Africa-Press – South-Africa. Deputy President Paul Mashatile has defended the ANC’s cadre deployment policy, arguing that the party deployed only the very best candidates into government positions.
Mashatile was answering MPs’ questions in the National Council of Provinces on Thursday.“Nobody is deployed in government unless they go through a very rigorous process,” he said. “We don’t just take anybody from the street because they are ANC members and say, ‘go and be a DG’. No, it’s never done,” he said.
“Don’t be worried about cadre development policy. It’s a very good policy because it ensures that you prepare your people for these tough processes, you train them and a lot of people are being trained in the ANC.”
He said they were trained at the party’s OR Tambo Leadership Academy.
“We train people all the time because we want the best of the best to go and do the job”.
Mashatile explained that the ANC established a cadre development policy and a deployment process after the democratic breakthrough in 1994 to safeguard democracy and good governance, while assuring rapid and purposeful transformation.
“The ANC was very conscious right from the beginning that we needed to provide our people with the necessary skills and capacity to be able to transform this country.”
The logic behind the process was to ensure the most suitable practices were used in recruitment and prioritising appropriate placement of skills, especially during the transition period and beyond.
He said the discussions took place in Lusaka, Zambia, even before 1994, about “how are we going to govern, let us train our people”.
“That’s where the deployment policy comes from,” he said.
Mashatile rejected a view that links service delivery failures in municipalities with the party’s cadre deployment.He said the challenges of local government were multidimensional and were primarily rooted in poor governance, weak institutional capacity, poor financial management and political instability.
“So, our policy is to ensure we deploy the best.”
The party’s top leadership at provincial and national level interviews its candidates for mayoral, speaker and executive committee members in municipalities before they are deployed to ensure the most suitable and qualified people are deployed.
“It is, therefore, incorrect to link cadre deployment with service delivery challenges faced by our municipalities.”
The adoption of the National Framework towards the Professionalisation of the Public Sector in 2022 was evidence of the government’s commitment to professionalising the public service, he said.
“In our view, the professionalisation of the public sector requires a non-partisan approach which embraces the merit principles in all staffing practices in the public sector,” said Mashatile.
DA MP Hildegard Boshoff had asked Mashatile whether, with reference to his role to implement rapid response on service delivery interventions, cadre deployment had led to the lack of service delivery as many officials within the municipalities do not possess the prerequisite qualifications to undertake the necessary maintenance of infrastructure that is leading to excessive sewer spillages.
The Sunday Times reported this month that the DA’s fight to see the ANC’s cadre deployment records has gone to the Constitutional Court.
DA MP Leon Schreiber wants access to the ANC’s deployment committee records to enrich his anti-cadre deployment draft bill, to which the ANC is opposed.
Schreiber said the records were likely to reveal how the ANC secured jobs for “loyal cadres”, some of whom had proved to be “corrupt and incompetent”.
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