Counsel for President Cyril Ramaphosa told the electoral court on Thursday that a national address he gave three days before the May election was designed to reassure voters amid the security concerns, not as a campaign pitch for the ANC.
Advocate Ngwako Maenetje said the Democratic Alliance’s (DA’s) claim that he had abused his position and public funds to deliver a stump speech was a “cynical” reading of Ramaphosa’s remarks.
Maenetje quoted the president as referring to South Africa as a diverse country before saying that, at this point in its history, its people could afford to turn back on “our path to renewal”, before concluding with the words were “let us work together to build a better country”.
“They want you to read … that this conclusion says, ‘Let’s go out and vote for the ANC.’
“That is just a wrong reading of what the president says,” Maenetje said, adding that the DA was taking Ramaphosa’s words out of context to support its claim that his speech on 26 May amounted to an abuse of public funds for last-ditch campaigning for his party.
A proper reading showed that the president was calling on voters to come out in numbers, despite fears that there would be strife on election day, for the sake of protecting South Africa’s multi-party democracy.
The speech was one of reassurance and encouragement, Maenetje said, not one in which a politician makes promises to the electorate in order to secure votes.
The DA approached the electoral court two days later to accuse Ramaphosa of breaching the Electoral Act and the Electoral Code of Conduct by highlighting the achievements of the sixth administration.
“He sought to use his position as head of state and head of the government to encourage the public to vote for the ANC,” Helen Zille, the chairperson of the DA’s federal executive, said in the party’s founding affidavit.
“The address was nothing more than a thinly veiled stump speech.”
The speech, in several respects, mirrored that which Ramaphosa had given at the closing rally of the ANC’s election campaign a day earlier, she said.
The DA located the alleged breach in the fact that his address was aired by public broadcaster SABC, several other broadcasters and the government’s YouTube channel, as well as being streamed on the presidency’s X account.
It argued that this flouted section 94 of the Act, with item 9(2)(e) of the electoral code, which prohibits the abuse of positions of power to influence the outcome of elections and section 87(1)(g), which prohibits the abuse of public funds for campaign purposes.
Maenetje told the court that the DA had not interpreted the act correctly.
The DA has asked the court to punish the alleged breach by discarding 1% of the total votes cast for the ANC, whose vote share slipped to 40% in the May election, prompting Ramaphosa to form a broad government coalition.
The party has asked the electoral court to deduct 1% of the ANC’s vote share because the president abused public funds to make a campaign speech
