DURBAN, June 25 (ANA) – Time is running out to save South Africa because the current government is slowly destroying the country, with the African National Congress on course to lose the next election, Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane said on Sunday.
“The state capture that the DA warned about in 2013 is now an undisputed reality,” Maimane told journalists in Durban following the DA’s two-day federal council meeting.
South Africa was approaching the most important election since the dawn of democracy. The 2019 general elections would define whether South Africa could turn around the present decline and grow to be the prosperous modern democracy everyone envisaged.
“We know what many voters are realising day by day – the ANC cannot self-correct, and we are determined that election 2019 will see the end of the ANC’s occupation of the Union Buildings,” he said.
The council unpacked the latest DA polling data revealing that the DA was gaining ground on the ANC. It was greatly encouraging that the ANC was polling below 50 percent, which meant it could be unseated at the next election.
“It is time for all South Africans to unite against the corrupt Gupta-led ANC and to vote for change at the next election. Over the next 700 days the DA’s primary focus will be to prepare for national government and to mount an election campaign of unprecedented scale and reach,” Maimane said.
A crucial part of achieving this objective was developing a compelling and credible policy offer. The DA federal council had discussed a number of key policy areas for further development, including jobs and the economy, education, land reform, health, and human settlements.
“Through our vigorous and thorough policy process, we will offer a complete suite of policy positions for national government. This remains one of our key focuses in the lead up to 2019.”
Equally important was ensuring an expanded pool of excellent, diverse, and hard-working DA candidates for the 2019 national and provincial elections. In this regard, the council considered proposed amendments to the DA’s candidate selection process.
The DA was the only political party that rigorously assessed the performance of all its public representatives and held them to a performance agreement. “We believe that public representatives must be accountable and available, must be well informed on their portfolios, must be involved in their communities, and must contribute positively in their legislatures.
“We have worked on streamlining our performance evaluation system and have now launched our new political performance assessment system (PPAS). The new system is entirely digitised and optimised for mobile technology so that performance assessment for all DA public representatives can be tracked live via a mobile app. The new system has already gone live and is being used by all provinces in an individual target setting process for all public representatives,” he said.
The council also recognised the crucial role the DA’s track record of good governance would play in increasing its support in 2019. To this end, the council noted the DA’s strong performance in the Western Cape where it was continuing to deliver excellent results.
The premier’s office was last week praised by the auditor general as being most actively engaged in helping to improve audit outcomes and deliver sound, clean financial management of public monies.
Under DA leadership, 80 percent of Western Cape municipalities got clean audits, with KwaZulu-Natal in second place with just 18 percent clean audits. Cape Town was the only metro to receive a clean audit in the 2015/16 financial year. Moreover, the DA-run Midvaal was the only municipality in Gauteng to get a clean audit in 2015/16.
The council considered detailed reports on monitoring and evaluating the four DA-run metro municipalities – Johannesburg, Tshwane, Nelson Mandela Bay, and Cape Town. It was overwhelmingly evident that the scale of financial mismanagement and corruption inherited from the previous ANC administrations in the three new DA-run metros was far worse than ever imagined.
“However, after just 10 months of governance, we are seeing the tide turn in all of our new metros,” Maimane said.
– African News Agency (ANA)
