Hamilton Ndlovu

Mr Flash and Crash

Hamilton Ndlovu thought he was the man. Firstly, he and associates received payments from lucrative personal protective equipment contracts with the National Health Laboratory Service. Then, smack in the middle of the hard lockdown, he posted video footage online boasting of how he had bought a fleet of luxury vehicles including a Porsche and a Lamborghini Urus SUV. The South African Revenue Service naturally took a keen interest in the flaunting of such wealth during a pandemic. It found that Ndlovu was not tax-compliant, and he has subsequently received a final preservation order to freeze his bank accounts and seize some of the high-end vehicles he was flaunting. What will this Mampara post on social media now?

Pending before parliament is an amendment to the Bill of Rights — what should be a sacrosanct part of the constitution — to enable expropriation without compensation. There is a large body within the ANC, and all of the EFF, who wish to turn this into arbitrary deprivation of property on the basis of racial revenge. Other matters that extremists want to force through are the annexation of pension funds to bail out a failing state, under the guise of prescribed assets, as well as dreams of turning the Reserve Bank into a bank reserved for the political elite, under the guise of nationalisation.

The fact that all these proposals exist simultaneously is no coincidence — there are political elites who see an opportunity to use every lever of the state to ensconce themselves in power for life. To them, the seeds of their revolution lay in the misery faced by ordinary South Africans, whose patience in the face of poverty and unemployment is rightfully wearing thin.

The DA is not engaging in McCarthyism here. Hunger in Venezuela, as a result of similar extremist policies, was so severe that the average citizen suffered severe malnutrition, losing, on average, 11kg in body weight in a single year. Over 90% of its population now live in poverty.

Yet, in parliament, we have to endure ANC and EFF MPs constantly citing Venezuela as the model SA should follow. We are simply, in the words of Maya Angelou, believing the radicals in the ANC and EFF when they tell us what they want to do. And they have used parliament, state capture, the Zondo commission and other platforms to tell us exactly who they are and what their agenda is, and we not only believe them, but have a responsibility to stop them.

A responsible official opposition in this environment has to ensure that the centre holds. This centre has to be defined broadly as expanding opportunity, education and employment rapidly to as many South Africans as possible, with a basket of social services to protect the vulnerable. This centre has to be underpinned by the rule of law, a market-orientated economy, and nonracialism. Any rational analysis of the South African political landscape shows that there is a broad array of reformers who, despite their disagreements on specifics and their ideological orientation, agree that corruption is a cancer that must be eliminated from the state, who agree that decent, quality education is key to both redress and development, and that jobcreating economic growth is essential to lift the country out of the doldrums.

John Steenhuisen provided exactly this analysis in a broad-ranging interview with the Sunday Times. The DA, under its successive leaders, has often expressed a desire to move South African politics beyond a racial census, which presently yields more and more power to radicals who are in a political minority against a moderate majority in the electorate.

During his campaign to become DA leader, Steenhuisen repeatedly expressed a desire to move the South African electorate away from racial blocs and towards a battle of ideas, as well as expressing his desire to make parliament relevant again.

In his response to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 2021 state of the nation address, Steenhuisen laid down the gauntlet to Ramaphosa and the ANC by stating that the DA, this year, would table all the economic reforms promised by moderates, and some by the president himself, in parliament for a vote. All the

ANC needs to do is stare down its extremists by getting 85 of its best MPs to vote with the opposition to get the necessary reforms through to get SA working again.

The upcoming proposals to remove the public protector from office will be the first such test, and should the centre not hold on this necessary measure, the DA will have to find and cleave away at every fault line in the ANC to tear it apart in order to save SA. It is not unrealistic to suggest that a breakaway of ANC moderates who can splinter its constituency would be good for democracy and the future of the country.

However, the Sunday Times, fitting with its recent form, decided to distort Steenhuisen’s words and meaning, falsely portraying this as some sort of dramatic shift in the DA’s positioning. Considering its recent history on the rogue unit saga and the Cato Manor death squad and its failure to fact-check, it is completely unsurprising that the Sunday Times’s pursuit of clickbait headlines resulted in the DA having to report conjecture on coalitions — which Steenhuisen did not speak about — to the press ombudsman, and we look forward to the outcome of this.

Regardless, the exact phrases Steenhuisen used were that he was “prepared to work with reformers” to prevent the entrenchment of a “radical socialist agenda”.

The subheading, indicating that Steenhuisen would not support a motion of no confidence in the president, is also not new or news. The DA stated in December 2020 that it would abstain in the motion of no confidence against the president, for the simple reason that such a motion is being brought by the African Transformation Movement, a political party that is alleged to be the brainchild of Ace Magashule and other radical extremists.

In a choice between handing SA over to a President Magashule and a Vice-President Julius Malema and their extremist radical agenda that will take SA down the road to ruin, or finding solutions to entrench the rule of law, a market economy and nonracialism, the DA will always choose the latter. It is part of the core mission of the DA to find a way to prevent SA from going the way of Venezuela or Zimbabwe, and for this we make no apologies, and must achieve realignment so that the moderate majority find their voices reflected in parliament.