Cape Town -
Shortly after DA leader Helen Zille apologised in her newsletter for confusion over the party’s position on the Employment Equity Bill, the MP responsible for the party’s labour portfolio has been shifted from his post.
This is the latest development in a week of high tension for the official opposition.
On Saturday, DA parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko announced she had shifted MP Sej Motau from shadow minister for labour to the economic development portfolio.
Motau said on Saturday that he was in Pretoria and had “not seen” the reshuffle, and therefore declined to comment.
It is understood he had refused to shift from supporting the bill – which the DA voted for in the National Assembly – to the new line hammered out at a tense caucus meeting.
Following widespread rumbling within the DA over the party’s support for the bill in Parliament, Zille announced a U-turn in her online letter on Thursday, and conceded that there were deficiencies in the work on the issue carried out by the party’s caucus.
She said the party had dropped the ball on the matter.
“My colleague, DA parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko, has also acknowledged the deficiencies in the caucus management system that allowed for these errors to slip through and compound themselves,” said Zille.
“She and the parliamentary leadership have proposed far-reaching changes to the way bills are ‘triaged’ and managed from their inception through to their discussion in caucus,” she added.
In her letter Zille said the party was not prepared to vote on the bill:
“The many and varied submissions on the bill were rushed through the portfolio committee in four meetings,” she said.
“We were unable to debate the implications of the bill adequately in caucus.”
According to reports, Zille even wanted DA chief whip Watty Watson to step down from his post over the debacle.
The DA has been accused of bending over backwards to attract black voters by changing some of its historical positions on affirmative action, among others.
Last month the opposition party voted in favour of the Employment Equity Bill, the draft law that aims to regulate demographic representivity in the workplace.
This opened it to all sorts of criticism, with its former leader, Tony Leon, leading the charge.
Leon wrote in a newspaper column this week that “the DA’s flip-flop on employment equity suggests that whatever its other lapses, the ANC now comprehensively dominates the intellectual space and defines terms of the debate within it”.
In Weekend Argus last Sunday researchers at the South African Institute of Race Relations, Anthea Jeffery and Frans Cronje, accused the DA of supporting the bill in the hope that it would win them votes from “born-free” black South Africans.
Mazibuko and Zille have moved swiftly to correct what they say was a mistake.
The two said the DA will now oppose the bill – on the basis that it is race-based – when it is returned to the National Assembly from the National Council of Provinces.
The debacle over the bill is likely to strengthen attempts to remove Mazibuko as the party’s leader in Parliament next year.
Weekend Argus has reported that some MPs opposed to Mazibuko wanted her to be replaced by DA spokesman and Gauteng premier candidate Mmusi Maimane.
The relationship between her and Zille is said to have soured. However, Zille denied this, according to a report published in Die Burger on Saturday.
Maimane’s supporters want him to use the DA’s parliamentary caucus seat to put him in good stead to take over from Zille at the party’s congress in 2015.
Weekend Argus