Democratic Alliance demands state of disaster. ANC declares state of disaster. DA says, not that kind of state of disaster! Journos call it out. Who gets the blame?
Ghaleb Cachalia, the DA’s shadow minister of public enterprises, has demanded ‘apologies’ from journalists who dared to report that the party appears to have contradicted itself.
For almost a year, it has loudly and repeatedly called for a national State of Disaster on Eskom. Now it objects to the national State of Disaster announced by Cyril Ramaphosa in Thursday’s State of the Nation address, and gazetted on the same day by minister of zol and beach walks, Nkosazana ‘tin-pot dictator’ Dlamini-Zuma.
What did they expect to happen?
The DA’s federal leader, John Steenhuisen, describing this State of Disaster as ‘desperate and dangerous’, issued a statement saying that the party will challenge the declaration in court.
In the statement, he said: ‘A National State of Disaster under the guise of dealing with the load shedding crisis it created, will similarly empower the ANC to abuse procurement processes and issue nonsensical regulations that have nothing to do with the electricity crisis. The DA will not sit back and allow the ANC to abuse the electricity disaster it created to loot and further abuse the people of South Africa.’
Nowhere in that statement does it even mention that the DA had been calling for exactly such a state of disaster since April 2022, about which it crowed as recently as 30 January 2023, when it said ‘the ANC was finally left with no choice but to accede to the DA’s long-time demand to declare Eskom an ANC-made disaster zone’.
‘Awaiting apologies’
In response to journalists observing this apparent contradiction, Cachalia tweeted: ‘The job of journalists is to inform the public about matters in their interest not to misinterpret what the DA says – that’s called disinformation and is NOT in the public interest. Awaiting apologies.’
He referred to another tweet of his in which he tagged Ferial Haffajee, associate editor at Daily Maverick, Mandy Wiener and Matshidiso Madia of Eyewitness News, and Dawie Scholtz, an independent electoral analyst.
That tweet contained a copy of a letter the DA wrote to President Cyril Ramaphosa in which it asks for a ‘ring-fenced’ State of Disaster ‘that is fully accountable to Parliament’, and rejects a state of emergency (which is an entirely different thing).
Other DA politicians, from John Steenhuisen on down, insisted that their demand had always been for a ‘ring-fenced’ State of Disaster, with parliamentary oversight.
Mandy Wiener expressed her confusion, and Steenhuisen replied to her that it is not confusing at all. ‘A ring-fenced [state of disaster] and interventions to free Eskom from compliance with red tape, procurement obstacles, employment of skilled local and international energy experts, cancellation of dodgy coal tenders, exemption from localisation requirements, exemption from fuel levies and taxes in producing diesel, exemption from arduous process to remove the corrupt from their posts is VERY different from a national state of disaster that was used to loot during the C19 pandemic and where arbitrary and irrational regulations were applied that hindered, rather than helped the situation,’ he told her.
Except that it is not so different at all. To ‘free Eskom from compliance with red tape [and] procurement obstacles’ is all that is required for looting to flourish.
More importantly, ring-fencing – other than limiting a state of disaster to provinces or municipalities – is not provided for in the Disaster Management Act (DMA), nor does it prescribe close parliamentary oversight beyond a monthly report.
Although the DA is contesting the constitutionality of the DMA (and rightly so), they also said that no new legislation is required to give effect to their ‘ring-fenced State of Disaster’.
Who? Us?
Christian ‘CJ’ Steyl told me via Twitter: ‘Our proposal was very detailed. It was not a call for a national state of disaster, the Act we are contesting its constitutionality in court BTW, but a specific ring-fenced disaster management around Eskom. With a multiparty parliamentary oversight mechanism.’
The first part: ‘It was not a call for a national state of disaster,’ is ipso facto false. Eskom is a national institution, the electricity crisis is national, and various DA people have called it a ‘national state of disaster’.
