Johannesburg - The African National Congress is confident it will increase its majority at next year's elections, ANC deputy secretary general Jessie Duarte said on Monday.
“We are not in a position to tell you that we are going to have a decreased majority - I think that's the wish of the opposition and they are welcome to wish,” she told reporters in Johannesburg.
“We are going to work for an increase in majority. We are very confident that we will win this election decisively.”
She said this was not based on polls, but rather on the “ground work” the ANC was doing.
Duarte said the ANC was working hard to win back the Cape Town metro from the Democratic Alliance.
She said the party was working primarily with black communities in the Western Cape.
“There is suspicion of the DA, but there is also unhappiness with the ANC,” Duarte said.
“People say we shouldn't have given over the Western Cape. We should have worked harder to retain it and as a result they are suffering.”
She said the ANC would conduct door-to-door campaigns aimed at nine million people who were not registered as voters.
She said a significant amount of people said they were satisfied with basic service delivery. However, the middle class wanted to know about the “next step”.
“The priority for the ANC right now is rural infrastructure. For many middle class people, that means that there will not be that much infrastructure development in and around cities,” Duarte said.
“I don't want to blame apartheid for anything, but there is a massive backlog of service delivery, especially in rural areas.”
She said the ANC was not concerned that the last election, where its majority seemed to decrease, was a “trendsetting” election.
She said the ANC was looking at the election as though it was the first one in 1994.
ANC election co-ordinator Amos Masondo said it was unlikely that political parties would speak about their election manifestoes this year.
He said parties stole ideas and the ANC did not want its ideas known at the moment.
Masondo said the ANC was going into the elections as a powerful brand. - Sapa