LETTER: No ‘revolution’ without deployed cadres

Cadre deployment in the public administration and state-owned enterprises is illegal and unconstitutional, and has been legally declared so since Dr Vuyo Mlokoti successfully challenged an attempt by the Amathole district municipality to deploy a cadre as its municipal manager in his stead.  

The ANC has attempted a workaround solution by pretending that the work of cadre deployment committees amounts to no more than a “recommendation” to the authorities legally seized with the task of making appointments. This stratagem has been exposed as false by the publication of minutes of meetings at which, inter alia, deployment of judges to the bench was discussed in terminology not of the recommendatory kind.

Attempting to distinguish cadre deployment from corruption is a fool’s errand. The loyalty of the cadres to their deployment committees, and the unconstitutional revolutionary conduct they support, sets up an inherent conflict in the cadres so deployed. They generally act to advance the “revolution” and seldom to implement the constitution in the manner prescribed by section 195 of the constitution.

Open, accountable and responsive governance is conspicuously absent when cadre deployment is allowed. The province (Western Cape), cities and municipalities governed by opposition formations are considerably better and more cleanly governed due to the absence of cadre deployment.

So would Eskom be if cadre deployment is outlawed by the courts in the litigation pending between the DA and those clinging, irrationally but tenaciously, to the practice of cadre deployment. The Zondo commission regards it as illegal and has identified it as a cause of state capture.

By all means deploy cadres to political office; all political parties do so in the exercise of their freedom of association. Law-abiding parties implement Section 195 and govern better for it. The ANC should follow suit instead of clinging to its corrosive cadre deployments.

Cadres deployed at Eskom feel free to act corruptly in the pursuit of greed and a worn-out ideology that is at odds with constitutional values. Without deployed cadres in the public administration and SOEs there can be no “revolution”.

SA will be the better for that because constitutionalism will come into its own, and not a moment too soon.

Paul Hoffman, SC 
Director, Accountability Now

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