‘How to redeem South Africa’s image’

Ahead of today’s general elections in South Africa, ESTHER TAIWO-OREJIMI speaks with  the Federal Chairman of the Democratic Alliance, Athol Trollip, on  xenophobia, IMF report on sliding economy, Nigeria, among other sub-Saharan countries, and measures to redeem the country’s image tainted by xenophobic attacks, among other plans of the FA towards winning the election.

The IMF report recently claimed that the economy of South Africa, Nigeria and other sub Sahara countries was sliding. Should DA come into power, what plan do you have to revive the economy?

To begin with I don’t think any self respecting political party should be contesting for power in South Africa if they don’t have a blue print for economic growth and job creation, as in Western Cape where we govern, the unemployment rate is 90 per cent lower than the rest of the country. We govern better than any of our competitors country, independent and national auditing organisations about service delivery have found that, journalists and business institutions have also found that, so we are saying to South Africans that they can have more of what we have in the city of Capetown, for example in 2016, during the local government election, we made a three-way promise to stop corruption, grow the economy for job creation, and improve service delivery. That has happened; the ANC has shown that they were not able to grow the economy, it’s been 18 months of Cyril Ramaphosa who supposedly represents a new dawn and unemployment rate has gone up, our economic growth he predicted three per cent but that has been reversed to, between 1 and 1.2 per cent, it’s not a new dawn as he claimed to be representing but a new yawn because it is more of the same, Ramaphosa has disappointed all South Africans.

On a personal level, I’m middle aged and I am saving money for my old age but the money is worthless because of poor governance, so Cyril Ramaphosa has made me poorer even in my old age. If I was voting, I won’t vote Ramaphosa into power again because he’s making me poorer by the day. 10 million South Africans are unemployed and 50 per cent of youths are unemployed. That is why we are saying people should come out and vote against ANC because they have broken too many promises made with regard to the economy.

Talking about insecurity in the land as a result of xenophobic attacks, how does South Africa hope to attract foreign investors when the people are killing foreigners?

Let me deal with that in two ways, first is the issue of insecurity, quite a lot of foreigners, diplomats and foreign representatives and High Commissioners are in this country and committed to its economic growth, there are four things that turn off foreign investments – High crime rate in South Africa, nobody wants to invest in South Africa because of the high crime rates; secondly we can’t guarantee water and energy provision and that’s a simple thing, but we have management crisis, maladministration and corruption, red tape bureaucracy and obviously insecurity about ownership of property, those are the factors that mitigate against people wanting to invest in this country.

Talking about foreigners, one of our main election offers is about border control,  when you want to travel from South Africa to any part of the world you need to have a passport and a visa so we are saying that it doesn’t matter where you are coming from whether Swaziland or wherever, you must be documented. We have borders for very good reasons but some people believe we shouldn’t, it is about national sovereignty, security. We’ve seen animal diseases coming through our borders into the country that affect us economically, we say we want foreigners in our country to invest but we want them to be properly documented. How can people come into our country without knowing who invited them and how long they are going to stay, why should our own different? We want our borders to be controlled, we want investors, diplomats and business men and women but we want to know how long they are staying, are they going to use state services, and are they going to pay tax and so on.

South Africa is fast becoming a xenophobic country as being tagged by the outside world and this has adverse effect on the growth of economic, how do you plan to correct this impression?

Let me just tell you that it’s a tragedy that South Africa is now being considered as a xenophobic country because we have a very difficult history of polarisation and much racists let alone about foreign nationals, even in our own country and then we had a period where President Mandela laid a process of reconciliation and unity and now we’ve got a political parties like the EFF,  even the government party and others like the Black Race Land First party, and Freedom Fan Plus, they are all promoting racial polarisation and if you are playing with that fire internally, it quickly becomes a fire that will burn externally and it becomes an issue of xenophobia.

I think South Africans have lost their way, they have forgotten that we had a perfect example in President Mandela who said we need to understand that we are country for all South Africa both Black and White, even in the freedom chapter of the ANC, it is entrenched in our constitution that all of the citizens of this country are one, but there are political parties in the system who believe in racial polarisation because of political interests which will then manifest itself in all sorts of intolerance.

Unfortunately, there has not been a good example of xenophobia in South Africa, it’s all just about intolerance. Who gives anyone the right in South Africa to be intolerant? Intolerance is something that naturally comes from human beings, it’s a conscious decision and unfortunately South Africa has been smeared by that kind of reputation.

