Raenette Taljaard

Taljaard gained much of her national public profile as a leading critic of the 1999 Arms Deal, a massive defence procurement package that was marred by allegations of corruption by politicians of the governing party, the African National Congress (ANC). Her engagement with the Arms Deal began in the Portfolio Committee on Public Enterprises, which investigated the industrial offsets that were attached to the deal.[9] In January 2001,[11] the DA appointed her to a seat in the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA), where she became the party's main spokesperson on the Arms Deal and related investigations. Soon after joining the committee, in February 2001, Taljaard led the DA in a walkout from a committee meeting in protest of what she called "the strong-arm tactics of the executive" in relation to Arms Deal investigations.[12]

In December 2001, the ANC majority in the committee pushed through a report on an Arms Deal inquiry over the objections of opposition parties; Taljaard said it was a sign that the ANC intended to shut down the investigation and disable SCOPA's oversight functions.[13] She also said she was considering leaving SCOPA to return to the Portfolio Committee on Public Enterprises.[13] Two months later, in February 2002, SCOPA chairperson Gavid Woods resigned, citing political interference in the committee's work as well as an increasingly polarised working environment, with ANC members treating him and Taljaard with particular hostility.[11] The Sunday Times agreed that Taljaard and Woods had been subject to "relentless hammering" in the committee, and Taljaard later described it as having been "like pseudo-psychological warfare".[2] The press expected Taljaard to follow Woods in resigning.[14][15] In early March, Woods was replaced by the ANC's Vincent Smith – the first SCOPA chairperson ever to come from the governing party, in a break with tradition – and Taljaard resigned soon afterwards.[11]

In later years, Taljaard remained a critic of the Arms Deal and of the ANC's response to related investigations: she argued that the ANC, assisted by Speaker Frene Ginwala, had systematically and deliberately undermined SCOPA's oversight role, permanently weakening parliamentary institutions.[16] In 2007, the National Prosecuting Authority said that it intended to call her as a witness in the criminal trial of former Deputy President Jacob Zuma, who faced corruption charges related to the deal (though the trial did not ultimately proceed),[17] and she was later one of several critics summoned to testify before the Seriti Commission of Inquiry.[18][19] She published a memoir of her time in SCOPA, entitled Up in Arms: Pursuing Accountability for the Arms Deal in Parliament, in 2012.[9][16]

After resigning from SCOPA, Taljaard replaced Ken Andrew in the Portfolio Committee on Finance,[11] where she became the DA's shadow minister and spokesperson on finance.[20][21] After the 2003 State of the Nation Address by President Thabo Mbeki, Taljaard was forced to retract her remark – made in allusion to widespread corruption allegations against ANC politicians – that Mbeki's entourage resembled "an identification parade at a criminal investigation".[22]

She remained in her post as shadow finance minister and spokesperson until her resignation from Parliament.[23] While she was in this role, at the end of 2003, the Mail & Guardian named her as one of twenty people in politics who "will emerge as key figures in our public life over the next 10 years".[24]

Also in 2003, Taljaard was appointed as a Yale World Fellow, in which capacity she spent several months abroad at Yale University, where she conducted research on the proliferation of private military companies.[2][25] This hiatus apparently attracted the ire of party activists linked to Taljaard's party constituency in the suburb of Florida, west of Johannesburg.[21][26] She later said that she returned home early from Yale at Leon's urging.[5]

In January 2004, as the 2004 general election approached, a provisional draft of the DA's party list was leaked which showed Taljaard ranked in an unelectable position: 32nd in the Gauteng caucus.[21] Taljaard had been nominated to return as a DA candidate by parliamentary veteran Helen Suzman, reportedly a close friend and mentor, who told the press that Taljaard was one of the DA's "most valuable members" and that her demotion was "crazy".[21] Taljaard later said that she was "aghast" and humiliated by her ranking.[5]

As widely expected,[26] Leon used his prerogative as party leader to increase Taljaard's ranking on the list.[5] She was ultimately ranked seventh on the DA's Gauteng list[27] and comfortably secured re-election in April 2004.[28]

However, on 5 November 2004, Taljaard released a brief statement announcing her resignation from Parliament "for private reasons".[29] She left with effect from 1 January 2005 and was replaced by Anchen Dreyer.[30] She also resigned from the DA.[2] The Mail & Guardian said that after her departure, the DA "battled... to make a meaningful contribution to economic debate in the National Assembly;[31] writing in the same newspaper, Richard Calland said that her resignation reflected poorly on the trajectory of the party, which he condemned as "apparently so caught up in their own hubris that they were unable to accommodate someone of Taljaard’s abilities".[32] Rhoda Kadalie, however, later described Taljaard as the victim of her own "political entitlement... and limitless hubris".[33]

The reasons for Taljaard's resignation were subject to speculation. DA chief whip Douglas Gibson said that Taljaard had left to pursue an academic career, that she had considered leaving on several prior occasions, and that she did not have "a commitment to a long-term political career like most of the rest of us do".[29] The party strongly denied widespread rumours that Taljaard's resignation was in fact the result of infighting in the DA, including disagreements between her and Gibson.[29][34][35] In 2011, Taljaard said that her resignation had been "an important moment of personal authenticity after a clear dissonance between my inner being and the harsh and in my view dysfunctional and war-like hostile tone of our public discourse during this time".[36] She expanded on this theme in her 2012 memoir, writing of the DA's mode of opposition to the ANC:

I was deeply averse to engaging in war-like posturing with ANC colleagues whose intentions and motivations were similar to mine — although we held widely divergent views on how best to achieve our common goals. They were my compatriots, not my arch-rivals... It was as if I did not belong anywhere else, but right in the middle of the floor of the House — between the DA and the ANC — where my own beliefs and feelings intermingled: the ideological, pragmatic middle ground, which neither party would ever concede as existing in our complex society.[5]

The book also partly linked her disenchantment with party politics to the failed Arms Deal investigations.[9] However, it confirmed earlier rumours that she had fallen out with party leaders, most importantly with Leon.[16] Taljaard described her uneasiness about having returned to Parliament in 2004 through Leon's preferment, which she thought might carry the presumption of "unquestioning loyalty" to him, and she said that her personal relationship with Leon had grown tense after she shared with him her concerns that he was leading the party while "isolated and cloistered in a bubble with his male entourage, who acted as echo chambers for each other's belief systems".[5] In the book, Taljaard quotes her resignation letter as having read, "Allow me to clarify again: my reasons for departing relate primarily to the DA, key personalities within it and their respective roles, and not to the ANC".[5]