The African National Congress (ANC) is making inroads into Democratic Alliance (DA) strongholds, particularly in the Western Cape, ANC head of elections Ngoako Ramathlodi said on Thursday.
“With its policies having been exposed as racially polarising the South African society, the DA has now been put on the back foot in the Western Cape, where the City of Cape Town has violated human rights and the dignity of black people by building unenclosed toilets,” he said at a media briefing at the party’s Johannesburg headquarters.
The ANC came out in “battle” mode, lashing the main opposition and accusing it of racism and double standards.
It listed the toilet saga, allegations of nepotism against DA Cape Town mayoral candidate Patricia de Lille, and the Midvaal municipality’s reluctance to remove a bust of apartheid architect Hendrik Verwoerd at its offices, as indications of the DA’s character.
“The DA has placed as one of the pillars of its elections propaganda the accusation that the ANC is involved in the practice of ‘cadre deployment’, but it has emerged that the party is itself involved in ‘family deployment’,” he said, referring to De Lille.
“This once again exposes the DA’s double standards, particularly in this election, which has seen the party always indicating left but turning right on moral and corruption matters.”
The ANC urged De Lille to answer to the allegations before the election.
It is alleged that De Lille employed her son, nephew, three sisters, two brothers-in-law and three family friends in government posts in the Western Cape, where she is the minister for social development.
De Lille on Wednesday dismissed allegations of nepotism against her as “baseless nonsense”.
Both Cape Town and the Midvaal in Gauteng are hotly contested terrain, with the ANC and the DA pulling out all the stops to capture the municipalities.
Ramathlodi said the ANC’s campaign would shift from “battle” mode back to emphasis on its manifesto during the final stretch toward the election.
‘Why must we be white for one day’
Meanwhile, a member of the ANC’s Eastern Cape provincial legislature taunted DA leader Helen Zille with remarks about her “white” party as she spoke to residents of Helenvale outside Port Elizabeth on Thursday morning.
Christian Martin and an ANC group gathered on a street corner in the mainly coloured township, a few metres from where Zille was speaking.
“When was the last time you saw a white person in Helenvale?” Martin shouted into a loudhailer.
“Why on the day of the local government election on May 18 must we be white for one day? This is your chance to make a choice.”
The crowd of ANC supporters, who waved party flags and wore yellow ANC T-shirts, shouted their approval as Martin spoke.
‘One of the reasons that crime is getting worse’
Zille told her supporters, gathered behind a palisade fence at the Helenvale Resource Centre, the DA could make a difference to the crime and gang-hit community if given the chance to govern.
She told her supporters, most of them dressed in the DA’s blue T-shirts, that Port Elizabeth’s lack of a metropolitan police force was one of the causes of the rise in crime in the area.
“You don’t even have a metro police force in Port Elizabeth. It is one of the reasons that crime is getting worse,” she said. “One of the first things the DA will do if we win the election here is to establish a metro police force in PE. We don’t see why you should be the only city in South Africa without its own police force.”
The “good news”, she said, was that for the first time the DA stood a “very good chance’ of governing Port Elizabeth.
“This is going to be one of the closely contested areas in the country. That is why we need every person who supports the DA to go out and vote on election day. And we need people who have never voted DA before to give us a chance to turn things around in Port Elizabeth.” — Sapa