‘Poor are getting poorer’
ANC has now started borrowing from the apartheid government’s play book
SOUTH Africans must use the upcoming general elections not only to change those steering the country, but completely abandon the vehicle driving it backwards.
That’s according to the DA leader Mmusi Maimane who yesterday told members of the Cape Town Press Club that in 1994, South Africans boarded a bus with all its baggage from the past and hope for the future setting off to a free country.
“However, 25 years later, our journey has come undone. We have taken so many wrong turns, suffered so many bad drivers and hit so many potholes over the years that we are now completely lost and our bus can barely move,” Maimane said.
“This path has now brought us to a crossroads, and we have a choice to make: Do we remain on the same broken-down bus, on the same deadend road, or do we change buses here? Do we stick with the liberation movement that has stalled our economy and failed our people – as every liberation movement on this continent has done over the last half a century – or do we opt for change? And it’s not only failed liberation movements that we are emulating,” Maimane said adding that the ANC has now started borrowing from the apartheid government’s play book.
“When the National Party ran out of money they introduced ‘prescribed assets’ to boost their coffers. Ramaphosa’s ANC seems intent on doing the same,” he said.
Maimane said any government intent on building an inclusive country should make it their primary business to close the gap between the rich and the poor.
“But, after 25 years of ANC government, this gap is wider than ever before.
“And it is widening because we have a government that deliberately puts up barriers between the insiders and the outsiders. A government that protects the employed at the expense of the unemployed and has turned its back on the most vulnerable in society,” he said.
Maimane also slammed labour laws and the new national minimum wage, jobs-for-pals and jobs-for-sex scandals.
“If you happen to be born into the wrong South Africa, life is a continuous struggle.
“Nearly four out of ten adults in the labour market can’t find work. Most of these people are under 30 years old. The Reserve Bank data shows that the poor are getting poorer as real per capita income has fallen in the past 5 years.
“Thanks to our runaway unemployment, we are now the most unequal society in the world. Half our households are headed by women, and most of these households are desperately poor,” Maimane said.