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The DA has today submitted a new request in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) to obtain full minutes and other records of all meetings held by the ANC’s national cadre deployment committee since 17 May 2021.

Our request to make this information public follows after the ANC’s newly elected Gauteng chairperson, Panyaza Lesufi, claimed that the ANC’s national cadre deployment committee interfered with the appointment of Judge Raymond Zondo as Chief Justice on 1 April 2022.

In a media interview published on Sunday, Lesufi admitted that he is “a strong proponent of cadre deployment,” despite the fact that Chief Justice Zondo’s report found that this practice was unconstitutional and unlawful, and played a key role in enabling state capture and corruption.

This makes it clear that Lesufi, as the ANC’s presumptive Premier candidate for Gauteng in 2024, is hellbent on continuing the ANC corruption that has brought the provincial government to its knees.

Voters must urgently unite behind the DA so that we can end this corruption and Stop Lesufi.

In addition to openly defying the findings of the Zondo report and declaring his intention to continue cadre deployment in Gauteng, Lesufi also suggested that the Chief Justice of the Republic of South Africa is himself but “a beneficiary of cadre deployment.”

With this statement, Lesufi has clearly tried to undermine the moral standing of the Chief Justice and the findings of his report into ANC state capture. Worse still, by suggesting that Zondo would not have become Chief Justice in the absence of ANC cadre deployment, he is sending a message of intimidation to the judiciary that judges who do not toe the ANC line will be disfavoured by the cadre deployment committee when they apply for positions.

The fact that the odious Lesufi is able to issue this coded threat in the first place serves as further proof of the urgent need to abolish cadre deployment, because it confirms how the ANC uses cadre deployment as a weapon against any public servant who dares stand up to ANC corruption, as Chief Justice Zondo has bravely done.

The DA will not allow Lesufi to get away with this abhorrent attempt at intimidation. The public has a right to know the details of Lesufi’s claim that the ANC cadre deployment committee unconstitutionally interfered with the appointment of the Chief Justice.

Given the gravity of this claim, the ANC is compelled to hand over all minutes of its national cadre deployment committee to the DA in the public interest, so that we can expose it in the same way that we exposed the previous set of minutes that covered the period 11 May 2018 to 21 May 2021.

The DA is also forging full steam ahead with our two court cases against ANC cadre deployment corruption. In the first case, we are asking the court to force the ANC to make public all minutes, emails, Whatsapps and other records from the period between 2013 and 2018, when President Cyril Ramaphosa chaired the ANC’s cadre deployment committee that enabled state capture.

In our second case, we have approached the North Gauteng High Court to declare cadre deployment unconstitutional and unlawful so that we can abolish this corrupt practice once and for all.

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