Latest news with #DA
Eyewitness News
41 minutes ago
- Politics
- Eyewitness News
ANC's Ntuli, Ntshavheni take swipes at DA for boycotting National Dialogue
CAPE TOWN - The African National Congress (ANC)'s chief whip, Mdumiseni Ntuli, and Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni have both taken swipes at the Democratic Alliance (DA) for boycotting the National Dialogue during debate on the budget vote of the Presidency. President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday sought to address the National Dialogue impasse with the DA upfront, saying it won't be a talk-shop and is being designed to hear the voices of society, so their needs can be properly addressed. ALSO READ: Ramaphosa says National Dialogue not 'just about talking', expects it to 'produce real results' Mdumiseni was the first to criticise the DA's announcement in June that it would not participate in the National Dialogue because of the cost involved and because the president was not acting fairly in his disciplinary action against members of the executive. Ntuli also said Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema was wrong to say the dialogue would be useless and a waste of money. 'It is my considered view that nobody must be allowed to stop the direction of the National Dialogue, and the country must be afforded an opportunity, from all sectors of society, to find solutions to the problems that continue to confront us.' Outlining how the dialogue will work, Ntshavheni also took a potshot at the DA, saying there had been an overwhelming response from civil society. 'When you don't want to participate, you'll remain there alone. South Africans are eager to participate.' With the first leg of the dialogue set to start in August, Ntshavheni said it would not be a once-off event and that the dialogue will continue in various forms and platforms for at least a year. On Wednesday night, the Presidency announced Professor Tinyiko Maluleke and Roelf Meyer as the co-chairpersons of the eminent persons group responsible for guiding the dialogue.
The Citizen
an hour ago
- Politics
- The Citizen
Police scandal: Justice must now be served
President Cyril Ramaphosa has said all the right things, but a tired public now wants to see action. As long as the ANC is still in power, the state capture and Phala Phala scandals will continue to haunt South Africa. Accused ANC officials seem to be treated with kid gloves, while tough action is taken against those from other parties like the recent dismissal of DA deputy minister Andrew Whitfield. This was the impression created when President Cyril Ramaphosa broke his silence on Sunday on the police scandal. He couldn't even suspend or fire police minister Senzo Mchunu, but put him on special leave and ordered a judicial inquiry to probe allegations of infiltration in the police. On Tuesday, the deputy national commissioner Shadrack Sibiya was also placed on special leave. This follows claims by KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi on 6 July, where he accused senior police and political figures of colluding with criminal syndicates. ALSO READ: Mr President, it's time for you to leave For South Africans exhausted by news of assassinations, gender-based violence, kidnappings and rampant gangsterism, Mkhwanazi's revelations were not only shocking – they were horrifying. He spoke not as a politician seeking fame, but as a top cop with direct knowledge of how deeply the rot runs. His allegations painted a picture of a justice system compromised from within: metro police officers on drug syndicate payrolls, prosecutors turning a blind eye and political leaders interfering with investigations. He even suggested that elements within the judiciary were linked to criminal networks. The implications of these claims strike at the heart of our democracy. If criminals have truly infiltrated the highest levels of our law enforcement and justice institutions, then the very ideas of justice, equality before the law and public safety become a farce. Ramaphosa's response – to establish a judicial commission of inquiry – is a measured and necessary step for him to take in order to seem as if he is busy. The commission – chaired by acting deputy chief justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga – is tasked with investigating the extent of this alleged criminal infiltration. Importantly, it is ideally sought to examine not only the police and intelligence services, but also the National Prosecuting Authority, the State Security Agency, the judiciary, and the executive arm of government. No stone, Ramaphosa promised, will be left unturned. ALSO READ: Why has President Ramaphosa overlooked Deputy Police Minister Boshielo? The public, however, will not be satisfied with another commission of inquiry unless it leads to swift and decisive action. The Zondo commission exposed the full extent of state capture under the Jacob Zuma administration, but progress on prosecutions has been slow. For the Madlanga commission to avoid becoming yet another archive of inaction, it must operate transparently, act quickly, and make real recommendations that lead to arrests, dismissals and reforms. Ramaphosa's decision to place Mchunu on leave and to appoint Prof Firoz Cachalia as acting police minister is a matter of yielding to public outcry. But we must be honest with ourselves; the removal of Mchunu does not guarantee any change because what Mkhwanazi exposed was not simply a case of corruption against an individual – it was a coordinated system used to attack the state's ability to govern and deliver justice. Other implicated individuals – whether named or unnamed – must also be investigated without fear or favour. Ramaphosa must resist the temptation to protect political allies or preserve party unity at the expense of public trust. The public's fatigue is real. South Africans are tired of promises and press conferences. They want accountability. They want to know that when they report a crime, it will be taken seriously; that when whistle-blowers come forward, they will be protected, not persecuted; and that when people in power abuse that power, they will face consequences – not golden handshakes or quiet transfers. ALSO READ: Leave and a commission don't make Mchunu immune from prosecution, parliament hears Mkhwanazi took a personal risk in coming forward. If his allegations are substantiated, he may go down in history as one of the rare figures in post-apartheid South Africa who put principle above protectionism. But if the process fails him – if the state fails to protect him or act on what he exposed – his courage will serve only as another cautionary tale in a country that has too many already. This moment, then, is more than a legal inquiry – it is a test of South Africa's democratic resilience. Will we allow the rule of law to be reclaimed by those who believe in it, or will we concede it to those who treat state institutions as tools for personal and political gain? Ramaphosa has drawn a line in the sand. He has said all the right things. But South Africa has heard all the right things before. Now we must see action. Now we must see arrests. Now we must see justice. Because if we don't, then this crisis will not simply pass – it will grow into something far worse: a nation where the state no longer protects its people, but preys upon them.
