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Minister Thulas Nxesi’s outburst yesterday in the budget debate on Vote 31: Employment and Labour reveals a ruling party on the ropes.

The ANC government is so evidently floundering – so overwhelmed by its own incompetence – that in sheer desperation it has started to ratchet up the rhetoric against minorities. It has begun to issue veiled threats to assorted targets whom it wishes to blame for its failures.

In the budget debate, I referred in passing to the ANC as the ‘so-called party of liberation’, because through its policy blunders and legion acts of corruption and maladministration the ruling party has been the very opposite of a force for liberation.

This unleashed a furious response from Minister Nxesi, who ranted: ‘We have been too nice to you! There will come a time when you will regret with [sic] this resistance….because we have been too nice…because we chose peace instead of war. And what you are trying to do now, you are forcing us to be more radical…Today what you are enjoying it’s what was brought by the ANC. Now you come and tell us we are the so-called liberation party. We will not accept that. There will come a time…Our people have been too tolerant on many issues, including the issues of the land and this empowerment we are talking about’.

He then went on to engage in crude race-baiting: ‘If you are a black person still defending the DA you are like a rented black, rent-a-darkie’.

The Minister’s diatribe and deflections do not change the fact that his own government is largely responsible for the current state of the nation: the rolling blackouts, the crumbling infrastructure, the rising cost of living, the soaring unemployment and the rampant crime.

The ANC might have inherited a terrible legacy from apartheid, but through a combination of corruption, cadre deployment, criminality and cack-handedness, it has compounded (rather than conquered) the sins of the past.

Instead of liberating the vast majority of South African people, the ANC has confined increasing numbers to a life of poverty and unemployment. As the state collapses due to ANC-induced failures, South Africans have fewer access to opportunities and a greatly reduced scope to improve their lives.

These are bald facts, and they cannot be obscured by Minister Nxesi’s fulminations.

Issued by Dr Michael Cardo MP - DA Shadow Minister for Employment and Labour