane, additional reporting by ANA)

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