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
McKinley County District Attorney told to give up control of office's finances
MCKINLEY COUNTY, N.M. (KRQE) – A New Mexico district attorney has lost her fight to keep control of her office's budget. It's been an issue KRQE News 13 first told you about in a KRQE Investigation this week. This move comes after years of concerns and complaints from the community and police about criminals not being held accountable — and the McKinley County DA creating a hostile work environment. Related Coverage: Defunded DA hangs onto control of office for now 'It's on her': Senator defunds DA citing attitude, staff shortage Lawmakers gave Bernadine Martin's budget to the neighboring DA in San Juan County. Jack Fortner took control of it Tuesday when the fiscal year began. But when he showed up at her office, she requested he hold off for two more weeks, citing her pending request to the New Mexico Supreme Court to weigh in on the budget move. The justices' decision on Wednesday means Martin must let Fortner take over. If she doesn't, she could be removed. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
Eyewitness News
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Eyewitness News
Ramaphosa says National Dialogue not 'just about talking', expects it to 'produce real results'
CAPE TOWN - President Cyril Ramaphosa said that the National Dialogue would not be another talk shop but a platform to determine how to reach the aspirations of all South Africans. Ramaphosa kicked off his budget vote address in the National Assembly on Wednesday afternoon by invoking the memory of the country's first president, Nelson Mandela, whose birthday will be celebrated through various civil society efforts on Friday. Despite the Democratic Alliance (DA)'s plans to boycott the National Dialogue, which is set to start in August, Ramaphosa said that the initiative was widely supported across society. ALSO READ: • Ramaphosa tasks eminent persons with boosting public participation in National Dialogue • National Dialogue figures say government must be ready to answer tough questions on police corruption • Committee working on National Dialogue looks to bring projected R700m cost down The president said that the National Dialogue was being convened in response to calls made by leaders and eminent persons across society. In an apparent reminder to coalition partners, Ramaphosa said the dialogue was endorsed by the Government of National Unity (GNU) when it was formed a year ago. He said it was not intended to displace democratic processes nor divert from the electoral mandate given to Parliament. "The National Dialogue is not just about talking, like with Codesa, like with National Peace Accord, through the consultation process we all went through when we drafted our Constitution, the National Dialogue is expected to produce real results that have a tangible impact on the lives of our people." Ramaphosa said that the dialogue should also be used to foster development, transformation, progress, national cohesion and national unity.
IOL News
15 hours ago
- Politics
- IOL News
Traoré's Revolution versus South Africa's Death Project
Burkina Faso's junta leader Captain Ibrahim Traore attends a meeting. Image: Angelos Tzortzinis / AFP In Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré shows the world what it means when an African people refuse to kneel before empire. He has expelled French military forces, reclaimed foreign mining contracts, and redirected national resources toward housing, healthcare, education, and food sovereignty. Sovereignty is not symbolic. It is control over land, minerals, water, and the architecture of daily survival. His politics are not shaped for donor applause or international approval. There is no hiding behind human rights frameworks or soft-focus governance talk. It is the seizure of power and resources back into African hands. In South Africa, the trajectory moves through an entirely different landscape. This is not simply a matter of corruption or failed governance. What unfolds before us, under the weight of the so-called Government of National Unity, is the multi-pronged roll-out of a corporate and state-driven war on African life, African collectivism, African revolutionary possibility. Mass unemployment, dispossession, the collapse of public health, the erosion of education, militarised policing in the townships, the criminalisation of Black masculinity, systemic violence against women and children, vigilante terror, and the suffocating normalisation of African poverty form the architecture of this war. Circling around it are the donor-funded NGO campaigns, the media spectacles, the safety and social cohesion projects, the curated dialogues, the public rituals of 'reform' designed to seduce people into believing the system is repairing itself. But this system is not repairing. It is evolving. It is refining. It is perfecting its capacity for devastation. The mining-industrial complex is its central engine. Multinational corporations, ANC elites, DA neoliberals, white monopoly capital, comprador classes – each holds its place in the circuitry. African minerals are ripped from the earth by the destruction of Black labour and Black communities. These minerals flow outward, become weapons, electronics, luxury goods, industrial tools, then return to the continent as commodities priced beyond African control. African economies are locked as suppliers, locked as dependent consumers, locked out of ownership. The ANC operates as a broker between capital and the people, using the worn-out language of struggle to contain revolt while smoothing the way for foreign and local elite profits. The DA offers up a streamlined neoliberalism, promising efficiency to investors. These are not rival projects. They are two faces of the same extractive order. Black-on-Black violence is treated as an inevitable pathology, but it is not accidental. It is actively produced and inflamed to keep the population fragmented. Township disorder, ethnic tensions, factionalised