The DA’s four year court battle to expose details on its rival’s destructive Cadre Deployment policy will reach bursting point at the worst possible time for the ANC. With service delivery collapsing as a direct result of State Capture, the court-enforced disclosures are set to come just one month from Voting Day. This week, in a ‘6-love’ victory for the DA, the Gauteng High Court ruled that the ANC must hand over computers and disclose gory details on how the Ramaphosa’s-led committee put party loyalists where and when. The ANC previously applied liberal use of koki-pens to ‘redact’ names and other details from 1 300 pages of documents the court forced it to hand over. DA shadow minister Leon Schreiber explained implications of the latest judgement to Alec Hogg of BizNews.
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Summary of the interview
In this BizNews interview with Leon Schreiber conducted by Alec Hogg, Schreiber discusses the issue of cadre deployment within the African National Congress (ANC) and its impact on governance in South Africa. He highlights the lack of transparency and merit-based appointments in the deployment process, leading to inefficiencies and problems in various sectors. Schreiber emphasizes the need to move away from cadre deployment and institute a new selection process based on merit and professionalism. He contrasts the Western Cape’s approach, focusing on merit-based appointments, with other regions affected by cadre deployment, showcasing the difference in governance outcomes. Schreiber also addresses the ANC’s accusations regarding the DA’s deployment policy, stating that the DA does not have such a policy and advocates for transparency and merit in government appointments.
Full transcript of the interview ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
00:00:08:11 – 00:00:38:17
Alec Hogg: Dr. Leon Schreiber is the shadow minister of Public Service and Administration with the Democratic Alliance. He’s the man who is being, well, hunting the ANC so that it gives the inside details on cadre deployment, one of the most destructive policies that South Africa has had to deal with over the past 30 years.
00:00:38:19 – 00:01:01:13
Alec Hogg: My guess is, this is a follow-up to the last conversation that we had. At that time, I hadn’t had a chance to have a look at all the details of the case, the deployment information, the documentation that was handed over to you because the court told the ANC it had to. I think you told us that day that it had taken something like three years to get to that point.
00:01:01:15 – 00:01:23:16
Alec Hogg: But when we then looked at the information, a heck of a lot of it had actually been what they call redacted. In other words, you didn’t know who the people were. There was a lot of stuff in there that needed, well, if you wanted to get the full picture, it would have been much better to know what it was before someone took a Koki pin to it.
00:01:23:18 – 00:01:25:23
Alec Hogg: And so you didn’t let it rest.
00:01:26:00 – 00:01:56:12
Leon Schreiber: Now, indeed, Alec, it’s good to be with you again. And I remember from our previous conversation that we even issued a bit of a public invitation to people to help us go through it and see if they could identify some of the most egregious cases. But in the event, as you say, that was very difficult because every single name in the 1300 pages of documents had been redacted, as well as some other information that made it really very difficult to use it in any meaningful way.
00:01:56:14 – 00:02:20:04
Leon Schreiber: So that was one of the things that was back before the Joburg High Court yesterday, but that wasn’t the only issue that we pointed out to the court in our application to the ANC and Fikile Mbalula specifically in contempt. So that was one of it. And the court agreed with us that it was unlawful for the ANC to redact these documents when the court order had been explicit that all information must be made public.
00:02:20:06 – 00:02:43:16
Leon Schreiber: But the second thing was that the ANC, the court actually also held that the ANC had illegally destroyed some of the information because the party admitted through an affidavit from Mr. Mbalula that it had deleted emails from the Cadre Deployment Committee after the court order had been issued. The original one in the Joburg High Court back in 2021.
00:02:43:18 – 00:03:20:02
Leon Schreiber: And then thirdly, and very importantly, the Court also agreed with us that it was unlawful for the ANC to withhold certain kinds of information. And it very explicitly mentions President Cyril Ramaphosa in this regard, saying that he was the chairman of this committee and therefore his emails, his WhatsApps, his correspondence containing information related to his work as chairman of the deployment committee should also have been included, as well as the other members of the committee and government officials who were essentially receiving these instructions from the ANC Deployment committee.
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00:03:20:04 – 00:03:46:18
Leon Schreiber: So it was really a slap in the face for the delay. I mean, just devastating analysis of the ANC dishonesty. And on the basis of that, the court then concludes that the ANC willfully and with malicious intent acted in contempt of court. And now we have a situation for the first time in six years of our democracy that the governing party of this country is in contempt of an order that was issued and upheld by the Constitutional Court.
