The ANC has warned opposition parties that their hopes of taking over the province in the upcoming general elections will be dashed. Provincial Secretary TK Nciza spoke to Newsnote on the sidelines of the IEC code of conduct signing ceremony and dismissed the messaging of the opponents of the ruling party.
“Everyone is campaigning on the basis that they must remove the ANC, not campaigning on the basis of what is it they can do for our people. That on its own is a weakness from their side but I don’t think they’ve picked it up,that they’ve been doing the same thing for the past thirty years,” he said of opposition campaign messaging.
Nciza said the ANC, having governed the country and the province of Gauteng since the dawn of democracy has achieved a lot and its offer to voters is a continuation of work it has already started. “The African National Congress is not campaigning against any other organisation but it tells people what it is going to do, it tells people what it has done, it tells people how it is going to improve their lives,” he said.
The ANC attributes its loss of support in successive elections since 2009 to a poor voter turnout with some of its supporters not coming out to vote and Nciza says the party is working on changing that and he’s confident a large turnout will keep it in power.
“The challenges that we had faced, you must remember people are not naive, people they’ve seen the outcomes of not voting. When you don’t vote there’s vulnerability. When there’s no one party running the municipality or even the province, what happens, you get chaos so people in this province are going to go out in their numbers and I’m assuring you they are going to come out in their numbers and defend the ANC because they have an appreciation that we are the only ones that understand governance. We are not just speaking from the sidelines. We are speaking about something that we have done for the past thirty years,” said Nciza.
The Gauteng provincial government’s recent initiatives in fighting crime, reducing unemployment and eliminating the ongoing electricity crisis have been labelled as electioneering by opposition parties and Nciza said they (the opposition) keep shifting the goalposts. “Whatever that we do is expected to be contested because we are a ruling party. We stopped loadshedding they’re saying is electioneering, we hire people they say its elections, we don’t they complain about it so you do you’re doomed you don’t you’re doomed so we chose to do, we chose to not listen to that, we chose to focus on the voter and I can assure you that if you want to see an organisation that is on people’s eyes, person to person, door to door, street by street, that is the ANC.
Most parties have based their campaigns on the hope that the ANC may not secure an outright victory which will present an opportunity for the formation of a coalition government in which most have vowed they would exclude the liberation movement which has been in charge of the country since 1994.