Cape Town - United Independent Movement (UIM) leader Neil de Beer officially launched his party’s poster campaign in Cape Town on Tuesday.
De Beer, a former national security advisor to President Nelson Mandela and Umkhonto we Sizwe intelligence agent, was an ANC member for about 30 years before resigning in November last year.
Having established the UIM, he is standing as a mayoral candidate for the City Of Cape Town.
De Beer, who was born in Stellenbosch, has his eyes set on the Cape Town metro as he feels that the hard work begins at home first.
“Today (Tuesday) is a historic day for the UIM because since 5pm we are contesting 46 municipalities, eight metros and 1000 wards. The party’s poster campaign was launched today in Cape Town.
“In this city alone, we will be contesting all 116 wards of Cape Town metro city. There was a decision made that if I want to be the president of this country… I should participate in solving my own city’s problems first,” De Beer said.
The party kicked off its manifesto launch in Mpumalanga two weeks ago.
Key targets for the UIM include fighting crime by getting the community involved; throttling corruption because (De Beer said) a municipality cannot have corrupt councillors; and regaining capital to improve the lives of the poor.
“We have a slogan in this city which says ‘The City works for you’... This City does not work. It works in Constantia.
“We have two cities in this Cape Town – the rich and the poor.
“We are living in a bubble and it needs to stop,” De Beer said.
He said Cape Town is called the Mother City because “it takes nine months to make a decision to help the poor”.
“This was not Mandela’s dream,” De Beer said.
Coalitions, he said, will be considered, but with parties excluding the ANC and EFF. “You will not get me to sit with them. We will never ever form a coalition with them. They are the reason we are where we are today.”
Fatima Abdool is the party’s vice-president, De Beer said. “The UIM will not count the women in the UIM. We will make the women count. Some political parties have women because they want to be ‘politically correct’, but when they are in they don’t make the women count.”
He said that during a recent campaign visit to Khayelitsha, a man in the community had summarised the state of politics in the country.
“During our visit... a Rastafarian approached me and said, ‘Comrade, we know who you are. We don’t want freedom, we want freeness’. That man encapsulated politics in this country.