The Time for a Break With Failed Policies Is Now

The following speech was delivered by the Leader of the Democratic Alliance, John Steenhuisen, in Parliament today during the debate on the State of the Nation Address (SONA):

Madam Speaker, Mr. President, Honorable members

South Africa is in a crisis.

For 10 years, our population has grown faster than our economy, making us poorer.

We have the highest unemployment rate on earth, and that has now been the case for decades.

Violent crime still destroys lives and livelihoods at a terrible rate – 70 of our fellow countrymen and women are murdered every single day.

Our education outcomes continue to steal our children’s futures, and positive progress is painfully slow.

And public healthcare fails the most vulnerable among us.

8 months ago, we entered the GNU for two reasons: first, to block the EFF and MK from power; second, to turn South Africa’s economy around.

South Africa today is immeasurably better for having the DA in government. And so we will continue to fight inside this government for more growth, and for more jobs, and to drive the reforms that we so desperately need.

Madam Speaker, the Democratic Alliance joined the GNU to help turn South Africa around. As part of our contribution, it is our duty to set out honestly and clearly both the reasons for the crisis we find ourselves in, and the way out of it.

The truth is we have persisted for too long with policies that fail…

State monopolies that have been bailed out over and over again, allowing the foundations of our economy to crumble.

Excessive regulation that makes it harder for businesses to grow and employ people.

Empowerment policies that benefit the few, not the many.

A tariff regime that pushes up prices with no benefit, even to the companies those tariffs are meant to protect.

A foreign policy that puts ideological solidarity ahead of the life chances of desperate South Africans.

And underpinning all of this, a thoroughgoing lack of accountability, where failure isn’t punished and success – like some of the recent reforms to network industries – is denounced for a lack of ideological purity.

Worse still, in the face of this crisis, we have failed to respond with the urgency and determination required to make a clean break with the past, and start ourselves on a bold new path to success.

And now, having made ourselves weak, we confront a new threat – the threat of US tariff barriers, being kicked out of AGOA, and possibly even a sanctions regime driven by an administration that will put America’s interests ahead of ours – and make no mistake about that.

And so, what do we do?

When a country faces a crisis, it needs to unite and navigate against the threat. That is what we must do now.

The GNU must practice what we preach. That is why in the portfolios run by DA Ministers, we have taken a decision to focus like a laser on growth and jobs.

I was in Ceres yesterday, to mark the first shipment of SA apples to Thailand in 16 years, one example of my focus on opening new markets for our agricultural produce.

Solly Malatsi is on a mission to get fast, reliable broadband into the hands of millions of people in rural and urban South Africa.

Dr Leon Schreiber is opening South Africa to skills and to tourists. And he is driving a digital revolution at Home Affairs that will turbo-charge access to the documents South Africans need to access the economy.

Dean Macpherson is fast-forwarding infrastructure projects, reforming Infrastructure South Africa to drive and manage them better, and turning dilapidated government buildings into development opportunities for domestic investors.

Siviwe Gwarube is focusing on long-term education excellence through a strategic reorientation of the system towards the critical, early years in a child’s education journey.

And Dr Dion George is ensuring regulations enable sustainable growth, rather than retard it.

South Africa cannot cut, tax or borrow our way to a better future. The only credible, sustainable path forward is to achieve much much more rapid economic growth. And that means having the political will to drive reforms forward with real urgency. And so the GNU collectively must do much much more, and much much faster.

We must:

• Approach our trading partners and seek to lower tariff barriers across the board to compensate for any increase in tariffs by the United States.
• Turbo-charge Operation Vulindlela, including the urgent concessioning of the Cape Town and Richard’s Bay ports.
• Take up the World Bank’s offer of a free government-wide regulatory review.
• Bring down costs to consumers by eliminating tariffs on things we don’t produce here in South Africa.
• Allow equity alternatives to ownership requirements in every sector.
• Make a big, bold decision to reimagine the NHI, making it the joint mission of the public and private sectors, where both have a clear role to play.
• Cut costs by implementing an immediate and fundamental spending review.
• Amend the Expropriation Act to better protect property rights.
• Bring back specialized police units and devolve policing powers to cities, like Cape Town, with the organizational capacity to fight crime more effectively.
• And, move quickly to professionalize the public service, as the President promised on Thursday.

And there is one more thing we must do, Madam Speaker. We must remember that South Africa cannot succeed unless everyone in it succeeds. And I mean everyone. No exceptions.

That means we must redress the wrongs of the past, but do so in ways that grow the economy and bring down unemployment. It makes no sense, for example, that 30 years of transformation has occurred alongside a 50% increase in unemployment.

We cannot redress the past by compromising the present and sacrificing the future.

It also means we must respect cultural and language rights, which exist precisely because South Africa is a diverse and historically divided country.

And we must ensure that every single South African feels safe, including our farmers and farmworkers.

The dismantling of the rural safety units was a catastrophic mistake that opened the door to a collapse of rural policing and the targeting of our farmers, and farmworkers, regardless of race by violent criminals and syndicates.

The subsequent failure to get on top of this means that every day, across our rural agricultural areas our farming communities fear for their lives, they are preyed upon by violent criminals and stock theft syndicates that are sapping the very lifeblood from their businesses.

Just this weekend I was in Thaba ‘Nchu, Ficksburg and other parts of the Free State with commercial farmers and small scale black farmers, to listen to their heartbreaking stories of how they fear daily for the lives of themselves and their families and how their ability to grow their businesses is destroyed through syndicated stock theft. Cases get opened but are never investigated. They know who is responsible but cannot secure arrests or convictions.

This situation cannot go unaddressed.

As a result, in my capacity as the minister of agriculture I am announcing that we will design a comprehensive plan to combat farm murders, stock theft and improve rural safety.

I look forward to collaborating with the minister of police and the entire justice and security cluster to bring an end to this scourge once and for all

Madam speaker, we live in times of both great hope and great fear,

It is time for us as leaders, the people in this house to lead by example.

We should seek to unite, not divide.

We should seek to build, not to break.

We should choose to reflect the best of ourselves and banish the worst.

Madam Speaker, we must recognize the moment we find ourselves in for what it is: a moment of great danger for the people of South Africa.

We must unite and mobilise to meet this moment.

That means doing what it takes to turn the economy around to provide hope and opportunity to the people of our great country.

It means taking the advice of Deng Xiaoping when he said, “A cat, whether it is white or black, is good as long as it is able to catch mice.”

The time for a break with failed policies is now. The time for a new approach is now.

Now, Madam Speaker, is the time!