The word is that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state of the nation address was written in just over a day, largely by Ramaphosa himself. There was nothing really startling in it. It was mostly common sense and what many have been asking for. DA leader Mmusi Maimane himself said as much when he was interviewed after the address. Right now, strategically the DA is nowhere. The state address jerked the rug from under its and the EFF’s feet. While the DA may themselves have made many of the points in debates in Parliament and elsewhere, as far as I am aware they have not collated them into a single document as a DA vision or plan for SA. Instead, they squandered the past few years by focusing on Jacob Zuma. The DA should have spent some time preparing high-level strategic plans around the themes presented in the address and released them prior to the speech. That would have given them first-mover advantage on everything outlined in the address (while the ANC was mud-wrestling Zuma out of ...

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