Talking about high rate of crime in South Africa, what is your plan to reduce it to the barest minimum?

There is a key focus in our manifesto which talks about professionalising the SA Police service because we realised that even though we’ve got a police service, there is a weakness in the detective capacity of the SA police service to conduct investigations that results in convictions once you get to the criminal justice system. So we want key interventions to improve the economy by getting core investigations so that every arrest will lead to convictions because right now we are not getting convictions, there are murders of prominent people for instance the national football goalkeeper in SA who was murdered in company of several people, to this day it remains unsolved, that is ad a result of poor detective capacity of the SA police force because also we have lost key personnel, very experienced people into the private sector because the remuneration and promotion capacity has been contaminated and politicised because it’s not done on merit, it’s been done to pursue personal interest, it’s been done with the consideration of accusing political principals rather than in the pursuit of fighting crime and seeking justice.

We have no tolerance whatsoever to attitudinal approaches to xenophobia, we believe that it is important for SA economy to be a welcoming place for different nationals who want to contribute and play a positive role towards the growth, prosperity and the economy of SA.

There are lots of foreign nationals playing a key role in sports, education and entertainment, we welcome them, but what we need to manage the immigration such that it contributes towards the economy and the advancement of the country, and towards the building of South Africa that is a rainbow nation.

We are also saying it is important to distinguish criminals from non-criminals. There is a lot of criminal activities that happen through South Africa borders and also through customs because of the poor state of our borders and because of the level of capacity at entry points into South Africa, and what that does is that we lose a lot of trades, because of free movement of goods which goes unaccounted for because it doesn’t go through the official channels of inter-state trade and through the official channels of customs. That is what we want to check by making sure that Home Affairs and South Africa Police Service, South Africa Revenue Service have sufficient capacity at entry points.

How do you correct the impression in the mind of an average South African that DA is a party for the whites who were the colonial masters? 

The feelings that DA is a party for the whites is a misconception that has been eradicated, if you come to our party manifestos, most of our supporters are black, the majority are black youth South Africans and that is an indication of the speedy growth of DA as a party in the black community, but we are not just a party for black or white or Indies, we are a party for all South Africans. The vision is to build one South Africa for all, and from the leaders to the followers we defend what the Rainbow nation is about, which is to defend the diversity of South Africa.

In its recent report on growth, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) postulated that South Africa is among other sub-Saharan countries whose economies are sliding, how do you hope to revive the economy should your party win the election?

In terms of growing the South Africa economy because we are aware that the economy is backsliding, so in our manifesto we are talking about revitalising the South African economy through cities. Cities are the future drivers of economic growth and to ensure this, you need three key things. Restore good governance in the cities, drive city growth by revitalising infrastructure and to ensure basic amenities are supplied uninterruptedly on a continuous process.

Are you considering forming a coalition Party?

Before we talk about coalition, we talk about winning. I don’t think anyone would want to go into a battle or a match hoping to come second best, but I think you want to go into a fight hoping to win, obviously you plan for three scenarios, one is you plan for an outright win which is good, two, you plan for what happens if you get the lion share but is not a 50 plus one, and then the third one is when you don’t get the biggest share but you become a big player in what is happening – those are the three scenarios and all of them present different challenges in terms of how you then get to negotiate.

The first one you don’t have to negotiate because it’s an outright win, the second one it gives you the bigger option on how you negotiate and who you negotiate with, the third option is you are sort of weakened in terms of  your position and then I think that is very much important in terms of what you take into consideration but the fact of the matter is we are not going to compromise our values as a Party, we are not going to compromise on what we want to do as a party for South Africa, even if it means at the end of the day we walk away from the negotiations because we cannot really get into an agreement on how we want to serve with the potential partner then we walk away, we will rather stay in an opposition than being in government and we are not able to deliver to the people.

The likelihood of coalition, which might be a reality, is EFF the preferential Party considering your experience in 2008?

At this point in time we are not talking about the who, but what we want to do, and everything we want to do in terms of negotiations should be people-centered. So if we will not talk about how best to put people and resources together to serve people, then we are not interested. It is not about what we want to get out of it as a party, because the interest of the political party is that of the people of South Africa, the second thing is we want anybody who wants to come in partnership to really come in head and everything, not one leg in one leg out, so that you can be committed to developing the big project of One South Africa for All.