00:03:46:20 – 00:04:09:17
Leon Schreiber: And that’s why we are calling on Ramaphosa specifically, as well as the president of the country, to now comply with this ruling because if he doesn’t and the ANC continues to basically ignore the constitutional court, then we are going to move towards the territory of a constitutional crisis. And I think that tells you all about the ANC’s desperation to hide whatever’s in Ramaphosa’s minutes and correspondence.
00:04:09:19 – 00:04:37:19
Alec Hogg: All of this in a civilized society, in a constitutional democracy, should not be allowed. And we know that. But we also know that this is dynamite information, which we thought would all be available. The business community, many people put their hands up, went through the documentation and then came back and said, but there’s nothing we can’t find. It’s almost like the smoking gun, which should be here but isn’t here.
00:04:37:21 – 00:04:55:00
Alec Hogg: Are you surprised, though, that the ANC has done what it’s done, and perhaps you can, because I don’t think members of the public were surprised, and perhaps you can take us to the next step. What if in the next 15 days they do not comply with what the court has told them to?
00:04:55:02 – 00:05:16:10 Leon Schreiber: Yes, I don’t think it’s a comment on the ANC that no one is really surprised that they would be willing to subvert the rule of law in order to hide. I think quite specifically, Ramaphosa is involved. And I think we must emphasize this because whatever they gave us, even in redacted form, was all from the period up to 2018.
00:05:16:12 – 00:05:41:04 Leon Schreiber: So you can see that the ANC very deliberately excluded anything from 2013 until 2018. There is not a single piece of documentation, not a WhatsApp, not an email, not a meeting, not a note from that period. So that only should heighten our concern over the precedent. The current sitting president’s role in a practice that the Zondo Commission told us facilitated state capture.
00:05:41:06 – 00:06:07:21 Leon Schreiber: So I think that is the only logical explanation for why the ANC would be this desperate and willing to actually go this far in undermining the rule of law. Now, what the judge said yesterday, as you point out, is that the ANC has 15 working days to compile all of this unredacted information, but also then, of course, to get hold of Mr. Ramaphosa’s emails, WhatsApps, and additional information from committee members.
00:06:07:23 – 00:06:31:19 Leon Schreiber: But there’s a critical component of this court order that I think might be the most important of all, and that is that the judge has said that the ANC must provide hard drives and laptops from the officials who admitted under oath that they are the ones who keep records to an independent I.T. expert selected by the DEA. And if we can get that executed…
00:06:31:21 – 00:06:55:02 Leon Schreiber: In other words, the raw source material, the hard drives, the deleted emails, whatever they claim. I am quite confident that the expertise exists for us to extract that information. So I think if I look at this court order and I look at how desperate the ANC is not to comply with it, that is probably the biggest nightmare, because we all know that that kind of information can be retrieved.
00:06:55:04 – 00:07:24:16 Leon Schreiber: So I think that is quite important. However, it may still be that the ANC also defies this particular court order because it’s now no longer a theoretical exercise. The ANC is in contempt of court at the moment. It is a civil case. We have approached the courts for a civil contempt of court case, but as you know, Alec, the next step is criminal contempt of court, and it’s basically the last mechanism that the legal system has at its disposal.
00:07:24:18 – 00:07:52:13 Leon Schreiber: When people and organizations refuse to comply with a court order and it results in imprisonment for the relevant officials. And that certainly includes Fikile Mbalula, but possibly others involved in holding the court in contempt. So I must say, a lot of people say to me, and I think even when we discussed it last time, I said to you that I am somewhat taken aback by the number of people who say they’ll never hand it over.
00:07:52:15 – 00:08:10:01 Leon Schreiber: But I must say to you, we have never been naive in this process. And I think the only reason we’ve gotten this far is because we’ve always planned for the ANC to be as dishonest as possible. And so that’s why I can say to you, we are already preparing for the next as we’ve done over the last. It’s now approaching four years of work on this.
00:08:10:03 – 00:08:22:15 Leon Schreiber: We are preparing for a scenario where the ANC undermines us, a contempt judgment, and then we would certainly be using every tool at our disposal to send the officials to prison. That is the last remedy.
00:08:22:17 – 00:08:40:05 Alec Hogg: For those who’ve been following this story, all of what you’ve said now makes perfect sense. But what about those people who are coming in, jumping in for the first time and saying, contempt of court? You know, it doesn’t sound like anything terribly serious. What exactly do we know from the documentation that you already have at your disposal?
