HITTING A BLUE NOTE
DA leader Mmusi Maimane delivers his party’s election manifesto at Rand Stadium in Johannesburg yesterday. He urged South Africans to vote DA in May, saying the ANC had taken the country to the edge of an abyss.
Yesterday, the DA launched its manifesto (manifesto.da.org.za) ahead of the 2019 elections. It is a blueprint for delivering real change in SA, for getting our economy growing and producing jobs. Jobcreating economic growth is the quickest, most effective way to reduce poverty and inequality.
This year, South Africans face a choice between the corrupt, old, disorderly ANC and the honest, modern and orderly DA. The DA can deliver to the whole country what we have delivered in the Western Cape, which accounted for half of net job creation in the past year (95,000 out of 188,000 jobs, Q3 2017 – Q3 2018), and where broad unemployment (23%) is 14 percentage points lower than the national average (37%).
The DA strives to provide everyone with access to opportunities. For example, the Western Cape has the highest percentage of households living within 30 minutes of a health facility and we retain by far the most children in school between grades 10 and matric (64%, whereas no other province retains above 50%).
In stark contrast, the ANC’s approach has been to enrich and reenrich a connected elite at the expense of the rest. This has divided our nation into haves and havenots and led to the stagnant economy and divisive society we see today. The DA’s approach will build one South Africa for all.
The action steps we propose in our manifesto are all realistic and achievable. They focus on the most critical issues that need resolving, such as how a DA national government would act urgently to stabilise the economy and prevent government bankruptcy, provide stable policy to drive growth and job creation, and redress the stark inequalities that remain pervasive 25 years into democracy.
You will find solutions to getting the basics right, such as our action steps to provide schoolchildren with teachers who can actually teach them to read and do arithmetic. The SACMEQ 4 report showed the Western Cape achieved 72.7% in advanced reading, compared to 36.1% nationally.
Our top priority would be to put a job in every home in SA. Over half the population lives below the poverty line. Ten million adults are without work, meaning that at least 20% of households do not have a single breadwinner. Where the DA governs, this number is only 9%.
The World Bank has made it clear that without a radical shift in policy, unemployment will remain unnaturally high over the next decade (above 25% for narrow unemployment) and the number of people stuck in poverty will continue to grow.
With the right reforms, we can put SA on a growth trajectory of 58%, in line with Botswana, Rwanda and Ethiopia. The ANC cannot bring these reforms, because they will be blocked every time by unions, on whose support they rely.
A DA national government would kickstart investment by, among other actions, guaranteeing private property rights and rejecting expropriation without compensation, overhauling our visa, exchange control and labour policies to attract skills, capital and tourists, providing a simplified, truly broad-based empowerment programme, exempting small businesses from certain labour and empowerment regulations, and scrapping the Mining Charter.
By making it a requirement for ballots to be held before strike action, amongst other measures, we will stop labour unions from damaging the economy and ensure they protect the real interests of their members rather than their own elites.
We will reduce fiscal risk by restructuring Eskom as per our “cheaper energy” (Ismo) bill and allowing more competition in the energy market — including enabling cities to buy directly from producers, placing SAA in business rescue, privatising non-core SOEs, rejecting National Health Insurance and introducing our affordable universal health policy instead, and reducing the size of the public sector wage bill by slashing cadre-deployment positions.
A DA government will restore order through rules and accountability. Anybody found guilty of corruption, where either of the parties to the corrupt relationship was a government official or public office bearer and where over R10,000 of public money was involved, will be sentenced to 15 years in prison.
We don’t tolerate corruption. The Western Cape achieved 83% clean audits in the last financial year, well ahead of second-placed Gauteng at just 52%. The DA-led coalition in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro took it from second least to second most trusted city in SA (after Cape Town). In DA-run Joburg, the value of investigations into corrupt tenders under the former ANC administration is R23.6bn.
We’ll build an honest, professional SAPS by retraining police officers, ensuring they are properly resourced and equipped to fight crime, and through lifestyle audits for senior management.
This election is about our future. We need real change.