The ANC can run the Western Cape better than Winde’s DA

THIS September marks 40 months since Western Cape Premier Alan Winde took office. He is two-thirds into his first term and has 20 months left to the next election.

The residents of the Western Cape must therefore ask whether the province is a better place than it was 40 months ago. We in the ANC do not think so.

Premier Winde and his administration must be the weakest that the Western Cape has ever had. The ANC recently proposed a discussion on the state of the provincial economy and the potential possessed by township economies to dent poverty, unemployment and inequality. The premier did not think this debate important enough to attend.

“It is the economy, stupid,” seems to have slipped his mind.

Given that our critics often want to point to ANC-run provinces, let us have a look at what ANC-run provinces are doing.

The Western Cape has tried to play catch-up with the ANC-led Gauteng in their township economy revitalisation initiative.

Whereas Gauteng launched theirs in 2014 and have a law to match it, in contrast the Western Cape introduced their version in 2018 and have had one failed project, the Pick n Pay Market Store, in respect of the township economy. The project confirmed that the DA is only interested in big business and old money.

Even though the agricultural and aquaculture sectors have been hit hard by the drought, Covid-19 and then locust attacks, according to the Western Cape provincial government’s own research these two sectors remain the ones that have the most potential.

Sadly, because of DA free-market economics, neither Premier Winde nor his then-MEC for economic development and tourism, David Maynier, thought it appropriate to mention agriculture and aquaculture in their state of the province addresses and budgets, respectively.

In the latest Quarterly Labour Survey released by Statistics SA, for the second quarter, the Western Cape, though always enjoying the lowest rate of unemployment even when the ANC was in government, came in sixth place after Gauteng, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and Eastern Cape in creating jobs.

Only the Western Cape, and to a lesser extent the Northern Cape, saw an increase in their expanded rate of unemployment, by 2%; this, even though the Western Cape contributes close to 15% of South Africa’s GDP.

At the same time, one of the premier’s flagships is his Safety Plan. The plan suggests that policing is the silver bullet to crime and violence in the province. It works from the premise that only poor, working-class people are architects of crime.

It completely ignores organised crime, especially in areas such as the abalone-drug trade-gangsterism triad. Significantly, the Safety Plan says nothing about the kidnappings that have taken place recently.

It was because of organised crime that the ANC, when it governed the Western Cape, identified “50 high-flyers” and in the first 10 months of 2003 arrested more than a dozen of these. Working with the SAPS, and not fighting them, the ANC-led province oversaw the arrest of 272 top gangsters between January and October 2003.

The premier’s Safety Plan simply elevated and dumped R450 million of provincial money into the metro police, now merely by another name the law enforcement advancement plan. There is no plan for rural safety in the Safety Plan.

The people of the Western Cape deserve better. In fact, when the ANC governed the province, we beat urban terror and were able to tackle crime, gangsterism and drug abuse at its heart.

You beat crime by creating more jobs, but in order to create them, we need a provincial government that works with communities, small businesses and the SAPS instead of fighting them.