ANC rolls out big guns to urge voters to register
THE ANC rolled out its heavyweights at the weekend to urge citizens to register to vote for the ruling party during the next year’s general elections.
Yesterday President Cyril Ramaphosa descended on Tshwane, the council of which the ANC lost control of in the 2016 local elections, while former president Jacob Zuma went to KwaMashu in his home province to call on locals to vote.
Ramaphosa warned in Centurion that the return of land to the majority of South Africans must not violate other people’s rights or the constitution. Addressing congregants and ANC supporters at the New Creation Covenant Church, he said when the party was talking about the return of land everything had to be done in an orderly fashion.
“We have to do everything orderly in terms of our laws, in terms of our constitution so that everybody’s rights are protected and advanced,” Ramaphosa said. The ANC recently backed the EFF’s parliamentary motion to amend the constitution to enable the expropriation of land without compensation.
Ramaphosa, accompanied by Gauteng premier and acting provincial ANC chairperson David Makhura and Tshwane regional chairperson Kgosientso Ramokgopa, said the government’s return of land would not be done to the detriment of economic growth and trampling on the rights of other South Africans, even if it goes ahead.
“A new dawn for us must be that we do things the proper way, without any corruption, without violating the law and without violating the rights of other people – without doing anything that we will not want to be done to us. That is the new dawn,” Ramaphosa said.
Zuma, meanwhile, gave an assurance that his love for the ANC was far from over despite being forced by the party’s leadership to resign last month before the end of his term of office.
“We will be calling on voters to vote for the ANC, there is no doubt about it. For some of us our votes are not secret, and are very open.
“I can vote even if you are looking at the ballot paper,” Zuma told journalists.
He spent the better part of yesterday pleading with prospective voters to go out to register.
He and KwaZulu-Natal ANC co-ordinator Sihle Zikalala started the day with a twohour-long church service at the KwaMashu Christian Centre.
DA leader Mmusi Maimane said EFF leader Julius Malema was making the “crucial mistake of thinking many others share his racist views” and will soon find out that most people reject his “racist hatred”.
Speaking in Port Elizabeth yesterday during the weekend’s voter registration drive, Maimane said that when the DA entered into a coalition with smaller parties to govern Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB) after the local government elections in 2016, it had been agreed by all that NMB could never “go back to the theft and the lawlessness of an ANC government”.