Ten percent to 12% of the vote — that is what Independent Democrats leader Patricia de Lille predicts her party will get in next month’s general election.
The fiery party leader, called the one-woman-show by many of her opponents, on Tuesday introduced her provincial leaders and premier’s candidates to the media at the Gauteng legislature in Johannesburg.
”I can’t wait for the 14th of April. There are so many people I want to prove wrong, so many scores I want to settle,” De Lille said.
De Lille told journalists her party is campaigning in all nine provinces, as well as for national Parliament.
”We will return to both the national Parliament and all nine provincial legislatures to work for positive change.”
De Lille said she has criss-crossed the entire country in the past three months and has been pleased everywhere by the support she and her party has received.
She introduced Mabandla Makwetu, son of the former Pan Africanist Congress leader, as her premier candidate for the Eastern Cape.
Mangkaiseng Moeng heads the ID list for the Free State; Gauteng member of the provincial legislature and DA defector Professor Themba Sono is in charge in Gauteng; Esau Damoense is top of the bill in the Northern Cape; Koos Senoamadi leads in the North West; Mohamad Farouk Sulliman is in charge of the ID in Mpumalanga; former Western Cape top cop Lennit Max is premier candidate in that province; and Edgar Miyeni in Limpopo.
The party’s candidate for KwaZulu-Natal is businessman Graham McKenzie.
Asked about her party’s funding, she said it has received ”titbits here and there” from business, usually from those who are contributing to existing Parliamentary parties on a sliding scale based on the number of MPs.
She said that while some of the financial criteria used by donors, such as using the outcome of the 1999 election, is questionable, the public disclosure of donations is commendable.
”It is a good sign,” she said.
She added that one of the more substantial donations she had received was from hotel and casino group Tsogo Sun, which applied ”a different formula”.
At the media conference De Lille also expressed her concern about irregularities in the Mier municipality’s accounts where R1,2-million could not be accounted for in an auditor general’s report, as well as alleged poor conduct by Northern Cape education minister Tina Joemat-Petterson at a high school in Kimberley earlier this month.
Speaking about the Mier municipality, a rural local authority north-west of Upington, she said those responsible have to be arrested and prosecuted.
”We can’t allow them to get away with this,” she said.
Joemat-Petterson was apparently abusive to staff and pupils at the William Pescod High School — her alma mater — on March 10 when she visited the school after the staff and pupils started a campaign of mass action to protest the suspension of the principal after he acted against pupils whose parents had made no arrangements to pay school fees. — Sapa
Special Report: Elections 2004