Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) Treasurer-General and the party's Tshwane mayoral candidate, Omphile Maotwe, is confident that her party will receive support in the coming elections, saying they are ready to take over municipalities across the country.
It has been predicted by polls that the Red Berets will receive less than what they attained in the 2021 local government elections.
In the 2024 general elections, the EFF received significantly lower numbers compared to the 2019 national elections.
Part of this was because of the party's stance on migration, where it called for immigrants to be documented in order for the government to know who is inside the country's borders.
"The numbers are numbering; the people have received the message of the EFF. The people are saying the EFF is ready to take over Tshwane, in fact, they are saying the EFF is ready to take over Gauteng as a province," Maotwe said.
"The people of Tshwane must give us the mandate to run with this thing. On the ground, people are responding. We have done everything: pamphleteering at train stations, malls, affluent areas, and everywhere we go, they are saying, 'You are our people, and you are ready to take over the country.'"
"You have seen how the EFF has been in the country, in all the provinces. The president has crisscrossed all nine provinces in the country and even held a rally at night in Madibeng, which was packed. You can see the people have accepted us."
Meanwhile, Maotwe shied away from saying whether the former deputy president of the EFF, Floyd Shivambu, might have been involved in the infiltration of the party, questioning the choice of name for his party, the Afrika Mayibuye Movement.
This week, News24 reported how State Security Agency (SSA) operatives set out to infiltrate the parliamentary caucus of the EFF in 2015, at the height of state capture and the party's opposition to former president Jacob Zuma.
The same operatives also later tried to entice popular EFF figures to leave the party and join the ANC. Former spy boss Thulani Dlomo and his co-accused, Patrick Moshotola, are accused of withdrawing R12 million in cash in February 2015 to fund Project Mayibuye, which was meant to infiltrate the EFF.
In 2024, Shivambu left the EFF to join former President Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party, which saw several leaders of the EFF leave and join him. Leader Julius Malema said the party had been infiltrated from within.
Shivambu later left the MK Party to form his Afrika Mayibuye political party.
Responding to questions on Tuesday, Maotwe said everybody should draw their own conclusion regarding the name "Mayibuye" for a political party.
"The media has got a lot of work to do, to go and uncover who are the people who benefited from this, and why the state would spend so much money trying to destroy the EFF, and whether it stopped with that project."
"If the state can use money meant to develop the people of South Africa, all of us should be concerned, not just the EFF."
"People get planted within us; the choice of the name also tells a story. We are not shocked. You see from people's behaviour that something is not right here, but you can't run an organisation on suspicion."
She said the party was also not shocked by the revelations in the SSA report, but they were going to take them on, as Project Mayibuye was funded by taxpayers' money.
"What was the threat of the EFF for the state to unleash so much money to want to destroy the EFF? We are going to go to every corner of this country to get to the bottom of this matter."
"We have always been very critical of the slush fund, and we were told that we were reaching, but here we are now. The revelations are out, and the people of South Africa must make their own decisions about what the SSA has done to us.”