Africa-Press – South-Africa. The DA can get clean audits but the ANC has a track record of transforming people’s lives.
This is according to ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa, who on Thursday sought to put out fires and do damage control after angering ANC councillors and senior party leaders when he sang the DA’s praises on municipal governance.
The comments have raised the ire of ANC councillors and senior party leaders who argued that Ramaphosa’s comments so close to the local government elections had effectively campaigned for the DA.
Ramaphosa sought to do damage control around his comments that the DA governs better in their municipalities and that the ANC should learn from them, telling the SABC on Thursday that the DA can also learn from ANC-led municipalities.
He said his comments earlier in the week “got lost in translation” and that he was merely quoting the auditor-general’s report about the performance of municipalities.
In his spin on his comments, Ramaphosa said though the DA got clean audits as per the AG’s reports, that did not translate into good service delivery on the ground, arguing that ANC municipalities have transformed the lives of poor people in South Africa, unlike the DA.
He said the ANC could learn from the DA municipalities on clean audits but the DA could also learn from ANC-led municipalities.
“If you were to talk to our people in Philippi, in Delft, in Khayamandi, in Langa, they will tell you that those clean audits are not resulting in the transformation of their lives where they live because there are enormous challenges. And this is where DA municipalities must learn a lot from the ANC municipalities,” said Ramaphosa.
Ramaphosa has faced a barrage of criticism over his comments, with some arguing that he used the wrong platform to make the comparison. They argued that some of the comments he made were meant for closed meetings with only ANC members and councillors — away from media and television cameras.
But Ramaphosa told the SABC in an exclusive interview that the AG had publicly said municipalities in the Western Cape generally get clean audits.
“When I spoke about what we need to do , I referred to the auditor-general’s reports. The AG issues reports every year, and correctly so, looks at all our municipalities and in some areas she has found that there are municipalities that have clean audits. And I cited what she has always said publicly: that municipalities, for instance in the Western Cape, have clean audits,” said Ramaphosa.
“But in the end clean audits do not mean clean streets. Clean audits do not mean the best governance. It’s a compliance issue. There are quite a number of ANC-run municipalities that have clean audits.”
He said as much as the ANC could learn a thing or two about getting clean audits, the DA could also learn about transformation from the ANC.
“Now, we need to look at this issue in a comprehensive way or in a broader context. There’s the compliance issue, and there’s the transformative issue,” he said. “I know many people in the DA got very excited and said ‘ja, the president said this’. From a compliance point of view a number of them are [compliant] but from a transformation point of view they are not really meeting the mark and a number of ANC municipalities meet the mark.”
He said the ANC had successfully transformed black townships such as Soweto when the DA had neglected townships in the Western Cape.
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