Bantu Holomisa silent on party manifesto, to reveal all at launch
UDM leader Bantu Holomisa will officially launch his election manifesto in February, promising to reveal all his party’s plans for the 2019 national elections.
Holomisa whose party has been showing a decline in support especially in the last national elections of 2014
hopes that the UDM would perform far better than in previous national elections.
Holomisa, however, said his party would continue to contest the national and provincial elections in all the nine provinces including his own the Eastern Cape.
“We are looking forward to our manifesto launch at the Dan Qeqe Stadium on February 16 in the Nelson Mandela Bay region. We also have our own plans to hold our list conference in February where we will select our candidates for the elections.
“I do not have a target, but I hope to do well,” Holomisa said.
According to him his manifesto was likely to contain all the pertinent issues his party would like to address but declined to name them, saying he would do so at the launch.
“We are on holiday now,” he said. After the 2014 national elections, the UDM forged strong ties with opposition parties such as the EFF, DA, Freedom Front Plus and Cope.
Their relationship grew stronger after the 2016 national local government elections after the governing ANC lost three metropolitan councils Nelson Mandela Bay, City of Tshwane and the City of Joburg to the DA.
At the Nelson Mandela Bay metro council, the UDM formed a coalition government which saw the DA’s Athol Trollip being elected as executive mayor and the UDM’s Mongameli Bobani as his deputy.
In September last year, the UDM, EFF and Cope argued in the Constitutional Court that Parliament had failed to determine that former president Jacob Zuma had breached the Constitution in the manner in which he dealt with the former public protector’s Nkandla report.
At the time, the three parties and the DA which was an intervening party in that application wanted Parliament to begin impeachment proceedings against Zuma.
The ruling on December 29 last year went in their favour these party leaders and their members acted like a united front outside the Constitutional Court’s building.
But tensions between the UDM and DA in the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality had become strained irretrievably since May last year. Trollip began accusing Bobani of corruption.
The cracks widened in March this year when Bobani openly supported a series of votes of no-confidence against Trollip.
Initially, Trollip survived a series of these motions but his control came to an abrupt end on August 27.
Bobani was later elected as mayor. The rift between the two parties further widened when Holomisa also conditionally supported the expropriation of land without compensation.
Now relations between the two are at their lowest ebb.