ANC national executive committee member and Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula says his party’s campaign is “getting hot” and will overcome voter apathy.
Addressing more than 6 000 ANC election volunteers at the OR Tambo Centre in Khayelitsha, Mbalula said the only way his party would reverse the DA’s gains in Cape Town would be by getting its supporters to the polls on May 18.
Also at the hall were the ANC’s newest members, Dumisani Ximbi and Lewis Dunn, who defected from the UDM and ID respectively. The two, along with several disaffected members of their former parties, were introduced at a May Day rally at the weekend.
Asked about the ANC’s campaign, which has come under attack, Mbalula said the campaign was gaining strength. “We are confident that the ANC supporters will come out in their numbers,” said Mbalula.
Despite reports, he reiterated that his role as ANC national campaigns manager had not been scaled back, saying that any such assertions were “pure propaganda”.
“Our campaigning has been focused on door-to-door … We are focusing on the wards.”
Unlike an earlier statement by Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe that the ANC was not looking to win Cape Town in 2011 but instead was focusing on the 2014 provincial elections, Mbalula said failure was not part of his vocabulary.
“We want to get our people out of the clutches of the DA.”
And while the DA was making a point of showing off its “delivery facts” in Cape Town, Mbalula remained sceptical. He said instead of service delivery, people in Cape Town’s townships had been subjected to water cuts and evictions.
The volunteers had waited several hours for Mbalula after he paid a short visit to Mfuleni, where he conveyed a similar message to a smaller group of ANC volunteers.
Mbalula said: “Helen Zille is promising people milk and honey but instead (she’s) taking them back to Egypt.”
Attacking the DA’s mayoral candidate, Patricia de Lille, over claims that her family members had been given jobs in the ID, he said ANC candidate Tony Ehrenreich would not be employing his “brothers, sisters and their boyfriends” should he be elected mayor. - Cape Times