The ongoing court application by the DA against the ANC’s cadre deployment policy, and subsequent judgments of the high court, has again brought this policy matter into public and legal discourse.
The DA victory will be pyrrhic at best. At worst, DA is misdirecting the public discourse to defend the status quo.
The problem is not cadre deployment but lack of it. The ANC is not deploying a cadre of the revolution. The ANC is deploying mediocre, opportunists and petty thieves with a counter-revolutionary agenda to plunder and loot the state.
Cadre deployment policy is historically about deploying selfless, disciplined, and ethical cadres who will dedicate their professional lives towards the implementation of policies aligned with a party advancing a revolution.
Misdirection of the public discourse
Since 1994, SA has been grappling with service delivery protests, dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic incompetence and apparent impotence of the ANC-led democratic state.
For many mainstream analysts led by the DA, this comes down to the bureaucratic incompetency linked with the ANC’s policy of cadre deployment.
The DA misdiagnoses the problem. But that is unavoidable for a party committed to the preservation of the status quo.
The DA is unable to face the fact that the corporatisation of public services introduces sabotage, looting and plunder of the public service.
Cadre principle deployment’
The policy and practice of “cadre deployment” has been around for as long as political parties have been around. The revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America gave birth to political factions organised around different sets of ideas, representing various social classes in struggle with each other, and political outlooks corresponding to them.
Change from a white minority-dominated apartheid regime to a black majority, democratic state is one such example. It is an example of the situation where change entails a political revolution that creates a qualitatively new state out of the old apparatus, or rather ruins of it.
ANC cadre deployment is a disaster
It has been suggested that a plethora of challenges around service delivery, and the realisation of the elementary socio-economic rights emanate from incapacity and incompetence of the personnel employed due to association with ruling party, without the necessary skills.
We don’t agree with this perspective. While the ANC deployment is part of the reason for mediocrity, rampant corruption and mismanagement of the state, is only a symptom of a much deeper crisis.
The impotence of the state to deliver on the most elementary services and economic needs of the working class and poor majority is rooted in the logic of the capitalist system in a period of economic crisis, just as the incapacity of its bureaucratic apparatus to manage the existing public services logically follows the narrow-mindedness and greed of the aspirant black bourgeois in the ANC.
The greed and corruption of the public service is not a reflection of moral personal failure of the “deployed cadres”. Greed and corruption are functional to accumulation of capital.
Why is the DA leading a public discourse on a false chase?
In a revolutionary lexicon, a cadre is a highly trained activist who personifies the programme of the party. The ANC defines this vision as the national democratic revolution. There is no point in taking issue with the problems with these ideas because the ANC has degenerated, so much so that its deployment has nothing to do with the vision of changing society anymore.
A highly concentrated, imperialist dominated, neo colonial monopoly capitalism and its neoliberalism is the essential cause of all fundamental crises of service delivery failure. Against these realities, the DA can only slow down the levels by stalling accumulation of the vast section of black capitalism completely dependent on tenders.
Like the ANC, the DA is the party of monopoly capitalism in crisis. In the period of crisis, there is no way of managing capitalism other than austerity.
- Redacted version of the academic journal article by Mametlwe Sebei, Lufuno Nevondwe, and Konanani Raligilia. Sebei and Raligilia are both lecturers at Unisa while Nevondwe is a lecturer at the University of Limpopo
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