00:08:40:06 – 00:09:06:05 Leon Schreiber: Yes. So I think it’s just important. It’s a great question to go back to what this is all about, why we are pursuing this. It’s on two levels. I think the first one is the Zondo Commission told us that the deployment facilitated state capture. So in order for us to hold accountable the correct people who facilitated state capture, we need to understand the details of the deployment.
00:09:06:07 – 00:09:34:05 Leon Schreiber: So as much as the ANC would like to tell us that the Zondo Commission has finished its work, you know, it spent a billion rand of taxpayer money and now we must move on. That’s never going to happen. We cannot move on until we understand how this practice was facilitated, and what I’ve said all along is the trick to understanding state capture is to understand how those people who captured the state were appointed in the first place.
00:09:34:06 – 00:09:55:19 Leon Schreiber: If you look at us, Hlaudi Motsoeneng, you look at it. Dudu Myeni also. Fraser all these names that we are familiar with, how on earth could they go through a selection process that was fair and merit-based and be appointed? The answer is that they can’t. It had to be manipulated from the outside and the tool that did that is deployment.
00:09:55:21 – 00:10:30:12 Leon Schreiber: So we are not anywhere close to done with state capture until we find the fingerprints of the people involved in the deployment. That’s really the first fundamental issue. But secondly, beyond just state capture, I think the document that we do have at our disposal and also some of the very limited set of minutes that the Zondo Commission obtained and which we as the DEA subsequently got hold of through a promotion of access to information request, demonstrates to us that K2 deployment is the root cause of state failure.
00:10:30:14 – 00:10:56:16 Leon Schreiber: So it’s not only about corruption and state capture, but it is also about state failure, because if you look at the limited information that is available, you can see that in a short period of time, the National Deployment Committee of the ANC interfered with 85 different government departments and institutions. It interferes with appointments all the way down to middle management, and it interferes with Chapter nine institutions and even the courts.
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00:10:56:18 – 00:11:23:11 Leon Schreiber: And in many cases you can see that they are specific references to a particular person being a cadre of the ANC, a loyal comrade of the ANC, and essentially reducing the appointment decision to what benefits the governing party rather than who can actually do the job. Now, the terrifying thing about all of this is that the deployment is not only limited to the national government level.
00:11:23:13 – 00:11:58:18 Leon Schreiber: The minutes themselves refer to the ANC provincial as well as regional deployment committees. So this means that from the highest level, all the way down to municipalities, the ANC subverts appointment processes and ensures that cadres are appointed. I mean, the number of cases I’ll give you one example in Limpopo province of a municipal manager who is implicated in the VBS scandal, who was removed from that position and lo and behold, a few months ago was appointed as municipal manager at another municipality in the Beaufort.
00:11:58:20 – 00:12:18:12 Leon Schreiber: And then we ask ourselves why Limpopo doesn’t have water, why the roads are falling apart. So that the two-pronged answer is if we want to bring an end to state capture and corruption, we need to hold accountable the people involved in the deployment. But also if we want to fix the state, we need to bring an end to this practice.
00:12:18:12 – 00:12:21:10 Leon Schreiber: And that’s where transparency is vital on both fronts.
00:12:21:12 – 00:12:42:06 Alec Hogg: It’s quite extraordinary, actually, when you sit back and think we’ve got an election and we’ve still got people who say, no, we’ll vote for this party because they were the party that rescued the country from apartheid. But I suppose it was a little bit like, you know, from the frying pan into the fire, it certainly appears to be that way, given the way the economy has performed.
00:12:42:08 – 00:13:14:04 Alec Hogg: The big issue here, though, is that there’s lots of talk about after the election, a government of national unity, which will be headed by Cyril Ramaphosa. Nobody else the idea would be suitable for the did even consider it going after him in this way, in this deliberate manner. Is that not putting that possibility of averting the what John Steenhuisen said at a conference that doomsday coalition does that not just completely wipe that possibility out?
00:13:14:06 – 00:13:50:15 Leon Schreiber: Well, I think we’re leaving off the table there. The most important solution or the most viable solution for South Africa, which is the multiparty charter. And it’s only if you accept defeat or accept the sort of second or third or fourth worst outcome that you would lose sides of this. And I think that this particular matter as well as I mean, as I said earlier, it is any logical person can see that this is a cover-up by the ANC to keep Ramaphosa’s fingerprints off the deployment and subsequently then all state capture and that they are absolutely willing to go to any lengths to do that.
