NELSPRUIT – On making a pit stop in the city before travelling on to Middelburg and Emalahleni (Witbank), the national chairman of the DA, Dr Wilmot James, spent the night here on Tuesday.
The meeting with Lowvelder ended at 18:00 when a public hearing by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) was scheduled to begin. The hearing would address the decision by the SABC to recall a DA-election advertisement.
The television ad sees Mr Mmusi Maimane, the party’s candidate for premier in Gauteng, talk to himself in front of a mirror about how the ANC’s conduct has forced him to stop voting for the party. A week after being uploaded to Youtube, the advertisement had been viewed 407,748 times.
Last week, the SABC and DA agreed that their legal teams would meet at a later stage to finalise their arguments, but in the meanwhile the public broadcaster undertook to air the ads over the Easter weekend.
James called the decision by the agency, to hold public hearings instead of making a decision within 48 hours of receiving the complaint, (a self-imposed deadline) a whole lot of nonsense and a delaying tactic. “We welcome the ruling. We are not withdrawing our application,” he told Lowvelder.
This refers to a South Gauteng High Court application the DA brought to compel ICASA to hear its complaint and to reach a decision without any further delay. Earlier this week, James, who used to be an academic before joining the party and Parliament in 2009, also objected publicly that the broadcaster had excluded the official opposition from live TV debates. The one earlier this week was on land restitution.
He said the best way to increase the success with land claims was to incentivise people. “We need to give incentives to attract the right people.”
James was not clear on the details surrounding the recent purchase of almost R1 billion of the Mala Mala Game Reserve in Sabie Sands, but said the party’s policy was that a lack of money was not the problem.
“The problem has never been money.” Initially the government budgeted R98 billion for the entire project. It was poorly administrated. It was done in a shoddy and slow way.”
He slammed the extension of the deadline by which to lodge claims with five years as a gimmick by the ruling party since it is estimated to receive an additional 397 claims at a cost of R197 billion to settle while only budgeting about R3 billion per year for land restitution.
“We support land reform because justice needs to be done, but we need certainty for food security. We don’t know what the state owns. We need to do an audit and release state-owned land for restitution.”
He also used the concept of incentives to explain the party’s proposed strategy to get companies to invest in their employees through job training. A proposal is to stop “punishing” people with the Broadbased Black Economic Empowerment codes as they are, instead proposing that by rewarding companies with points for training and diversifying their workforce, these points will assist them in obtaining not only tenders but also export licenses.
At the time of going to print, ICASA had referred the DA’s complaint case to the Complaints and Compliance Committee (CCC).
