Opposition must unite to take KZN
UNITY among opposition parties was imperative if they wanted to grab power from the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal, said re-elected DA provincial leader Zwakele Mncwango yesterday.
Speaking to the media in Durban, three days after he retained his position, Mncwango said the DA had already started its campaign to reduce the ANC to below 50% in the province, but it needed support from other major opposition parties – the IFP and EFF.
“We are ready to be in government, which means each and every voter in KZN must know that the DA exists.
“If you look at the trends of the support, through previous by-elections, in the north the IFP keeps regaining support, but in the south the DA keeps gaining strength.
“It is clear that the opposition parties keep squeezing the ANC of its support base. Therefore it is possible to drop the ANC to below 50%,” he said.
Mncwango said the ANC infighting provided fertile ground for opposition parties to join forces to take control of the provincial government.
He said the party would campaign on the issues of free education, land and social grants to rural and township voters. At the weekend he and DA national leader Mmusi Maimane visited Osuthu Palace in Nongoma to pledge to defend King Goodwill Zwelithini’s Ingonyama Trust Board.
“In South Africa there is a challenge of malnutrition. If we stop wasting money on corruption and wasteful expenditure we can afford to double grant payments to each child,” he said.
On the land issue, he said food security should be protected by not expropriating productive white-owned farms.
He said people who had invested in land earmarked for expropriation should be compensated.
“If a piece of land owned by a white person is not used and government wants to use the land for production, there is no use for that person to hold on to the land. That person should be compensated because he had plans to use it in the future,” he said.
He said there should be negotiations on how the government should compensate farm owners whose land would be expropriated.
“White people should consider that the land was acquired at the expense of black people. Therefore they should be considerate when it comes to demanding compensation,” said Mncwango.
Outspoken former DA youth leader, Mbali Ntuli, who recently resigned from the provincial parliament to lead the party campaign in the province, said she would assemble a big team of young people to focus the campaign on young people and the unemployed.