DA may have bitten off more than it can chew in cadre deployment saga

‘ANC bends the knee; surrenders cadre deployment records to the DA,” proclaimed a statement released by DA MP Leon Schreiber on Monday, 19 February.

“Bends the knee”, a term Schreiber repeated in the body of the statement, was arguably a needlessly provocative way – with unpleasantly racialised master/subject undertones – to describe the DA’s court victory in compelling the ANC to hand over the records relating to its cadre deployment policy since 2012.

But Schreiber is no stranger to hyperbole, having originally termed his legal success in this regard “one of the great victories in SA’s legal and democratic history”.

There was, however, good reason to be interested in the records in question – the fact that between 2012 and 2018, the person who chaired the ANC’s cadre deployment committee was then-deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa.

Evidence of Ramaphosa being directly implicated in some disastrous deployment decisions of the peak State Capture era would be a gift to his political opponents and could have created significant waves some three months ahead of the elections.

It was also always a long shot. Ramaphosa told the Zondo Commission in April 2021 that he could not recall minutes having been kept during the period in which he helmed the committee, due to the ANC’s “rather unfortunate record-keeping processes”.

This is, needless to say, impossibly convenient. 

But with the sitting President having given this version of events under oath to a judicial commission of inquiry, there would be no easy way to walk it back.

And so, when the ANC complied with a court order to turn over cadre deployment records to the DA on Monday, they did so by submitting an avalanche of paperwork which amounts to almost nothing useful.

1,344 pages of… very little

The dossier of 1,344 pages, now uploaded for public scrutiny by both the DA and ANC, is in parts unreadable. It also includes pages and pages of worthless information: the cover letters of those who applied for state jobs and their CVs, for instance, but with identifying details redacted.

Meanwhile, the only actual minutes supplied from the cadre deployment committee meetings are those that Schreiber, to his credit, already succeeded in having released in 2022 – covering the period from May 2018 to November 2020. This was the stretch in which former deputy president David Mabuza chaired the committee.

There is one clear sign that Ramaphosa’s claim that the committee did not keep records before this should be treated with scepticism, to say the least: the first available minutes in the dossier, from 11 May 2018, start by adopting the previous – missing – minutes from 19 March 2018.

But these 2018 to 2020 minutes have already been pored over and reported on, more than two years ago. You can read Daily Maverick’s reporting on them here and here.

By far the biggest revelation to emerge from them was that the cadre deployment committee deliberates on appointments to supposedly independent Chapter Nine institutions, to ambassadorial posts, and, most seismically, to the judiciary.

The fact that the committee discusses its preferred judge candidates also flatly contradicted what Ramaphosa told the Zondo Commission.

DA over-hyping committee powers

But even at the time of the minutes’ release in 2022, there were some reasons to believe that the DA might be over-egging the pudding in its outrage. 

One was that almost all the judge candidates preferred by the deployment committee did not succeed, meaning that President Ramaphosa felt comfortable overruling the decisions of this supposedly all-powerful committee.

Another point, made by Judges Matter campaigners Alison Tilley and Mbekezeli Benjamin at the time, was that it was likely that other political parties similarly discussed their desirable judicial candidates ahead of meetings of the judge selection body, the Judicial Service Commission.

As we also noted at the time, references from within the minutes to candidates being loyal ANC members were far less frequent than references to candidates possessing the necessary skills and experience, and being drawn from representative groups in terms of age, gender, race and geography.

All of this was aired and discussed in January 2022. It has therefore been somewhat surreal to see the DA, in concert with some willing journalists, present this information as if for the first time again this week – when the sole additions appear to be a few affidavits from ANC officials regarding the workings of the committee.

Opposition heading for trouble of its own

More seriously for the DA, however, the party could now be headed for trouble of its own.

The discussion of cadre deployment makes for reliable public outrage in certain quarters – and understandably so given the catastrophic effects of State Capture. But it has been pointed out that many – if not most – administrations around the world like to see trusted people placed in important posts. This is almost certainly true for the DA where it governs too.

Unfortunately for the opposition party, it has also now grown to a point where there is a significant volume of disgruntled former DA leaders itching to spill the beans on the party’s internal processes.

Already this week, former Midvaal mayor Bongani Baloyi – once touted as a shining star of the DA – took to social media to claim that the DA’s federal executive insists on approving all senior staff appointments in the municipalities it governs.

“If they have nothing to hide, they must release minutes of FEDEX and you will see that they practiced the same cadre deployment that the ANC practiced,” Baloyi posted.

The ANC, meanwhile, has threatened to go “toe-to-toe” with the DA in exposing the DA’s own cadre deployment processes.

It has the potential to get messy, even by the characteristically mucky standards of South African politics – and ultimately the DA may end up questioning whether this week’s grandstanding has been worth the price. DM