LETTER: ANC cannot have its cadre cake and eat it

Upon hearing that the DA’s cadre deployment case was being defended in court by the ANC, I vaguely recalled the case a couple of years ago where a Gauteng metro was flipped from ANC to DA in an election (“Comrades’ jobs on the line if DA wins cadre deployment case”, January 23).

As I recall, the DA wanted to dismiss municipal employees because they were deemed to have been ANC cadres, naturally due to the infamous cadre deployment policy. The judge ended up ruling in favour of the ANC, and the DA could not dismiss them.

This to me forms an important precedent for the current court application. If the ANC’s defence is that cadre deployment is an important mechanism and should be kept, then those ANC municipal employees should have been dismissed so the DA could deploy its own members to implement its policies.

So which is it? The ANC cannot have its cake and eat it. It may be the case that if the DA loses this case it could use it as a new precedent to get rid of legacy ANC employees employed in DA run municipalities.

But perhaps I’m reading too much into it.

Luke Mkentane
Via email

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