DA leader John Steenhuisen has lamented the many things going wrong under the ANC government ahead of the state of the nation address (Sona) on Thursday.
Delivering the “real” Sona in Cape Town on Tuesday, he said load-shedding was the “most visible and most threatening state failure”.
This comes ahead of the Sona, due to be delivered by President Cyril Ramaphosa at the Cape Town City Hall on Thursday night.
The DA leader said there was little to look forward to except more empty promises.
The sad reality for most South Africans, he said, is to live with the fact that the myriadproblems that confront them daily will not go away soon.
“Load-shedding is the most visible and most threatening state failure to affect South Africans, but it is by no means the only one.
“The South African Post Office has collapsed. Our freight rail network has collapsed. Our passenger rail service has collapsed. Our ports have all but collapsed. Our police service is losing the war on violent crime. Municipal service delivery in hundreds of towns across the country is virtually non-existent.
“These failures have been a long time coming, but with the move to permanent high-stage load-shedding, government failure has reached into every home in a way that can no longer be countenanced.
“For many who have recently packed up and left the country, Eskom’s collapse was the final straw. For the millions who remain here, load-shedding is a daily source of despair and anguish. It is a metaphor for what life under an ANC government has become.”
Steenhuisen slammed Ramaphosa for rising into power on the promise to turn the country around from the mess created under his predecessor, Jacob Zuma.
However, he said evidence was of a man on course to deepen the decay, including the burning issue of load-shedding.
“This is not a country on the mend. This is a country falling apart. Despite all the bluster and PR spin, this is Ramaphosa’s true legacy: he has added five wasted years to the nine for which he likes to blame his predecessor.
“This is a country losing hundreds of billions of rand in productivity and hundreds of thousands of jobs to an ANC-made crisis.
“A crisis for which everyone, from the DA to energy experts to media commentators, has been proposing the same simple solutions. But thanks to its ideological stubbornness and deeply entrenched web of patronage and corruption, those solutions have always been a bridge too far for the ANC.”
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