ANC first deputy secretary-general Nomvula Mokonyane has defended South Africa’s move to have Taiwan removed from Pretoria, calling it long overdue, and labelling the DA as the “most dangerous racist organisation in this country”.
The DA and the IFP said they will petition President Cyril Ramaphosa to reverse the decision against Taiwan within the GNU.
DA MP Emma Louise Powell accused Ramaphosa’s government of bowing to pressure from external actors.
She said: “The ANC no longer enjoy an outright majority and as such, are no longer at liberty to unilaterally determine South Africa’s foreign policy positions without consulting their partners in government”.
To renegotiate the terms of this bilateral agreement, consensus must be sought within the GNU.
“Remember the DA has got serious hangovers of separate development. See what they do in the Western Cape. See what they want to do about the constitution in the Western Cape.
“It’s just because we have a bigger responsibility as the ANC, bigger than any other party in this country, to carry South Africans along. But if there’s one most dangerous racist organisation in this country, it’s the DA that seeks separate development, the noise they are making about Taiwan,” Mokonyane said.
She said that foreign policy as well as peace and security issues lay with the President.
“It’s in our DNA that any form of separate development, any form of segregation, we can’t actually identify, and that’s the story we agree with, actually it’s overdue, the removal of Taiwan.”
“We will not support what the DA wants, which is to take the people of China back to a bantustan system,” she said, adding that South Africa could not respect any action that sought to fragment a nation.
According to Mokonyane, Taiwan doesn’t fit the definition of a “nation state”.
[Photo: ITU Pictures from Geneva, Switzerland, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]