Geordin Hill-Lewis, die federale leier van die DA, het Donderdag in ‘n toespraak in Sandton ‘n openlike gesprek oor die land se politiek met Suid-Afrikaners gehad. Hy het aangevoer dat die land ‘n nuwe politieke era betree waarin burgers eerder as politieke partye die middelpunt moet wees.
Hill-Lewis, sê Suid-Afrikaners moet eerlik wees oor die land se politieke werklikheid en die uitdagings wat die land sedert 1994 in die gesig staar. Hy sê sy toespraak was nie bedoel om verkiesingsveldtogte te voer of ander partye aan te val nie, maar eerder om ‘n oop gesprek oor die toestand van Suid-Afrika se politiek te begin. Volgens hom moet die land wegbeweeg van ‘n stelsel waar lojaliteit aan politieke partye voorrang geniet bo dienslewering aan burgers.
Hy voer aan Suid-Afrika staan nou voor ‘n “tweede oorgang”, waarin kiesers toenemend politieke partye beoordeel op hul vermoë om diens te lewer en mense se lewens te verbeter.
Lees die volledige toespraak hier onder:
| Subject to Citizen: a New Vision for South Africa by Geordin Hill-Lewis – DA Federal Leader |
| The following major speech on the state of our politics was delivered today by DA Leader, Geordin Hill-Lewis, in Sandton: Thank you for joining me today in Sandton.This is my first major speech as Leader of the Democratic Alliance. In it, I want to do something that South African politicians don’t do often enough: talk honestly about the state of our politics.This is not about who is governing badly, or who should govern instead. That’s for the campaign trail. And you’ll hear enough from me on that in the coming months.Today I want to talk about the political configuration that has shaped South Africa since 1994. For thirty-two years, it has determined how we think about power, freedom, opportunity, identity and the potential for change.I want to make the case that we are entering a brand new era – our second transition, if you like. The shape of this transition will be determined by the choices we make in the months and years ahead.And I want to talk about the party we need to build for this second transition. Part 1: Subjects Before I get there, let’s go back to the system that defined us – in so many ways. Apartheid was a moral atrocity. It was a crime against the people of this country that left wounds which have not healed, and may not heal, within our lifetimes.Structurally, apartheid was a system of organised dependency. It was designed – deliberately, methodically – to keep the majority of South Africans economically marginalised, politically powerless, and dependent on white permission for the most basic conditions of their existence. To borrow the formulation of Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, apartheid was built on a distinction between citizens and subjects. It denied black South Africans full and equal citizenship, incorporated into the state not as participants with rights, but ruled by a power they could neither control nor remove. Then, in the early 1990s, something happened that many had thought impossible. People who had every reason to live in a state of permanent mistrust, fear and vengeance. They chose something better. They chose each other. They chose a negotiated settlement that guaranteed rights to every citizen regardless of race, language, belief, or the circumstances of their birth. The Constitution that emerged was a remarkable document. But more than a document, it was a promise – a promise of a relationship between the state and the citizen that the majority of South Africans had never known before. All citizens would be able to contribute, participate and hold the state accountable. In turn, the state would deliver services equitably, protect people from harm and remain answerable to the citizenry. The problem was that this promise was entrusted to an organisation built for a fundamentally different purpose. Liberation movements are built to seize power from an illegitimate state. And they are built on one principle: loyalty to the organisation above all else. Those were necessary qualities for a movement fighting an unjust system. But they were the wrong qualities for a government serving free citizens. A movement that treats loyalty as the highest virtue, and claims to be the very embodiment of the will of the people, inevitably appoints the compliant rather than the capable. And a movement that cannot separate the state from the party inevitably uses the state to serve the party. The cry of “power to the people”, in practice, becomes “all power to the party”.And this is what happened. Cadre deployment hollowed out the public service. When the interests of the party and the interests of the citizen diverged – as they inevitably did – the party won. And when the state exists to serve the party, and the party falls prey to factional interests, the state goes with it. The Zondo Commission documented what that costs: hundreds of billions of rands. Institutions dismantled. A prosecuting authority compromised. A police service corrupted from the top down. State capture was not an aberration, it was a destination. The inevitable conclusion of a party that put loyalty above everything else. The looting of state institutions was the criminal face of a patronage system built years before. But the system had a legitimate face as well, and it operated on the same principle. The