ANC national chairperson Gwede Mantashe has defended the governing party’s deployment policy amid calls for it to be scrapped.
Mantashe was on Wednesday on the stand before the commission of inquiry into state capture where he was giving parliamentary oversight evidence as well as explaining various positions of the party which are alleged to have aided state capture, including deployment of ANC loyalists to head state-owned entities (SOEs) who later facilitated their looting.
The DA last month filed a submission before the commission in which it asked its chair, deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo, to grill President Cyril Ramaphosa on the policy as the former chair of the ANC deployment committee.
Ramaphosa led the committee while he was the party’s deputy president between late 2012 and late 2017 and several top officials linked to the ANC, including former Eskom chief executive Brian Molefe, have been fingered as shining examples of those who had aided state capture within the state.
Mantashe however moved to defend the policy, saying that it was aimed at ensuring that those who occupied key positions within the state were not hostile to the governing party’s transformative agenda and the implementation of its election manifestos.
He told the commission that the ANC’s strategy had been to “deepen its hold on the levers of the state”, including SOEs.
“Unashamedly, the ANC wants to govern and therefore you cannot govern without a state. We are a governing party, but the state which is continuous must be made ready to execute programmes of the governing party,” Mantashe said.
Evidence leader advocate Alec Freund SC quizzed Mantashe on how the ANC navigated the tension between its deployment policy and the principle that the public service had to be non-partisan.
“No, there is no tension. The emphasis is on working with a public service that is not rebellious against the governing party,” Mantashe said.
He pointed out that the ANC had inherited an untransformed public service when it took over in 1994 from the apartheid regime, which required the deployment of trained, capable people to state institutions to discharge the transformation agenda.
“Here is an ANC walking into government. It inherits a state which is run by white males, many of them hostile to the ANC. The ANC had a duty to deploy people who understand the intention of transformative constitutionalism and that is why I emphasise the point that people were sent to school in various parts of the world and then brought back and deployed to the state,” he said.
Mantashe insisted that the party’s deployment committee was not responsible for employing officials but for recommending them to government, adding that these were not only cadres but people who were both competent and had a broader understanding of the need for transformation.
“I have no problem with the term cadre, but for deployment into positions we are not looking for cadres. We look for people who are competent to execute the task at hand…the deployment committee does not employ. Sometimes the person it is recommending fails the selection process and that is not a big deal,” he said.
Zondo had earlier indicated that scheduled times for Ramaphosa’s appearance before the commission had been shifted, with him now expected to take the stand on April 28-29 to give testimony as the president of ANC while he would also appear on May 13-14 in his capacity as the head of state.
The inquiry continues.
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