Parties must deliver on promises

A confident ANC voter was spotted in Mfuleni on the day of the election. The party said it is not happy with the results but has thanked those who voted for it.

The 2019 national and provincial elections have come and gone. Now it is time for the elected parties and politicians to deliver on promises made. PHIRI CAWE spoke to the Democratic Alliance (DA), the African National Congress (ANC) and the Good Party on what lies ahead for the province.

The DA has managed to retained their power to govern the province with a majority of 55.58% percent while the ANC could only manage 28.5% of the votes, down from 32.9% it got five years ago.

For Patricia de Lille’s Good Party, 3 percent was enough.

The Democratic Alliance’s provincial leader, Bonginkosi Madikizela says although the DA has won the lion’s share of the Western Cape, now is not time to gloat; the party must fulfil their voters’ expectations.

He said as much as the DA was not able to secure the 60 percent it had hoped for, it is happy because of the circumstances that surrounded the party going to the elections. “The aim was to get the outright majority but that wasn’t to be.

“Given the challenges we faced in the past three years, 56 percent is quite pleasing. It was not a good three years. But we had to go to our voters and speak to them, explain the direction the party was taking and explain some of the decisions we took.

“Another factor that helped us was the collective we have; collectively with our councillors we focused on service delivery,” he told Vukani.

Going forward he said the party must deliver on its promises.

“You see the mistake we do as politicians is to promise people heaven and earth. We say things that people want to hear even if we cannot fulfil them. But from us it is not the time to be gloating that we won the elections but to go around and deliver, and implement our policies.”

The provincial results came as a disappointment to the ANC.

Qubudile Dyantyi, ANC provincial head of campaigning, said they failed to put a dent in the DA’s support even though the party had challenges. Mr Dyantyi, however, said the election was a wake-up call. He said even the Cyril Ramaphosa factor could not help them.

“Seriously we are disappointed with the results. We have to put that upfront. But we are appreciative and thankful to those who stood in the rain to vote for us. Surely there is someone sitting at home with a fever because he/she went out to vote for the ANC. We are humbled by that. But our plan was to dismantle the DA’s support to be less than 50 percent. Our best was not good enough. The DA was in crisis but we could not use that,” he admitted.

However, he said losing was a message from their voters that the ANC is not doing things well enough provincially, especially since the party won nationally.”For us the message was clear that we are still lacking something.

It says to us we have not been visible enough to the people’s struggles. They had more confidence and hope in President Ramaphosa than us. It is a lesson to us. We have to go back to the drawing board. We accept the results. But I must say that we can only beat the DA when our house is in order, for four years we had no face. The ANC was given hope by Ramaphosa. Whoever thinks that Ramaphosa factor was non-existent is living in dreamland,” he said.

New kid on the block, the Good Party managed to out-perform the older parties like the Congress of the People, United Democratic Movement and Inkatha Freedom Party.

Party spokesman Brett Herron said the party is satisfied with its performance considering that it is only four months old. “We are very satisfied.

“In the four months of our existence, we had to campaign and raise funds at the same time. The province had a lot of new parties and we could not make a breakthrough. But we are satisfied with such results,” he said.

He said there is no rest for the wicked. His party is now working to conquer the 2021 municipal elections. “We have to build a base. We cannot relax now. We are plotting a way to the 2021 local elections,” he said.