policy of Black Economic Empowerment was conceived for the right reasons: to address a real injustice; the economic exclusion of the black majority.But, as implemented, BEE did not build broad black wealth – it allocated access to wealth narrowly, through the party, to those the party chose. A small new elite emerged whose prosperity was conditional on continued proximity to the party that had opened the door and could, at any moment, close it again.By reserving economic opportunity for the politically connected, BEE crowded out the investment, the competition, and the dynamism that would have created jobs for everyone else. When BEE was introduced in 2003, the unemployment rate amongst black South Africans was 32 percent. At the beginning of 2026, it had grown to 36 percent. Thirty years on, the black majority is still waiting for the economic freedom that political freedom was supposed to unlock. The response to the unemployment crisis was various public works programmes. But the millions of jobs promised through these programmes at every election never materialised. Because they were never a genuine response to unemployment. They were a patronage lever, recycling party loyalists and affiliates through three-month stints and four-month contracts, and returning them, at the end, to exactly where they started – needing the next programme, grateful for the next opportunity, dependent on the party to provide it. For the millions the party could not reach with a BEE deal or a work programme – there were social grants. While these grants were a necessary safety net, they were cynically deployed with a political objective: keep the recipients grateful and ensure that in every election season the pernicious lie is repeated that other parties will take the grants away. And then there is the cruellest part of this story. Education – the one pathway out of poverty that required no political connection, no tender, no party membership card – was captured too. The party protected the South African Democratic Teachers Union, and the union delivered votes and organisational muscle in return. The price was paid by children in the classroom.Today, eighty-one percent of grade four learners cannot read for meaning. This is the direct result of a system that placed the comfort of politically protected adults above the futures of economically vulnerable children.Our Constitution had promised to turn subjects into citizens. What emerged instead was a new form of subjecthood: access to opportunity depended on one’s relationship to those in power, not on one’s rights as a citizen. Mamdani had described that condition in the early 90s. Thirty years after liberation, it is still the most accurate description of South Africa. This was allowed to happen because for the last three decades everyone – and I mean everyone – assumed the party in power would govern forever, that it was the sun around which everything orbited. The assumption of its own permanence – grounded in the moral legitimacy it had earned in the struggle – allowed the party to govern badly without consequence, to capture institutions without fear of accountability, and to treat people as subjects. Millions of South Africans who were deeply unhappy with their government voted for the party anyway, because the party was all they knew. Millions more simply stopped voting altogether, retreating from democratic participation because they no longer believed politics could change anything. Many who had the means made a different choice: they voted with their feet. They emigrated, taking their skills, capital and ambitions elsewhere. The media and the commentariat largely bought into the idea of permanent one party dominance. The primary news story of South African politics, for thirty years, has been the internal factionalism of the ANC – which faction is up, which is down and who will succeed whom. The party was so thoroughly assumed to be the permanent centre of gravity that the dominant political journalism of our era was essentially palace reporting. The subject, watching from outside the palace gates, barely featured.Even the opposition – including the DA – was drawn into the ANC’s gravitational field. Every strategy and electoral calculation was built in relation to the governing party as the permanent fixed point of South African politics. First we named the threat: the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution and its ambition to extend party hegemony over every lever of power in the state and society. Then we identified the fault line running through the ANC – between the constitutionalists and the populists – and built our strategy around the realignment we predicted would follow. More recently, we forged a multi-party coalition to keep the most destructive forces from power. When that fell short of a majority, we took the harder decision to enter government alongside the party we had spent three decades opposing. The point is that each move was a response to what the ANC was doing. The ANC was the sun, and we orbited around it along with everyone else. This is what must change. Part 2: Citizens For the first time, there is a reason to believe it can be changed. Because voting in South Africa is finally becoming what it always should have been – an act of citizenship. A voter’s calculation is no longer: