Almost nobody in the Cabinet ‘would be employable in the private sector, and frankly, some of them should be behind bars,’ DA leader John Steenhuisen said in debate in Parliament on Cyril Ramaphosa’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) of last week.
He announced that he had tabled a motion of no confidence in Cabinet, which he described as a ‘rag-tag mob of crooks and free-loaders’.
News24 reports that the motion did not include a motion for Ramaphosa’s removal.
Steenhuisen was reported as saying, however, that the goodwill towards Ramaphosa when he became president in 2018 evaporated in the face of his inaction.
The DA leader said Ramaphosa’s Cabinet, which was among the biggest in the world, was ‘a massive jobs-for-cadres scheme where no one is too corrupt, too lazy, or too useless to land one of these plush jobs’.
Addressing the president, Steenhuisen said: ‘You stand up in your SONA, and you talk about building a capable state. But you’re not prepared to walk away from the very essence of state capture and the incapable state: the ANC policy of cadre deployment.
‘Clearly, you know your Cabinet cannot be trusted to get things done. You have effectively admitted that by setting up a parallel state in your own office. Your appointment of outsiders like Sipho Nkosi, Mavuso Msimang and Daniel Mminele to do the job of your Cabinet says it all.
‘In a functional democracy, you would have fired most of your Cabinet ages ago, but we all know why you haven’t.’
He said Ramaphosa saw his job ‘as holding together this rag-tag mob of crooks and free-loaders, even if that means the destruction of our country’.
[Image: Democratic Alliance, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=96850673]