I pointed out that in the original calls for a State of Disaster, published on the DA’s official website on 18 April 2022 and 4 May 2022, respectively, there was no mention of any ring-fencing, or of parliamentary oversight.
The earliest mention of ring-fencing appears to be in their letter to the President on 18 May, and it doesn’t seem to appear in a public press release until 15 July, when Cachalia, the author of the original releases, felt it necessary to clarify the DA’s position, and qualified the call for a State of Disaster with the phrases ‘ring-fenced’ and ‘fully accountable to Parliament’.
Yet Cachalia responded to my comment that this was ‘nonsense’. He wrote: ‘We have called for it to be ring-fenced around Eskom from the get go. I should know; I made the call.’ (My italics.)
Yes, he did make the call, but, no, he did not say ring-fenced.
After some to-ing and fro-ing, during which he claimed my citing the DA’s own press releases was ‘ill-informed’ and called me ‘maliciously intended’, he tried to claim that merely stating the reason for the State of Disaster as ‘Eskom’ in the early press-releases, clearly implied that it was to be ring-fenced. That is far from clear to me, or presumably, to many other readers.
I do not think it is malicious for journalists to call out politicians when they, to put it kindly, retcon their own statements.
Boneheaded
Calling for a State of Disaster was a boneheaded idea from the start. We’ve just had an example of what happens when you let the ANC government declare one. Widespread corruption, and ineffective but draconian oppression.
Yet, mere days after the previous State of Disaster was lifted, the DA wanted another one.
Even (eventually) adding the adjectives ‘ring-fenced’ or ‘subject to oversight’ or ‘limited to Eskom’ doesn’t change anything. Besides the fact that the DMA does not provide for either of these things, so there is no legal authority for such measures, it wouldn’t prevent the potential for great harm.
For example, it would still empower the government, as it did with Covid-19, to ban the publication of any information about Eskom and the electricity crisis that was not issued by the government itself. It would still remove measures that aim to prevent corruption from the single largest locus of corruption in the country.
Arguably, the State of Disaster as declared by Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is indeed ‘ring-fenced’, as the DA demanded. It says ‘a national state of disaster to prevent the progression to a total blackout from occurring…’ and limits its interventions ‘to the extent that it is necessary’ to achieve a list of objectives.
As I wrote recently, the very idea of declaring a formal State of Disaster to deal with an actual state of disaster that was caused by the very people now in charge of the remedy, is absurd.
The DA gave the ANC the idea of a State of Disaster, and the realisation that it was politically feasible. The DA shouldn’t have called for it in the first place.
Although it did qualify its demand for a State of Disaster in due course, it did not do so ‘from the get go’, as Cachalia and others have said.
This has all the hallmarks of hasty back-scrabbling, after they belatedly realised what a catastrophe a State of Disaster will undoubtedly be.
Malicious
For the DA to accuse journalists who raised these issues of ‘disinformation’, or ‘malicious intent’, and to demand apologies from them, is ridiculous. It is their job to hold politicians accountable, no matter which party they’re from.
I nominally support the DA. Its principles are not that far removed from the classical liberal principles that I espouse. If they end up in a coalition with smaller parties, it would be good if they needed as few flaky partners as possible. If they end up in a coalition with the ANC, it would be good if they had as much power within that coalition as possible. Either way, a DA government would be far superior, in principle, to an ANC government, even if the learning curve to govern nationally will be steep.
It really is the only sane option for voters opposed to the ANC, in my view, despite its shortcomings.
For politicians to attack journalists, merely for holding them accountable for the things they said, is not the behaviour one expects from a party that claims to be ready to govern, and claims to be more honest and transparent than the ruling party.
‘Perhaps, “state of disaster” was not the right words to use,’ Steenhuisen sheepishly told News24, adding that ‘ring-fenced intervention’ would have been better.
Owning mistakes – and this was a real clanger – might be embarrassing, but denying them, even against documentary evidence on their own official website, only undermines public trust in the party.
This cannot be what the DA wants. South Africans deserve better.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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