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President Cyril Ramaphosa should not be judged as a stand-alone entity, and his character should be tested on the basis of the role he has and continues to play within the ANC, a party that is being shown to have been captured and one that led the country to the brink of calamity.
This is what United Democratic Movement (UDM) president Bantu Holomisa said as his party launched its provincial and national election manifesto at the Isaac Wolfson Stadium in Port Elizabeth yesterday.
Holomisa said it was disingenuous for Ramaphosa to appeal to South Africans to “trust him despite his party’s failings”.
“Why? Because he knows that his party – the ANC – is not worthy of your trust. We all know what damage it has done – be it to our economy, our safety, our education and health systems, and so the list goes on.
“How can the ANC be trusted when it stood meekly by as Jacob Zuma and his cronies looted the state and stole your taxes and deprived you of economic opportunity?” he asked.
The UDM leader was in part challenging how Ramaphosa seems to be attempting to reinvent himself as an anticorruption candidate who South Africans “should trust” and send to do their bidding for them.
Holomisa argued that Ramaphosa served under the same Zuma whose tenure he now seeks to distance himself from.
“Today we hear noises from the ANC that the past nine years were disastrous under the Zuma administration. Yet the current crew is made up of the very people who said that he did nothing wrong. They even invented a slogan that read: ‘We have a good story to tell,’” said Holomisa.
This was met by a round of applause from the scores of supporters who filled the stadium.
“I ask the question again: Can we trust them given that the same organisation was at pains to defend Zuma and was hellbent on discrediting the Public Protector and the judiciary?”
He said that, even if it was the case that “President Ramaphosa may be a decent man”, he was just one individual out of many in a party that had been exposed at the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture as having been party to corruption and fraud.
Holomisa also argued that, given the disunity currently plaguing the party, should the ANC be voted back into power on May 8, there was no guarantee that it would appoint Ramaphosa as its president.
“There is nothing stopping the ANC from deciding to remove Ramaphosa – just as they recalled Thabo Mbeki and replaced him with a person who is now facing more than 800 criminal charges,” said Holomisa.
He called on citizens to no longer place their trust in the ANC as it had “lost touch with ordinary South Africans”.
He said that the UDM pledged to improve the country’s healthcare system, particularly in terms of infrastructure and maintenance.
“Hygiene at many clinics is at unacceptable levels and must be addressed immediately. It remains a sad fact that many South Africans must travel huge distances to the nearest clinic or hospital. Health infrastructure and services need to be provided closer to the poor,” said Holomisa.
In light of the tragedy at Driehoek High School in Vanderbijlpark, where four pupils died after a concrete slab collapsed on them, the UDM also pledged to prioritise the building, fixing and upgrading of school infrastructure.
Holomisa also said his party would “establish a permanent commission on education, whose primary responsibilities will be to establish and build upon basic educational policy pillars, as well as ensure that there was stability in the curriculum to give our pupils the best opportunity to succeed in their studies”.
He also revealed that his party would reopen teacher training colleges and impose national standards for teachers to ensure that they had the necessary resources to provide the highest level of professionalism possible.
On unemployment, Holomisa said his party would launch a massive initiative focusing on job creation through infrastructure maintenance and development.
