Cadre deployment tit-for-tat
● Just days after its victory in forcing the ANC to hand over its cadre deployment records, the DA is under pressure to come clean about its own version of the policy.
ANC President Cyril Ramaphosa this week dared the DA to disclose its own deployment records.
“We have given the records, and we now wait for other parties that have also had the so-called cadre deployment experience and processes to also now reveal their records of their own executive or federal committees or whatever committees,” he said.
The ANC this week complied with a Constitutional Court order compelling it to release all its cadre deployment committee records from 2013 to 2021. The records relate to closed-door meetings at which critical appointments of executives, boards and senior government leaders were decided.
The DA believes senior executives of state-owned entities who were later fingered as key players in state capture were appointed as a result of discussions at these meetings.
But it emerged this week that the DA appears to have its own programme of making sure the right people are appointed to important posts.
A letter has surfaced in which the DA’s MEC for local government in the Western Cape, Anton Bredell, took the party’s caucus in George municipality to task over an unauthorised appointment.
“It has come to the attention of the DA that you are in the process of appointing director: corporate services. You are requested not to go ahead with the appointment without getting permission from the federal office,” wrote Bredell.
“You are aware that appointments must be approved by the FedEx [federal executive], with the following information required: the scoping report of your consultant, the recommendation from the consultant to the council.”
Bredell asked the caucus why it had deviated from the recommendations of the “deployment committee”.
“The regulations are clear that the deployment committee makes a recommendation to the council. What was the reason for the DA caucus to disregard the unanimous recommendation of the selections panel without taking it back to the selections panel?”
The DA denied that the letter amounted to evidence of cadre deployment.
Spokesperson Solly Malatsi said it was “not even an iota of proof” that the DA practised cadre deployment.
Helen Zille, chair of the DA federal council, is reported to have posted a tweet — subsequently deleted — saying Mmusi Maimane introduced cadre deployment in the party during his tenure as leader, but that it had now been scrapped.
Maimane has since released a statement saying there was never such a policy during his leadership of the DA.
Bongani Baloyi, a former DA Midvaal mayor who has launched his own party, Xiluva, has also said the DA practised cadre deployment. During his term as mayor between 2013 and 2021 the municipality could not make any senior staff appointments without the approval of the federal executive, he said.