politics, so-called xenophobic attacks pull public attention away from the mineral contracts, the land transfers, the capital flows. They become the ground on which militarised policing expands, where repression becomes ordinary, where state force in Black life is made common sense. Mining companies extract. Political elites contain. Media channels flood the public with images of chaos. Communities beg for order. The security apparatus swells. Investors relax. This is not dysfunction. This is design. The deepest violence is that the poor, the working class, and the Black middle class are swept into supporting the very system consuming them. Survival in untransformed spaces produces the desperate belief that safety comes through harder policing, tougher leadership, and stricter state control. There is no political party, no police general, no NGO or donor agency committed to protecting the African poor from the system that profits from their dispossession. They exist to protect the elite. Steve Biko wrote that the wealth of a country must ultimately be enjoyed by the people whose labour has created it, and that only on this basis can a just system be built. Without land, without mineral sovereignty, without water and food security, without collective control over the means of survival, there is no justice. There is only punishment, repression, and a deepening spectacle of containment dressed up as governance. When militarised crackdowns sweep through township streets, when extrajudicial killings dominate headlines, when clean-up operations leave death scattered in their aftermath, it is the poor who carry the weight. The spectacle is for the wealthy, for middle-class nerves, for investor confidence. For the poor, it escalates the risk of becoming the target, the casualty, the forgotten. The conditions tearing at South Africa's majority – mass unemployment, forced removals, gangsterism seeded by economic hopelessness, relentless insecurity – will never be addressed through trigger-happy authoritarianism. Uniformed raids, televised arrests, and open killing on the streets do not touch the core devastation. Only a revolutionary project like Traoré's – a project that fights for sovereignty, reclaims land and resources, breaks the stranglehold of foreign and local elites, and turns dignity into redistribution – carries the force to cut into the root. The tragedy is not only that the resource-deprived and exhausted poor are sacrificed for the security of the elite. It is that they are drawn into cheering for it, pulled into the fantasy that the war crushing them is being waged on their behalf. This is the final cruelty of the neoliberal state: to transform the oppressed into spectators of their own suppression, applauding as the spectacle moves forward, until the moment the weapons shift and the streets erupt and the false skin of protection is torn away. Marikana was not an episode. It became the template. It became the blueprint for how to discipline the Black working class the moment it threatens to interrupt extraction. The public is taught to demand more policing, more militarisation, more containment. The true architects of dispossession – the mining bosses, the landowners, the financiers, the global firms – remain protected. And Marikana never ended. It rolls out over many landscapes and locations in the brutal killing of the poor. South Africa is not crumbling. It is functioning precisely as designed. Global capital flows through it with surgical precision, co-opting popular figures, funding intelligence-linked NGOs, saturating media space with distraction, and keeping the pipelines of extraction unbroken. As a white South African, I have been inside academia, media, and the NGO world, witnessing firsthand how whiteness operates – how it slips easily into human rights language, donor discourse, and faux social justice branding. The human rights and NGO industrial complex is not a space of care. It is camouflage. It is capture. It is part of the machinery that feeds on African dispossession while performing the language of solidarity, protection, and benevolence. It is the shield that pacifies, the soft cover that allows the most brutal devastations to proceed without interruption. It functions as a carefully engineered buffer zone against the inevitable explosion of Black rage. This, I have come to name for what it is – not humane, not beneficial, but a cold, deliberate, knowing evil. And it is why I know with clarity that no commission, no election, no imported model will transform this system designed to preserve the wealth and power of the privileged while managing, containing, and brutalising the poor. Only full-scale revolution will alter the material and ontological condition of the majority. Only the radical reclaiming of what has been stolen will break the cycle. Today, perhaps, a South African Traoré has been born. Perhaps she or he is a child now, waiting to emerge. But liberation will not come from one leader alone. The people of South Africa will rise. They will cast off foreign capital, expel comprador elites, break white monopoly power, dismantle intelligence-embedded NGOs, strip donor gatekeepers of legitimacy, and unseat the local managers of empire. The future will be reclaimed by African hands because behind this orchestrated roll-out of Black-on-Black violence, the collective spirit of the ancestors continues to whisper that the work of liberation can no longer be postponed. That whisper is already thickening, already gathering at the edges of the present, and soon it will break into a scream that will shatter a system that has no intention of yielding, no intention of returning what has been stolen, no intention of loving or respecting the people to whom this land belongs. It will take everything until it is forced to stop. And that force is rising. Ibrahim Traoré's revolutionary stance in Burkina Faso challenges the status quo, while South Africa grapples with systemic injustices and the struggle for true sovereignty. Image: IOL *Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
