All parties should vote to get rid of Ramaphosa
While the speaker of the National Assembly has predictably used technicalities to block the ATM’s motion of no confidence in President Cyril Ramaphosa, there are many compelling reasons why such a motion should be tabled, debated and passed by parliament. All political parties, including those in the government of national unity and especially the DA, should support it.
However, if such a motion were focused mainly on the debacle of, and secrecy about, the Phala Phala matter, it would not succeed, because there are too many unknowns regarding the president’s own possible guilt in this saga. He has anyway successfully kicked any investigation into his own role into touch. His skills at kicking cans down the road are well known.
If, however, the motion of no confidence contained the plethora of disastrous crises and consequences facing South Africans arising out of his and his government’s policies, decisions and actions taken on Ramaphosa’s watch, it should rationally be voted for.
Far more important than the Phala Phala matter, as sordid as it is, are our ailing economy, increasing unemployment, homelessness, poverty, crime and corruption, bankrupt metros and municipalities incapable of providing the most basic services, healthcare and education failures, and an unmanageable national debt. These are all symptoms of governmental failure, misrule and gross mismanagement under Ramaphosa’s leadership.
Damagingly inconsistent, ANC self-serving foreign policy, including links to Iran, Hamas and their ilk; increased racial legislation; poor official cadre appointments, including the deputy president, public protectors, ministers and police commissioners; and Ramaphosa’s tolerance of, and inaction against, incompetent or corrupt cabinet colleagues and other public officials, as well as his reluctance to hold ANC cadres accountable through consequence management, are all prominent features of his presidency.
Irrespective of the suspicious nature of the Phala Phala matter and his lack of real transparency about it, this president, with all his failed policies and broken promises, has led himself, his party and the whole nation down a slippery path towards a failed state. He should go.
David Gant
Kenilworth
Local tax models abroad way to efficient public transport
Tara Roos’s most recent column, “Should Cape Town be grateful for digital nomads?” (May 22), refers.
In many parts of the world different types of taxes are collected and spent locally. For example, Vail (in Colorado, US) funds public transport and similar services from a sales tax.
This means visitors pay their way and benefit from the transport network when they are there, which benefits the residents all year round.
It is an efficient (no cash/tickets required for transport) and progressive system that leads to free transport for those that have a meaningful commute from a neighbouring dormitory town.
Greg Becker
Via Business Day online
NHI faces constitutional challenges as reform needed over replacement
Your editorial opinion “Top court’s ruling on doctors shows good intentions aren’t enough” (May 22), refers.
National Health Insurance (NHI) is clearly unconstitutional as well as irrational. It has not been properly thought through, which explains much of the vagueness and lack of clarity regarding many of its provisions, including financing.
The certificate of need ruling must surely be a fatal blow to the NHI concept, and it’s about time. It’s also time for the health minister to stop seeking unconstrained power and for the health department to drop its national democratic revolution totalitarian instincts and focus on the achievable.
A public healthcare system already exists, but it has been mismanaged and looted to the core. Common sense suggests that the department should focus on repairing this broken system.
This would also involve taking measures to increase hospital security to prevent theft — competent budgetary accounting would go hand in hand with security.
It’s been obvious from when the ANC unveiled NHI that it would unavoidably interfere with and limit the right to choose a trade, occupation or profession freely and rob patients of their right to choose private healthcare and that it would therefore be unconstitutional. Not that such a detail has ever concerned ANC apparatchiks.
Unsurprisingly, it is evident from this editorial that the health department will look for ways to get around the Constitutional Court’s ruling. The ANC has always been intent on controlling every facet of South Africans’ lives. This will only result in more litigation.
NHI trials — private practice doctors temporarily acting as health department civil servants — have already shown that the scheme will not work at the patient-doctor consultation level. According to feedback from the medical profession, doctors had to wait endlessly before they were paid for their services. In other words, government incompetence was extended to the private sector.
The public will be better served once the shortfalls of existing public healthcare facilities are seriously addressed instead of attempting the unachievable and unacceptable.
Francois Theron
Via Business Day online
The sky isn’t the limit — the relationships are
A $1.30 profit per passenger against a global average of $7.90; fuel costs 17% above the global norm; a continent generating just $200m of a $41bn global profit pool (“Geopolitical risks make collaboration essential for the survival of African airlines”, May 19).
“Collaboration” as a prescription is correct, but the complete diagnosis is a relationship deficit.
African aviation’s structural vulnerabilities are not primarily technical failures. They reflect a sector in which governments, carriers and regional institutions have not consistently invested in the relationship-building that makes durable collaboration possible.
Calls for an integrated, co-ordinated aviation sector are not new. Their slow translation into practice points to a deficit of sustained stakeholder engagement rather than an absence of stated intent.
You build relationships when you want to, not when you need to, because when you need to, it is already too late.
Transport minister Barbara Creecy’s warning about criminal networks exploiting air routes, the fuel disruptions linked to the US-Iran conflict and a regional accident rate that in 2024-25 remained the world’s highest are not sudden shocks. They are risks that have been developing for years in a sector that has not built the relationships needed to absorb them.
Collaboration at the moment of crisis is damage control. What African aviation needs is collaboration as a standing discipline, built before the next geopolitical disruption forces the issue.
Ofentse Donald Davhie
Centre for Risk Analysis
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