Thursday 4 September 2025
After careful consideration, The United South Africa Movement (TUSAM) has decided to withdraw its participation in the National Dialogue in its current form.
In the past few months, TUSAM has enthusiastically engaged with the National Dialogue process, devoting many hours and resources contributing to preliminary discussions and providing continued input to the Steering Committee. We have done so in the spirit of supporting a genuine attempt to advance socio-economic upliftment, democracy and accountability in South Africa, despite some early misgivings and reservations about how exactly the National Dialogue would unfold.
Unfortunately, many of our worst fears were confirmed as the long-awaited details around how the National Dialogue would take place, and what form it would take, slowly unfolded over the last few weeks.
Several significant red flags have become all too apparent. The first one is the complete lack of transparency around the cost of the National Dialogue. While the government has been at pains refute media reports around a 750 million rand price tag, it has failed to provide a clear answer on what the actual cost of the process would be. Even the lower estimates around 450 million rand are preposterous in the current context of budget constraints and the daily hardships that far too many South Africans endure as a result of failed government policies.
The second red flag is that is has now become all too clear that in its current form, the National Dialogue has, in effect, been hijacked by the African National Congress (ANC) as a channel to run a party-political electoral campaign, paid for by South African taxpayers. The ANC has made it very clear that they will go to any lengths to stop the National Dialogue from addressing the real issues that affect South Africans of all backgrounds, including systemic corruption, organised state capture, and the near complete lack of accountability of public officials in the country. This is not a National Dialogue, but a desperate attempt by the ANC to control the narrative and avoid accountability.
TUSAM refuses to take part in a process that favours any political party at taxpayer expense, let alone a process that has been designed to take the appearance of a citizen-led process, but is in fact entirely controlled by the main governing party.
We therefore call on like-minded civil society organisations who are interested in an inclusive, grassroots and citizen-led National Dialogue to join TUSAM in a genuine, bottom-up process to debate the critical issues affecting our society and how we can address them to build a better South Africa for all its people.
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Solly Moeng on + 27 71 133 7116