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The final instalment of the State Capture Report amounts to a total and complete vindication of the DA’s decades-long fight against cadre deployment, which we have systematically intensified into a full-blown war in recent years. As a result, the DA can today announce that we are submitting the entire section of the report that deals with cadre deployment as formal supplementary evidence in our case in the North Gauteng High Court to have ANC cadre deployment corruption declared unconstitutional, illegal and unlawful, and to eradicate it from the face of our country once and for all.

This means that the final volume of the State Capture Report now becomes the fourth crucial piece of evidence we are submitting in our court challenge against this corrupt practice. The other three key pieces of the puzzle include the actual wording of the ANC’s cadre deployment policy, testimony delivered under oath in front of the State Capture Commission by the likes of former ANC cadre deployment chairperson Cyril Ramaphosa, and the 2018-2021 minutes of the ANC’s national cadre deployment committee that the DA helped expose.

The DA intends to use the findings of the final State Capture Report to devastating effect in our court challenge to the ANC. In paragraph 657, the Report echoes key aspects of the DA’s case by concluding that “it is unlawful and unconstitutional for a President of this country and any Minister, Deputy Minister or Director-General or other government official, including those in parastatals, to take into account recommendations of the ANC Deployment Committee.”

Importantly, the Report also directly implicates the chairperson of the ANC cadre deployment committee between December 2012 and December 2017, Cyril Ramaphosa. Zondo, in paragraphs 622 and 623, finds that “Many of these people…who enabled state capture…would have been appointed by the Deployment Committee…It is not sufficient for President Ramaphosa to focus on the future of the party and his envisaged renewal process. Responsibility ought to be taken for the events of the previous ‘era.’”

This means that, in the DA’s court case against ANC cadre deployment, Cyril Ramaphosa and his deplorable deployment committee now stands as accused number one.

Like the DA, judge Zondo also find it hard to believe that no meeting minutes exist for the period between 2012 and 2017 when Ramaphosa chaired the committee. In paragraph 590, the Report states that “It is difficult to conceive how the Party would have any oversight over the Committee without any records.” It is for precisely this reason that the DA is also continuing with our second, ongoing court case to force the ANC to hand over to us all cadre deployment records from the period when Ramaphosa was the chairperson.

The Report further dismisses the former cadre deployment chairperson’s claim that the committee merely makes “recommendations.” In paragraph 608, the Report finds that “The evidence…gives credence to the proposition that appointing authorities, including Cabinet, are de facto bound by the decisions of the Committee, which means that its ‘recommendations’ are in fact instructions.”

The State Capture Report’s findings also rely on exactly the same legislative and statutory foundations as the DA’s case and our End Cadre Deployment Bill, which is currently before Parliament. Like the DA, judge Zondo holds that cadre deployment violates section 195 and 197 (3) of the Constitution, which stipulates that “no employee of the public service may be favoured or prejudiced only because that person supports a particular political party or cause.” As the DA also argues before the court, the Report further finds that cadre deployment violates the Public Service Act, and that it constitutes an unfair and discriminatory labour practice because it means that “candidates [for public sector jobs] are not treated equally.”

In the intensification of our war against cadre deployment over the past three years, the DA has rolled out a carefully crafted strategy to first expose, then encircle and finally defeat ANC cadre deployment corruption. Following the final State Capture Report, we are closer than ever before to uprooting cadre deployment and, in the process, crippling the ANC’s “National Democratic Revolution” that seeks to centralise all power in the hands of this corrupt party.

In this final, endgame, stage of the DA’s war against cadre deployment, we will not only use the State Capture Report to seal our court victory over the ANC, but also to argue that Parliament has no choice but to adopt our End Cadre Deployment Bill.

It is now clearer than ever that the DA will win this war. Through relentlessly exposing cadre deployment, endless letters to the Zondo Commission, our End Cadre Deployment Bill and our ongoing court challenge to outlaw this evil, the DA is rewriting the history of the South African state – all from the opposition benches (for now).

By the time we are done, this country will – for the first time in its history – have a truly non-partisan, independent, skilled and capable state that serves all of the South African people. That is the vision that motivates us, day in and day out, to win this war against ANC cadre deployment corruption.

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