Ramaphosa betrayed Tintswalo, says Steenhuisen

DA leader John Steenhuisen says President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration betrayed “Tintswalo” and her dream.

In his state of the nation address (Sona) on Thursday night, Ramaphosa personified a generation, naming it Tintswalo, a child born at the dawn of South Africa’s democracy in 1994 whohad benefited from the ANC government’s policies — free primary healthcare, education and water, as well as electrified homes and welfare grants.

But Steenhuisen, continuing the story of Tintswalo in parliament, listed some of SA’S growing problems — loadshedding, unemployment, crime and corruption — and their impact on her life and millions of citizens like her.

“There is no doubt the SA she grew up in after 1994 was a hopeful place,” Steenhuisen said. “It was a place built on the South African dream: the promise that her life would be better than the life of her parents, and that her children’s lives would be better still.”

Steenhuisen said Ramaphosa only told the story of Tintswalo’s start in life during the 1990s and the 2000s.

“It was far from perfect, but it was a time of hope and possibility. But Tintswalo’s life story does not end after childhood. Today she is 30.

“She has entered the next phase of her life as a wife, a mother and a provider.”

He said over the past decade, Tintswalo has watched with growing horror as the dream of her childhood was betrayed.

Her social consciousness started to develop during high school as she watched the ANC elevate a man accused of corruption and rape to the highest office in the land.

“In fact, Mr President, in 2019 Tintswalo voted for you.

“Like many others, she did so for one reason: she believed you would restore SA to the path it was on when she was a child.”

But her hopes were shattered again soon after, said Steenhuisen. In the same year that Ramaphosa was elected, she lost the first and only job she ever had, because the loadshedding crisis that Ramaphosa had promised to end shut down the factory where she worked.

She was forced to move into a tin shack on the outskirts of the city, returning to the same life of poverty she thought she had left behind for good, he said.

She has been unemployed ever since.

Steenhuisen said Ramaphosa’s administration broke all the lofty promises it had made of a New Dawn, including by protecting the president’s comrades implicated in state capture.

An angry Tintswalo, with her own baby, Esona, was no longer waiting for the ANC to change, he said.