WATCH: You have betrayed Tintswalo’s dream, Steenhuisen tells Ramaphosa

Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen has joined the long list of South Africans who have used President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Tintswalo analogy to highlight the ANC failures.

During his Sona speech on Thursday last week, Ramaphosa used a Tintswalo analogy to highlight the progress that South Africa made in the past 30 years.

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Steenhuisen responded to Ramaphosa during the Sona debate on Tuesday and told him he had betrayed Tintswalo’s dream.

‘Tintswalo done waiting for ANC’

He said while the South Africa she grew up in after 1994 was a hopeful place and her start in life a time of hope and possibilities, her story did not end in childhood.

“Today, she’s a 30-year-old woman, she has entered a new phase in life,” said Steenhuisen.

“Over the past decade, she has watched in great horror that the dream of her childhood has been betrayed. She watched the ANC elevate a man accused of corruption and rape to the highest office in the land.

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“In 2015, she graduated from a TVET college, a year later she realised she was not alone in her growing unease about the future. In 2016, She watched as many people abandoned the ANC in major cities and she too started to think about her vote at the next election.

“She couldn’t stomach voting for the ANC after it unleashed state capture and load shedding.”

However, according to Steenhuisen, Tintswalo was hopeful again when former president Jacob Zuma resigned from his position in 2018.

She voted for the ANC again after Ramaphosa ascended to the country’s highest office.

“Her hopes were shattered shortly after. The load shedding you had promised to end shut down the factory where she worked and she lost her job. She was forced to moved to a shack on the outskirts of the city, returning to the same life of poverty she thought she had left behind for good. She has been unemployed since,” said Steenhuisen.

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“Tintswalo is done waiting for the ANC to change. She has accepted that it never will. She acknowledges the opportunities she got as a child, but she now thinks about the future and her own family. Tintswalo cannot afford to live in the past. She must survive in the reality of what South Africa is in 2024 and what it was in 1994. You have betrayed Tintswalo’s South African dream.”