which party do I identify with? It is: which party will make my life better? And that answer is no longer the ANC. Three weeks ago, in the heart of the Vaal Triangle, the DA won a by-election in a township called Evaton in the municipality of Emfuleni. Here, the taps frequently run dry, the municipal debt stands at ten billion rand and the industrial jobs that once sustained families have largely gone. We won by eight votes. Eight votes. Eight people who looked at the broken infrastructure around them and concluded that history was not going to fix the water pipe, that liberation credentials were not going to create a job, and that political loyalty is – in fact – conditional. Our candidate, Maki Tshabalala, a soft-spoken champion of the community, won that ward street by street, door by door, conversation by conversation. She demonstrated that, in a democracy, it is the party that serves at the pleasure of the people, not the people who exist at the pleasure of the party. And that same calculation is being made far beyond Emfuleni – in homes and taxi ranks and church halls across this country – by people who have watched the water system collapse and the lights go out and the schools fail their children. They have quietly concluded that the party that liberated them has not delivered the liberation it promised. In 2024, for the first time, the majority of South Africans did not vote for the ANC. And now, in 2026, the ANC is polling below fifty percent across all demographics. In fact, if only black South Africans voted, the ANC would still not win a majority. Let that sink in. The party is over. Our second transition is here. We must begin to prepare for a post-ANC future. The national question now is what a post-ANC future looks like. When a dominant party collapses, they leave behind a constituency. The constituency is the millions of people betrayed by the party that liberated them – their accumulated disappointment is the most combustible material in South African politics.T heir anger is legitimate. Their frustrations are rational. And there are politicians who have been watching that anger build and build for years, who understand it intimately, and who are now preparing to harvest it. You can see them on the platforms, in the stadiums, in the viral videos. They know exactly which wounds to press. But look carefully at what they are actually offering. Their answer to a state captured by one elite is to capture it for another. Their answer to thirty years of dependency is not the end of dependency – it is to redirect it, to install a new set of patrons in place of the old ones, to ensure that the citizen remains exactly where she has always been: waiting for permission from the powerful. A new master. The same subjecthood. There is another way, and it is the path I describe here today. It does not offer the emotional satisfaction of populism. It is harder and slower. But it is the only path that actually completes the journey that 1994 began. It is a politics that puts the citizen at the centre of our politics. Not the ANC. Not the DA. The citizen. What does it look like? First, a citizen-centred government requires a different understanding of the state. For too long, institutions meant to serve citizens have instead served political power: public appointments have become political appointments, public resources have become political resources. The consequences are all around us – failing municipalities, weakened law enforcement agencies, collapsing state-owned enterprises, and the erosion of public trust itself. A citizen-centred government begins by restoring a simple principle: the state does not belong to any party. It belongs to the citizens. Success in government is measured by what citizens experience. Whether the school functions. Whether the clinic works. Whether the train runs. Whether the crime is investigated. Whether the lights stay on. The standard by which government should be judged is the lived experience of the people in whose name it governs. Second, a citizen-centred government requires a different understanding of the economy. In the economy the ANC built, the state is at the centre. From exchange controls to industrial policy, from BEE to labour law to the management of our ports – every plan, every policy, every intervention is built on the same assumption: that economic activity is allowed only under license of the state, that the state should direct and the people should follow. As subjects do. The results are clear. Millions stuck in rising unemployment. An economy that grows too slowly to offer any opportunity to its own young people. A business environment so laden with red tape, racial targets and regulatory uncertainty that investment goes everywhere else – and the jobs go with it. A citizen-centred economy starts from the opposite premise. It is driven by the choices of free people – choices about where and how to invest. Whether and how to start a business. Who and how many people to hire. These are not decisions that should belong to the state. They should belong to the citizen. The state’s role in a citizen-centred economy is limited and focused. It does the essentials well – infrastructure, law and order, education, healthcare, a social safety net. And for the rest, the state gets out of the way. Because when it