Democratic Alliance (DA) leader Tony Leon has rejected what he called President Thabo Mbeki’s attempt to label the DA as a party from the ”right”.
Commenting in his weekly newsletter on the debate on Mbeki’s budget vote in the National Assembly earlier this week, Leon said in the president’s ”idealised world every intervention by the state is necessary and beneficial.
”The cold reality of South Africa’s experience over the past ten years indicates otherwise.”
In repairing the damage from the apartheid past, ”as indeed we must”, it was no use repeating or compounding the mistakes of the previous era, with a different set of beneficiaries in mind.
The DA supported, among other things, free provision of basic services, a basic income grant, extension of the child grant to children up to the age of 18 years, business support centres, export processing zones, tax credits for investments in labour-intensive industries, and subsidised public transport for the unemployed during off-peak hours.
The DA also believed the state’s role should go beyond poverty alleviation, and it should also actively provide opportunity, especially to those who were denied opportunity because of discrimination in the past.
This was why the DA promoted such policies, among others, as opportunity vouchers and broad-based empowerment, in terms of which employees and ordinary people were given access to ownership and the market.
The DA advocated an enabling state, and opposed a controlling state; a state that dictated, over-regulated, and tried to do what others — the NGOs or the private sector — could do more successfully.
”If we believed, as the president suggests we do, that individuals should ‘shoulder their burdens and exercise their rights alone’, we would simply not propagate the views and policies I have just outlined.
”Only a party that advocates the importance of the social, of solidarity with the disadvantaged, of fraternity and caring, could hold these views and advocate these policies,” he said.
”The president’s attempt to project the DA as a soulless, selfish, uncaring party is thus simply incorrect and unsustainable.”
It required no great effort to mischaracterise one’s opponents’ arguments and to misquote their speeches and elide their concepts to create a bogeyman for a public execution.
”I think there is actually merit in much of what President Mbeki says. That is why we should have a proper and honest debate, not a rigged trial based on deliberate distortions,” Leon said. – Sapa