A DA motion of no confidence in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s entire cabinet failed on Wednesday evening with all ANC MPs and some smaller parties present in the house and on the virtual platform voting against the DA proposal, as widely expected.
The ANC, which enjoys 230 seats in the 400-seat National Assembly, closed ranks and quashed the DA’s attempt to have the cabinet effectively dissolved. This as pressure mounts on the president and his ministers to implement critical economic reforms necessary to revive growth and halt SA’s worsening unemployment crisis, which hit a high of 35.3% in the fourth quarter of 2021.
A total of 231 MPs in the house and on the virtual platform voted against the motion, with 131 supporting the DA’s proposal to fire the cabinet. One MP abstained.
According to the constitution, if the National Assembly, by a vote supported by a majority of its members, passes a motion of no confidence in the cabinet, excluding the president, the president must reconstitute a new cabinet.
But with the ANC enjoying a majority in the National Assembly, the motion was always going to be all but academic.
ANC ministers, subject of the debate, were permitted to vote as per parliamentary rules, despite calls by some opposition parties for the cabinet members to recuse themselves.
During a rowdy and often ill-tempered debate earlier on Wednesday, DA leader John Steenhuisen, who tabled the motion in February, referred to the cabinet as a “poverty cabinet”, saying it has failed to make SA a viable place in which to operate a business and employ people.
“They have failed to protect lives and property, they have failed to supply electricity and basic services, and they have failed to reform labour and regulatory legislation. The result is that our extreme poverty, unemployment and inequality are now global outliers,” Steenhuisen said.
“And yet we still persist with this: one of the largest, most inefficient and most corrupt cabinets in the entire world,” the DA leader said.
“Consider that Brazil has 23 ministries. China has 21 ministries. South Korea has 18 ministries. Argentina has 16 ministries. The US has 15 federal government departments. And Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, has a 16-member cabinet.
“But here in SA we have 38 ministries, each with a deputy minister, and sometimes even more than one. And for what? For the sole purpose of rewarding otherwise unemployable cadres with jobs. Not one of these ministers here would last a day in the private sector, where results matter and accountability is still a thing,” Steenhuisen said.
ANC deputy chief whip Doris Dlakude said the party rejects the DA motion “with the contempt it deserves”.
She said the president has the right to choose his own cabinet, and the DA motion was ostensibly challenging the legitimacy of a democratically elected party, with the aim of “weakening the credibility of the movement and attack systems of democracy”.
Dlakude said the motion was also an, “application to co-govern when they [the DA] has not won a national election, an attempt to resist transformation and propagate the apartheid order”.
The IFP said it would not support the motion and would give Ramaphosa the benefit of the doubt.
Similarly, the NFP said it would be disingenuous to pass a no-confidence vote in the entire cabinet as “some ministers are performing well”.
The vote also threatened to expose fault lines and factional battles within the ANC ahead of the governing party’s elective conference in December, in which Ramaphosa remains clear favourite to retain his position despite a challenge by a faction linked to former leader Jacob Zuma.
On the same day, Ramaphosa himself was also due to face a motion of no confidence separately brought by the African Transformation Movement (ATM), which holds two seats in the National Assembly.
The motion by the ATM, which is alleged to have links to the so-called radical economic transformation faction of the ANC, an allegation it vehemently denies, stalled on Wednesday as parliamentary speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula referring it to the programme committee.
Steenhuisen initially announced his plan to table a motion of no confidence in SA’s entire cabinet during a debate on Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address (Sona), arguing that the president had failed to deliver on most of the promises made in previous speeches and this was in large part due to an “incompetent” cabinet.
Ramaphosa was swept to the highest office in the land on an anticorruption ticket and on promises to revive the economy.
During his Sona in February, Ramaphosa again promised structural economic reforms — including an amendment to the Electricity Amendment Act for public comment that will enable a competitive market for electricity generation, the spectrum auction and providing third-party access to Transnet Freight Rail’s network.
Many of the reforms were promised in previous addresses, but remain unachieved despite overwhelming consensus by business and ratings agencies that such reforms are crucial to unlock economic growth.
Damningly, while the president has on several occasions promised to tackle SA's electricity crisis, not a single additional megawatt has been procured to date, largely due to bureaucratic hurdles — leaving the country vulnerable to bouts of load-shedding costing the economy billions of rand.
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