Deputy president Paul Mashatile has come to the defence of President Cyril Ramaphosa, saying he was quoted out of context at an ANC event at which he told thousands of ANC councillors that the DA-governed municipalities in the Western Cape were governed better.
Ramaphosa at the time told the councillors that they should take lessons from the DA municipalities which always received clean audits.
Ramaphosa had to embark on a media tour after the remarks upset ANC members in an attempt to clarify that they were not an endorsement of the DA just a year before local government elections.
Mashatile told MPs during an oral reply in parliament on Thursday that Ramaphosa had merely spoken about how councillors in general must learn from each other.
“He then went on that he has come across this information that there are a lot of municipalities in the Western Cape that have clean audits. He says go and see what they are doing as well,” said Mashatile.
“But what he did not say was that the Western Cape is really the panacea for good governance and service delivery and everything. He was focusing on clean audits.”
Mashatile said the clean audits that the DA municipalities received did not directly translate into good governance.
The auditor-general in 2024 reported that 63% of the DA-run municipalities had received clean audits compared with 5% of ANC-run municipalities.
The City of Cape Town was the only metropolitan municipality to receive a clean audit out of the nine in the country.
While conceding that the DA-run municipalities managed their books better, Mashatile emphasised that audit outcomes were not a sign of good governance.
The optimal model that we require is one that would accommodate all individuals regardless of their race or colour.
— Deputy president Paul Mashatile
Mashatile said the state of townships such as Khayelitsha in the Western Cape were reflective of a DA that does not govern well.
“It is important to note that there is a significant and persistent disparity between the wellbeing of many residents residing in township and informal settlements of the province of the Western Cape,” he said.
“Although the province is often recognised for strong financial governance overall, this does not reflect the lived experience of many black communities who continue to struggle with socio-economic challenges. Therefore, the Western Cape municipal governance model is not the best in the country as it fails to address the legacy of apartheid spatial segregation.
“The optimal model that we require is one that would accommodate all individuals regardless of their race or colour.”
In fact, Mashatile said, the DA governance model in the Western Cape was flawed because of the vast disparities between townships where mostly black people lived and urban areas where white people reside.
“By the way, some of the municipalities that have clean audits are not necessarily in the Western Cape, but the president was saying as you get an experience of learning from one another, also look at the Western Cape. But he was not saying ‘oh well the Western Cape knows it all’,” said Mashatile.
He said he had planned to invite EFF leader Julius Malema on a trip to Khayelitsha to assess its state. Malema had sponsored the question on the state of the DA-led municipalities, but was not present in the National Assembly.
“In fact, I was going to invite honourable Malema to go with me to Khayelitsha if he has time next week because when you go to Khayelitsha and some of the townships and informal settlements in this province I don’t see the good governance at all,” he said.
“So it’s one thing to say you’ve got the clean audit, but it’s one thing if you are changing the lives of people for the better. And that’s really where we must focus. But I know the media has got its own way of reporting and they only focused on this issue giving an impression that our president was praising the DA. That was not the case.”
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