Gauteng MPL Themba Sono announced on Tuesday he was leaving the Democratic Alliance (DA) to join the new Independent Democrats (ID) with former Pan Africanist Congress MP Patricia de Lille.
Speaking to reporters in Johannesburg, Sono said the ID was ”not against any political party”.
”We are not anti-ANC, we are not anti-DA, we are pro-South Africa. We want a South Africa that works in all areas of life from law enforcement to socio-economic empowerment to the management of the economy.”
Sono said the ID would move away from the current adversarial style of opposition.
A growing number of South African voters ”express themselves dissatisfied not only with the performance of government, but also with the absence of an appropriate opposition party,” Sono said.
Sono said in a written statement: ”Neither adversarial opposition (typical of the DA) nor co-operative politics (a la ANC-NNP currently) may truly sustain our largely experimental democracy”.
He said the ID wanted to ”avoid class distinctions as much as racial or tribal distinctions” and to include rural voters who had been ”largely forgotten”.
They also wanted to take power away from political parties and give it to the voters. ”We do not want oligarchic representation. People should have ownership of political programmes, not parties,” Sono said.
De Lille, who was at the media briefing, said the party would have a weekend workshop to draw up its policies. Both the policies and the leadership of the party would be announced at its official launch ”in about two months time”.
She said the strongest expressions of interest in the new party had come from Limpopo, the Free State and the North West. The party would make an effort to reach out to informal settlements.
There were no membership fees yet, as the party did not want to begin with ”fights about money”. They had received sponsorship from ”corporate South Africa” to help with office and administrative expenses, De Lille said. – Sapa