MALAIKA MAHLATSI: DA's opposition to the budget has nothing to do with the poor

Eyewitness News

26-04-2025

Malaika Mahlatsi 25 April 2025 | 11:10 Government of national unity (GNU)
Democratic Alliance (DA)
Enoch Godongwana
Democratic Alliance officials and supporters outside the Western Cape High Court on 22 April 2025 for the party's legal challenge against the VAT increase. Picture: @Our_DA/X
On the 24th of April 2025, the Minister of Finance, Enoch Godongwana, gazetted the Rates and Monetary Amounts and Amendment of Revenue Laws Bill that will reverse the contentious 0.5 percentage point value-added tax (VAT) increase that he had proposed in the 2025 Budget Speech that he tabled in Parliament a month ago. This will keep the VAT rate at 15 percent. According to a statement issued by the National Treasury, the decision to reverse the increase follows extensive consultations with political parties, as well as careful consideration of the recommendations of the parliamentary committees. Shortly after the VAT reversal was announced, the Democratic Alliance (DA) held a media briefing where the party's Federal Council chairperson, Helen Zille, stated that it was the DA's "muscle in the courts" that forced Godongwana to scrap the VAT hike. The DA also announced that lawyers acting for Godongwana had approached its lawyers, proposing an out-of-court settlement, in the matter the DA brought to interdict the VAT increase (the Economic Freedom Fighters [EFF] also took the matter to court). Using the VAT matter, the DA has positioned itself as pro-poor.
The liberal media in South Africa has (not unexpectedly) bought into this narrative and insists on peddling it as fact. It isn't. The DA is not and has never been a pro-poor party, and the fact that it fought against the VAT increase, which would have affected the poor, must not blind us to the real motivations behind the party's stance.
The DA has made a lot of noise about how it stood on the side of the poor in the fight against the increase of VAT. The liberal media has intentionally minimised and is attempting to erase the true motive for why the DA did not support the budget. This motive is not secret. DA party leader, John Steenhuisen, told Newzroom Afrika's Iman Rappetti shortly after Godongwana tabled the Budget in March that his party was opposed to the increase in VAT and any other tax hikes, but that it was willing to engage with the African National Congress (ANC) on the matter. Steenhuisen contended that the DA had made concessions on several key issues and argued that other parties in the Government of National Unity (GNU) needed to do the same. More significantly, he argued that a deal might be put back on the table, but on condition that discussions and concessions needed to be made on the Expropriation Act, which he claimed could not be divorced from the Budget as it is "an impediment to investment" in the country. He went further to state that the Expropriation Act has created a major problem in the United States, and boldly claimed that this "problem" would soon extend to Europe.
While he acknowledged that the US's interpretation of the Act was based on misinformation, he went on to claim that it serves as a deterrent to investment in South Africa, asking Rappetti, without any sense of irony: "Would you invest billions at a factory if, at a stroke of a pen, a government official can expropriate that without compensation?"
In asking this question, Steenhuisen did exactly what the DA and the liberal media have been doing – invoking fear in the minds of potential investors that the Expropriation Act would be facilitated in an unlawful manner. He simultaneously peddled the false narrative about the intentions of the Expropriation Act that the Donald Trump administration is using to bully and unfairly target South Africa, using instruments such as tariffs and disregarding the G20 (South Africa assumed the presidency of the international forum in November 2024). The Expropriation Act does not intend to give powers to government officials to arbitrarily expropriate land without compensation – even as the White House has claimed it does, and gone on to state on its website that the Act intends to "enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners' agricultural property without compensation".
The factual purpose of the Act, rather, is to provide for the expropriation of property for a public purpose or in the public interest; to regulate the procedure for the expropriation of property for a public purpose or in the public interest, including payment of compensation; to identify certain instances where the provision of nil compensation may be just and equitable for expropriation in the public interest; to repeal the Expropriation Act, 1975 (Act No. 63 of 1975); and to provide for matters connected therewith.
It is clear that the Expropriation Act does not intend to make allowance for arbitrary expropriation. It also does not do away with the payment of compensation entirely. So why does the DA insist on using it as a scare-mongering tactic? The answer is simple: the "pro-poor" party does not believe in the importance of land justice for the indigenous majority of South Africa that has been rendered landless and disenfranchised by centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid. What the DA calls the protection of property rights is nothing more than the protection of violently dispossessed land from Black people by a White minority that still controls a vast majority of both agricultural and commercial land in South Africa. According to the land audit report published in 2013, which covered state land, only 14% of the country's land is owned by the state, with 79% privately owned and 7% unaccounted for.
The second land audit report, published in 201,7 covered private land. It indicates that White people own most of the land held by individuals, with 72% share of farms and agricultural holdings. Black people, who comprise the majority of the country, own only 1% of the total share of private land in South Africa, with just a 4% share of farms and agricultural holdings. White people own the majority share of other types of land, including but not limited to sectional title units.
The DA wants this injustice to continue, and one doesn't need to be a genius to understand why. The DA is a party that fundamentally represents the interests of those who benefit from this injustice, as well as the 'investors' who want the status quo to remain because it serves their imperial interests. No country can develop when the majority of its people are as disenfranchised as Black people are in South Africa.
Thus, all talk by the DA about being interested in economic and social development is thin air. It simply doesn't align with its anti-transformation and anti-poor policy positions and pronouncements that hide behind "pragmatism".
The fact of the matter is that the DA used the Budget as an instrument to blackmail the GNU into making concessions to abandon the Expropriation Act that seeks to redress injustices. It used the Budget not to stand with the poor as it claims, but to smuggle in the interests of its core votership that benefits from the systematic and structural injustices that have kept the majority of South Africans poor.
Both the EFF and the DA may have taken the VAT hike battle to court, but only one of the parties was doing it because it genuinely wanted to fight for the poor. That party is NOT the Democratic Alliance.
Malaika is a geographer and researcher at the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation. She is a PhD in Geography candidate at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.