00:13:50:17 – 00:14:13:17 Leon Schreiber: So I do think let’s talk straightly to each other as well, Alec. We’ve got now less than two months to go to an election. I think it is vital for the people of South Africa, and it’s actually a point we made in our court papers that the people of South Africa need to know if the current president was involved in facilitating state capture, as the Zondo Commission termed the practice of kind of deployment.
00:14:13:19 – 00:14:40:09 Leon Schreiber: That is a fundamental issue about transparency and actually about informing the electorate. So this matter in the current environment, I do want to just stress this didn’t start yesterday and there are people who started the day, you know, playing politics Well, then we’ve been playing politics for years and even decades on this matter. I personally have been driving it since coming to Parliament in 2019 with exactly the same focus that I’m doing now.
00:14:40:11 – 00:15:12:20 Leon Schreiber: But the truth is, of course, that now we are very close to an election. And, you know, I do believe fundamentally that if South Africans were to actually see the truth about the person who promised them the new dawn and all these, you know, the bullet trains and the smart cities and all these things that that have turned out to be lies, to see that you were certainly no innocent bystander, but was actually the chairman of the process that facilitated the very destruction of the state that the ANC now, you know, claims to want to address that.
00:15:12:20 – 00:15:47:05 Leon Schreiber: That could have very substantial political implications. And I think that in that sense, we should also look at this politically as a vital fight for the promotion of the multiparty charter. The alternative, because at the end of the day, if we are able to demonstrate what we strongly believe, which is that the ANC, through Mr. Ramaphosa, was no innocent bystander, was keenly involved with the state capture project, that we would in that way be able to inflict a very serious political blow close to the election to the ANC as well.
00:15:47:07 – 00:16:06:20 Leon Schreiber: That doesn’t mean we will let this go after the election. It doesn’t mean that all the work we’ve done previously is less important. But of course your question is informed by the current context and I think that we must play for first prize. And I don’t think anyone would disagree that this prize remains, that we get rid of the ANC and that we get the multi-party charts across the line.
00:16:07:01 – 00:16:08:21 Leon Schreiber: And I’m doing my bit through this.
00:16:08:23 – 00:16:34:18 Alec Hogg: It’s quite extraordinary, really, if you just sit back for a while because Trump was has been outspoken against state capture, but perhaps he you might have felt that the people that he was putting into these positions were people who were going to do a good job because that’s the only rational explanation. But once they got there, clearly, as we know from the record and we know what’s happened in the country, they didn’t do a good job.
00:16:34:20 – 00:16:53:13 Alec Hogg: Was the any way anything in the documentation that you’ve seen where the cadre deployment committee, reversed any of the decisions, pulled back, recalled as they liked doing with their presidents, some of those cases who’d been deployed and had made, well, they are nests rather than supporting the country.
00:16:53:18 – 00:17:25:17
Leon Schreiber: Well, again, I mean, the problem right now is that everything we have is from the post-Ramaphosa, from the Post-Zuma period. So post-Ramaphosa’s chairmanship of the committee. So at the moment we just can’t say. And that’s why, you know, yesterday’s judgment is important. But certainly judging from the limited information we have from the period after that, from 2018 to 2021, we can see that there is extensive consideration of how to redeploy.
00:17:25:17 – 00:17:53:07
Leon Schreiber: And that’s a term that many South Africans are also familiar with because, in fact, there’s a database, an internal database with hundreds of names of cases for consideration is the title of the database, and that this database is then used to essentially find people. I mean, one who comes to mind, I think there’s the former mayor of Ethekwini was, you know, unceremoniously removed, but then finds their way back onto this database.
00:17:53:12 – 00:18:11:13
Leon Schreiber: And then the party indeed actively looks for opportunities to redeploy this person. So in other words, to find a job for them regardless of whether they might be the best candidate. But because, you know, they are the person, I think one of the good ways to think about this is that the ANC doesn’t look for the best person for the job.
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00:18:11:15 – 00:18:38:15
Leon Schreiber: They look for the best job for the person. And that’s really where the deployment has wreaked havoc that we can say from how from what we have in the documentation. But I think the second point about Ramaphosa and the state capture era is that the fundamental problem is that it should not be up to some secretive committee that sits and decides who gets appointed.
00:18:38:17 – 00:19:06:06
Leon Schreiber: That’s really the systemic issue because at the end of the day, if you are looking for a municipal director on infrastructure or you’re looking for, you know, executives at Eskom or executives in government, the appointment process there should be judged on who is the right person for the job by relevant people who can make informed decisions about that in an interview process, for example.