does, something remarkable happens. The small business owner opens a shop. The entrepreneur takes a risk. The farmer invests in the land. The young person finds a first job. These are not just beneficiaries of the economy. They are the builders of it. Citizens, not subjects. Third, a citizen-centred government requires a different understanding of human potential. Rights and opportunities are not enough on their own. A citizen must also have the capability to seize opportunity when it exists – the knowledge, the skills, the confidence to exercise their freedom. Without that, opportunity goes to waste. A child who learns to read gains access to a wider world. A young person who acquires knowledge and skills gains greater control over their future. But when children spend years in school without learning to read for meaning, when young people leave unequipped for work or further study or active citizenship – we waste human potential on a vast scale, and we limit children’s lives before they have properly begun. A citizen-centred education system starts from a different premise: that every child who sits down in a classroom on the first day of school carries with them an unrealised future that it is the system’s sole purpose to unlock. Every decision – how teachers are appointed, how time is used, what is taught and how it is tested – is made with that child in mind. That is the true measure of an education system: not the inputs, not the budgets, not the policies. The lives it makes possible. Fourth, a citizen-centred government requires a different understanding of safety. People – especially women – walk our streets in fear every day of their lives, a fear that has become so constant we have almost come to accept it as normal. Victims and their families are left to carry the emotional wreckage of violent crime, while too often the perpetrators walk free. That is a grave injustice: a country in which citizens are forced to surrender their freedom while the criminals who take it from them keep theirs. A citizen-centred government understands that the rule of law is not an abstract principle. It is the foundation upon which free societies are built. It starts from the belief that every citizen has the right to live free from fear. That every community has the right to safety. That every victim deserves justice. And that every criminal must know that there will be consequences for breaking the law. The measure of a criminal justice system is not how many policies it produces, but whether citizens actually feel protected. Whether crimes are investigated. Whether criminals are prosecuted. Whether victims are heard. Whether communities feel safer. Finally, a citizen-centred government requires a different understanding of the social compact. Citizenship is about more than the relationship between the individual and the state. It is also about the relationship between citizens themselves. Every person is more than the sum of their demographic parts. Each of us carries something unique and personal that no category can fully capture, and recognising that in others is what allows us to recognise ourselves in them. That is the beginning of empathy. That is the beginning of tolerance. For too long, South Africans have been encouraged to think of themselves primarily as members of groups: racial groups, political groups, linguistic groups and countless others. Citizenship asks something different – to recognise one another first and foremost as fellow South Africans. That does not mean abandoning our histories, identities or traditions. It means recognising that there is something larger that binds us all together: a shared commitment to the country that we love. Not loyalty to a party. Not allegiance to a leader. But a belief that South Africa belongs equally to all who live in it, and that all who live in it have a stake in its success. A new community of all who love this country and want to see all its people flourish. Every life contains moments of vulnerability – illness, disability, unemployment, old age, misfortune. A citizen-centred society does not abandon people in those moments, it cares for them. But it goes further than that: it does not accept a future in which millions remain trapped in permanent dependency. The purpose of social support is to restore agency, expand opportunity and help people regain their footing – to build pathways out of poverty, not systems that manage poverty indefinitely. The promise of citizenship is that no one is left behind, and no one is left where they started. We protect each other, and we grow together. These, in sum, are the five pillars of a citizen-centred South Africa: A state that belongs to the people, not to the party. An economy that offers opportunities for all, not favours for the politically connected. An education system organised around children’s needs, not union interests. A criminal justice system that protects law-abiding citizens, not those who prey on them. A social welfare system that builds agency, not dependency. And this is the South Africa we are going to build. I would like to turn now to a practical question that this speech inevitably raises. If the party is over, if citizen-centred politics is what comes next, what is the DA doing in government with the ANC? The decision to join the Government of National Unity