DA leader John Steenhuisen used Cape Town as a benchmark to propose what South Africa would look like if the DA headed the national government – “a world-class state that we dreamt of in 1994.”
Delivering what the party has titled the “True State of the Nation”, Steenhuisen took shots at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership, saying that he “rode” into town five years ago, with a promise of cleaning up and cleaning out. He was carried into the union buildings with huge waves of goodwill from South Africans and euphoria following the disaster of former president Jacob Zuma’s reign.
He urged South Africans to, when listening to Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation address on Thursday, look past the “carefully crafted, smoke and mirrors, cherry-picked statistics and take in the bigger picture of the full five years of this administration”.
He said the trajectory of load shedding, crime, infrastructure maintenance and investment, capital skills and poverty showed where the country was heading.
“The reality is life has got a great deal harder for more and more South Africans over the past five years. Increases and cost of living has far outstripped every South African,” he said.
Steenhuisen said there was no time to waste as the country was regressing year after year.
He says that while some might complicate things, it was a simple binary between the DA and the ANC.
“As 2024 election fast approaches, the DA offers the only credible way forward for the country and its services. Let's be honest, what the DA offers is much better.
“Look no further than DA-run Cape Town where it is protected from two further stages of load shedding, thanks to DA policies. On its way, there are hundreds of megawatts of privately produced power projects to end load shedding here before anywhere else in SA.
“As failures of ANC national government continue to accelerate, DA local governments are continuing to step in and take over these services to shield the residents from these failures.”
Steenhuisen said load shedding was by far the single biggest impediment to investments and growth.
In 2018, South Africa experienced six days of load shedding. Since then, it had increased. In 2022, the wheels fell off, with the country experiencing 157 days under load shedding.
“This is not a country on the mend, this is a country that is falling apart,” he said.
He lambasted the ruling party, saying it was the ANC’s “ideological stubbornness and its deeply entrenched web of patronage and corruption” that allowed the ANC to ignore simple solutions proposed by the DA, experts and media commentators.
He said that while load shedding was the most visible and threatening of the state failures to affect South Africans, it was not the only one.
Steenhuisen listed state-run entities such as the postal service, freight rail network, passenger rail service and ports. He said they had all collapsed, with the police service losing the war against violent crime.
He said municipal delivery services had also collapsed, leaving hundreds of towns and cities across the country stranded.
“These failures have been a long time coming but, with the move to permanent and higher stages of load shedding, government failure has now reached into each and every single home in South Africa in a way that can no longer be counted.
“Eskom’s collapse has been the final straw.”
He said the 2024 national election would irrevocably shake the trajectory of the nation.
Steenhuizen called on South Africans to strengthen the only party that was a credible and better alternative for SA, and to create a new and better country around the principles and values of the DA “that has put places like Cape Town onto a better path”.
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