KWAZULU-NATAL – The leader of the DA in KwaZulu-Natal, Francois Rogers, says the ANC in that province has ‘died’. Rogers is the MEC of Finance in KZN and is part of the ANC-IFP coalition in that province.
He was speaking yesterday at the DA national congress in Johannesburg, where the party is expected to elect new leadership.
“The age of one-party dominance is over, the ANC is dead, not because it ended gracefully, but because it failed spectacularly. It has failed across every sphere of government, and it is now failing in our municipalities.
“It failed millions of South Africans who were promised delivery but instead got decay,” he said. Rogers said coalition politics are the future of South Africa because voters have decided they will no longer give any political party a blank cheque to govern.
“Here is the truth, coalitions only work if they are built on principle, they must be built on delivery and not political deals, they must be built on accountability and not silence,” he said.
He said after the 2021 local government elections, a number of municipalities were hung. He said the province went into service delivery agreements with them as part of efforts to ensure residents are not negatively affected by the outcome of the elections.
“We proved that a party does not have to be a majority to be able to bring about change. What collapse municipalities is corruption, incompetence and leaders who fear the scrutiny of voters more than failure.
“Let us be honest, in KwaZulu-Natal, those broken municipalities are now suddenly afraid of the Democratic Alliance because the Democratic Alliance exposes them.
“We have exposed inflated contracts, we have exposed empty bank accounts and we have exposed the lie that things take time to change,” he said. Rogers said it has not been easy for the DA to expose corruption in government departments in KZN while being in the same coalition with the ANC.
“The decision to place the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education under Sections 18 of the PFMA, which is a Treasury intervention, did not go down well at all. “In fact, it nearly collapsed the government of provincial unity, but as the DA, we chose principle over expedience,” he said.
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