was the correct one. The alternative was to allow destructive populists into power. We could not, and will never, allow that. We were also determined to show South Africa what the DA can do in government – and we have had real successes in putting the citizen at the centre of policymaking. Of course we have not always got everything right. But our worth isn’t measured by the mistakes we make – it is measured by how quickly we identify and correct them. Under my leadership, the DA will not tolerate poor performance. Because my first loyalty is to the Constitution and to the citizens of this country. Last week, Mteto Nyati, one of South Africa’s most respected business leaders, wrote something worth repeating. He said, “In my book, loyalty is often little more than cadre deployment dressed in more respectable clothing. This substitution of personal allegiance for proven capability remains one of the primary reasons our nation continues to struggle. When those entrusted with influence consistently place who one knows or owes above what one can deliver, mediocrity becomes systemic and institutions lose their way.” He is right. And this is the standard I am applying inside the DA. There are also standards that I will apply to the ANC. First and foremost is requiring the ANC to accept that it did not win a mandate to govern as it always has. In 2024 it won a mandate to negotiate, to compromise and to share decision-making with other parties. The Statement of Intent that established the GNU recognised this explicitly, requiring sufficient consensus amongst coalition partners for decisions to be made. That agreement is being honoured in the breech. On economic policy in particular – on business licensing, on industrial strategy, on the review of BEE – the ANC has proceeded as though the election result meant nothing. We will not accept that. The DA will no longer remain silent when the ANC refuses to consult or compromise, and we will make public the positions we have taken inside the GNU. This is not meant as a threat. It is a matter of basic respect for democracy. We have a mandate from the citizens who voted for us, and we are honour-bound to tell them what we are doing with their trust. When I was elected Leader of the DA, I chose to remain outside the Government of National Unity for the simple reason of independence. I do not owe my position to President Ramaphosa. I owe it to the millions of people who voted for us and to the millions who have not yet voted for us. These are the people I care about – real people, citizens of this great country, people who just want a chance to build a decent life for themselves. I meet many black South Africans who say to me, “I like what you are doing, and I think the DA’s doing a good job, but I am just not yet ready to trust – to actually vote for you.” This cuts me deep. But it also inspires me to do better. To build a truly citizen-centred party in which every person feels welcome – no matter where they come from, the colour of their skin or the language they speak. A party that is truly for all the people. I am encouraged by the growing number of people out there who reject the idea of dependence on the state. These are the young people brave enough to make a different choice from their parents; not out of disrespect, but in the knowledge that their liberation won’t be found in the past – it lies ahead, and it will be built by citizens standing on their own two feet. The Democratic Alliance, under my leadership, will be a party for them. We stand for them. We champion their lives, their hopes, their aspirations. Because they are our lives, our hopes, and our aspirations. We want you to thrive, for your lives to be better, and we will be the party of your flourishing. And, with their support, we can become the largest party in South Africa – the leaders of a future coalition government at national level. I know that this is an ambitious goal. But I believe we can achieve it if we build the right kind of party – a party that governs well for everyone, that is present in every community, that holds itself and its coalition partners to account, and that believes, above all else, in the capacity of South Africans to take control of their lives. But none of that matters if we do not move with the urgency that this moment demands. Before I close, I want to say something that keeps me up at night: we are running out of time. We have lived for too long with catastrophe treated as normal and pain as something to simply endure. Unemployment is at crisis levels and inequality is entrenched. Violent crime is so pervasive it has become background noise. Municipalities are bankrupt, children are leaving school unable to read, and our public healthcare system has all but collapsed. We cannot go on as normal. All of us have a responsibility to act, to mobilise, to do whatever we can to effect change. At the forefront of our minds must be the millions of people who just get by and the millions who don’t. For them, delay is not an option. They have waited long enough. Our first transition gave South Africans the right to be citizens. The next transition must give us the power to live as citizens: free to choose, free to build and free to flourish. That is the journey this country began in 1994. It is our responsibility to finish it. Thank you. |
