Johannesburg | Saturday
SOUTH AFRICA needed a tripartite alliance of high growth rates, low interest rates and a stable currency, Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon said on Saturday.
Leon was speaking at the party’s federal congress in Johannesburg on Saturday, where he was re-elected unopposed.
He was nominated by chairman Joe Seremane.
”Instead we live in a house where the rand is going through the floor, interest rates are going through the roof and jobs are going out the window,” he said in a speech prepared for delivery at the party’s federal congress in Johannesburg.
”(This is) because other than hiking the interest rate, every weapon at the governments disposal – privatisation, deregulation, exchange control abolition and labour market flexibility – is a prisoner of the tripartite alliance governing our country.”
There would no be no change in South Africa’s economic fundamentals or job situation without political courage and leadership, Leon said.
”And that wont happen until the opposition outside the tripartite alliance is mightier than the opposition within it.”
Leon said it was crucial in South African politics that the DA offered itself convincingly and credibly to those looking for a new home.
The party would not remain in the safe compound called opposition, or merely represent minorities, as some wanted it to.
Nor would it, as some wanted, give up the idea of building an alternative and throw in its lot with the ruling party, hoping in some way to influence it for the better, he said.
The New National Party, according to Leon, was largely irrelevant now.
”Their previous leader lives in the wilderness. And that is the place where their current leader is taking them…”
”It will learn soon enough, one of the key lessons of South African history: that ‘joiners’ are despised by their former supporters and abused, and finally discarded, by their new masters.”
He asked what had become of 1994’s ideals.
”Today the people are treated as voting fodder while decision-making has been centralised in the presidency, which exists in a kind of splendid isolation from the people. And as the presidents power has expanded, so has he failed to lead in areas crucial to our success as a nation.”
South Africans were more vulnerable than ever to crime, Leon said.
”Since 1994, 186 678 rapes and 915 84 murders have been reported across the country. The human tragedy behind those abstract numbers cannot be quantified.”
The DA leader said the president had failed the people of South Africa in the fight against Aids.
”The governments increasingly bizarre approach might have superficial plausibility in the more remote corners of cyberspace or in an obscure site on the Internet or in the seminar room or wherever else President Mbeki seeks his dissident views, but these are places where human life is spoken of as a bloodless abstraction…
”The highest priority of government policy should be to save lives. Yet the grotesque caricature which masquerades as the governments Aids policy is rather about saving the Presidents face.”
Leon said the African National Congress had failed the people of South Africa by not promoting confidence in the country as an investment destination.
”Crime, strangulating labour provisions, our support of the government in Zimbabwe and the Presidents status as an Aids dissident combine to keep investors away.”
The government was living in a dangerous state of denial over the country’s economic health, he said.
”The South African miracle, if it is to take root and flower, depends on rapid and sustained economic growth that is impossible without a radical change of mindset in government.
”We require action today on the fundamental question of confidence: a 180 degree turnaround on Aids and Zimbabwe; a new commitment to the fight against crime; a conscious effort to convince the world, particularly investors, that our leadership is prudent, sensible and consistent.” – Sapa