Ramaphosa’s Brexit

Theresa May is likely to be headed for an embarrassing defeat this week, when her Brexit deal is set to be voted down in parliament. May, a reluctant Brexiteer, is stuck between a rock and a hard place, fully knowing that a Brexit deal in whatever form is likely to leave the UK worse off.

Many political analysts have pointed out that billionaire businessman-president Cyril Ramaphosa may similarly be uncomfortable with delivering land expropriation without compensation. The ANC manifesto again notes that expropriation without compensation is a cure for all to speed up land reform.

The truth is the ANC’s strategy on land will do nothing to solve the systematic issues in the land reform programme such as chronic underfunding, large-scale corruption and nepotism, lack of capacity and a lack of political will by the failing ANC to address it in the past quarter century. If Ramaphosa is ready to destroy the constitution he helped draft and not take a principled stand to solve the real problems in the country now, how will giving him more power do it?

And let’s not forget that Ramaphosa will not be president forever, so what will a President Mabuza do with the unfettered baton of power handed to him by the ANC in the future?

The intent by both May and Ramaphosa is irrelevant, as they have become the implementers of populist and ill-conceived policy.

Luckily South Africans have a chance in 2019 to show that they have had enough of 25 years of broken promises and choose a party that has the will and ability to deliver land reform in the country

the DA. —

Thandeka Mbabama DA member on the Constitutional Review Committee