The ANC has accused the DA of using the Western Cape Provincial Powers Bill to appease its conservative voters.
JOHANNESBURG – The ANC has accused the DA of using the Western Cape Provincial Powers Bill to appease its conservative voters.
Last year, the DA tabled the bill in the Western Cape provincial legislature, citing the lack of provision of basic services, including energy, policing and rail at national level when the national government falls short, as the reasons for the bill.
“The bill creates a framework for the province to fully assert its existing constitutional and legislative powers and to get more powers delegated from national government,” the DA said.
“It not only enables but instructs the provincial government to step in as far as constitutionally possible where national government is failing to perform a function.”
Thembi Nkadimeng, speaking on the sidelines of an ANC national executive committee (NEC) meeting at the weekend, said the party was alarmed that the “Western Cape has embraced the ideologies of right-wing factions and has positioned itself as a supporter of the old apartheid regime, which never advocated for a unified or constitutional state”.
She said the bill wanted to take the country back to racial segregation.
“(We) will never go back to the dark days of racial segregation. Three of the Western Cape’s legal advisers have declared the bill unconstitutional.”
She said the DA had failed to use the powers it already had to transform the Western Cape in its entirety.
Nkadimeng cited agriculture, with “less than 3% of agricultural land owned by blacks in the Western Cape; this includes Africans, coloureds and Indians combined”.
She said that in education, the province was failing to provide enough maths and science teachers to schools in need, and in health “the DA has failed to build a new hospital in the Cape Flats but is opposed to the NHI”.
“The people of the Western Cape are part of a united South Africa and the plan is outrageously divisive. We will defeat this bill and it will never become law.”
“We will fight racism wherever it rears its ugly head,” Nkadimeng said.
The SACP in the Western Cape said the province was characterised by asset and income inequality and spatial segregation. The intent of this Provincial Powers Bill is “to create enclaves of privilege and misery for the people in the Western Cape”, it said.
“If the sprawling squatter camps and homelessness in the Cape Flats is not evidence of the deteriorated material conditions of the poor and working class, then the farce concocted by the DA Capexit alliance is the perilous future.”
Christopher Fry, the DA’s spokesperson on the Western Cape Provincial Powers Bill, said it would enable the Western Cape government “to negotiate its own, province-specific trade agreements with territories across the world.
“Nothing about this bill is based on race. Nothing about this bill is based on class. And absolutely none of it is based on the pipe dream of secession,” Fry said.
