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The DA has formally launched urgent contempt of court proceedings against ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula over his failure to comply with an order confirmed by the Constitutional Court to hand over complete records related to the ANC’s national cadre deployment committee dating back to 1 January 2013, when Cyril Ramaphosa became cadre chairman.

The DA’s application, which was filed on Monday in the Johannesburg High Court where the original order against the ANC emanated from, seeks to declare that the governing party of South Africa is in contempt, and in breach of, an order upheld by the highest court in the Republic.

As the DA articulates in our urgent application, the ANC’s failure to comply with the court order amounts to an assault on the judiciary and the rule of law. By refusing to be bound by an order upheld by the Constitutional Court, the ANC risks triggering a full-blown constitutional crisis. The only way to avert this urgent risk to our constitutional order on the eve of a general election, is for the DA’s application to succeed and for the ANC’s Secretary-General and officials involved in the destruction of information to be held personally accountable.

The DA’s application follows after the ANC brazenly failed to comply with an order handed down in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA). It did so by undertaking unpermitted redactions of relevant information, by withholding all records related to the period between 2013 and 2018 when Ramaphosa was in charge of cadre deployment, by excluding specific minutes from the record, by providing illegible information, and by destroying information held on laptops while the court process was underway.

In addition to seeking appropriate relief for the ANC’s contempt and to compel the ANC to hand over complete records, the DA’s application also seeks to compel the party to hand over to an independent IT expert the laptop and hard drive from which cadre deployment records were removed.

The ANC is so desperate to cover up its dirty cadre secrets – and specifically Ramaphosa’s role in the practice that, in the words of the Zondo Commission, facilitated state capture – that it is willing to trigger a constitutional crisis. But the DA will not relent. We have been leading the struggle against cadre deployment corruption for years, and we will not stop now.

We will use every single tool at our disposal to force the ANC to respect the rule of law and comply with the court order for it to expose all of its dirty cadre secrets, so that the people of South Africa can see with their own eyes how the root cause of state capture, of corruption and of collapsing service delivery including loadshedding and water-shedding, is the African National Congress.

Issued by Dr Leon Schreiber MP - DA Shadow Minister for Public Service and Administration