00:19:06:08 – 00:19:29:19
Leon Schreiber: But what on earth does Mr. Ramaphosa or any of these other ANC skaters, Lindiwe Sisulu, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, these are some of the people who served on the deployment committee recently. What on earth do they know about finding the head of, you know, the Water and Sanitation Department’s infrastructure division? They are not equipped, well-qualified to find the right people.
00:19:29:21 – 00:19:55:22
Leon Schreiber: And that’s the systemic problem, is that you outsource appointment decisions to politicians who openly say that they make their decisions based on political factors like who is a loyal cadre and inevitably whether they think someone is right for the job or not, they are not qualified and they’ll certainly not legally entitled to make those decisions about positions that should be technical in nature and should be filled by professionals.
00:19:56:00 – 00:20:18:19
Leon Schreiber: That’s really why we need to move the conversation forward to how we get rid of cadre deployment and how we institute a new selection process where selection panels are insulated from political interference with the Public Service Commission plays its rightful job to ensure that appointments are based strictly on merit. And that’s the DA’s offer in this election as well.
00:20:18:21 – 00:20:30:03
Leon Schreiber: Very clear. One of our seven pledges in our manifesto is to abolish cadre deployment and build this new system. We professionals will be looking for other professionals to fill these positions.
00:20:30:05 – 00:20:37:20
Alec Hogg: And the ANC is response as a final question is, they say, but why is the DA not telling us about its cadre deployment?
00:20:37:22 – 00:21:07:03
Leon Schreiber: Yes. You know, Alec, I’m no psychologist, but I feel the strong urge to diagnose them with a case of projection, in other words, where you try to deflect by accusing other parties of the thing that you are guilty of. I thought it was hilarious when I saw the ANC statement on yesterday’s case this morning where they said, well, they claimed that, you know, they are acting in the interests of transparency in making their things public and now others must also make the things public.
00:21:07:05 – 00:21:27:22
Leon Schreiber: This is the same party who was just held in contempt for hiding this information, claiming to be acting in the interests of transparency. Now, of course, from the DA’s point of view, the problem that the ANC has is quite simple. They are asking for things that don’t exist. The DA doesn’t have a deployment policy. It never has. It doesn’t advocate a deployment committee or anything analogous to that.
00:21:27:22 – 00:21:50:11
Leon Schreiber: It never has. And quite obviously then there would be no records of from something that doesn’t exist. But I do think South Africans who have been following this, but also those South Africans who, you know, live in places like I mentioned, Limpopo, where I was recently on the campaign trail, where, you know, people in good spirit military thought they haven’t had water for months, sometimes years.
00:21:50:13 – 00:22:14:21
Leon Schreiber: They certainly understand very well every time that they tried to open the tap and there’s no water, that that’s the consequences of ANC created women. It is not on any other party. And in fact, I would maybe end off by saying, if you want to see the difference between a government that is built on of deployment, then you should go to Limpopo and and try to get water from your tap.
00:22:14:23 – 00:22:38:22
Leon Schreiber: But conversely, if you want to understand what can be done in a government that makes appointments on the basis of merit and looks for professional people rather than ideas, and without the deployment policies or committees just come to the Western Cape and experience the difference. When you drive from the Eastern Cape into the Western Cape, it’s because professional people are maintaining the roads that your car doesn’t get stuck in a pothole.
00:22:38:22 – 00:23:13:17
Leon Schreiber: It’s because professional people are maintaining the water infrastructure, are maintaining, you know, the economic infrastructure that we need to create jobs. That’s the reason why 300,000 new jobs in South Africa comes from the Western Cape. In fact, over the last five years, 78% of net new jobs have come from this province. And I think that that demonstrates to you all you need to know about the difference between a government built on of deployment, as in most of the rest of the country, and a government that is interested in finding the right people for the job through a fair, merit-based appointment process.
00:23:13:19 – 00:23:34:04
Leon Schreiber: You have a template, voters have a template, they can have a look and it’s not just the people who vote with their feet to move to or emigrate to the Western Cape who understand this. It’s anybody who just has a look around them.
00:23:34:07 – 00:23:36:02
Alec Hogg: Dr. Leon Schreiber is the shadow minister for Public Service and Administration. He’s with the Democratic Alliance. I’m Alec Hogg from Biznews.com.
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