Trollip heads to Eastern Cape to motivate DA’S election battle
CAPE TOWN — Former Democratic Alliance (DA) parliamentary leader and leader of the party in the Eastern Cape Athol Trollip will be leaving Parliament at the end of next month to take up a seat in the provincial legislature and to drive the party’s election campaign in his home province.
Last year Mr Trollip lost the bruising contest for DA parliamentary caucus leader, which Lindiwe Mazibuko won.
After Ms Mazibuko ascended to her new role, Mr Trollip was moved to a new portfolio — shadow minister of rural development and land reform, and alleviation of poverty.
Mr Trollip may have felt underutilised in his position, but the DA, which holds six of the 63 seats in the provincial legislature, aims to replace the Congress of the People (COPE), with nine seats, as the official opposition in next year’s general election.
The party has also set itself “very ambitious” targets, Mr Trollip said yesterday, in increasing its support in what has traditionally been a stronghold of the African National Congress (ANC), which holds amajority of 44 seats in the legislature.
“The chances of the DA showing strong improvements in the elections are very, very good,” Mr Trollip said. “We are not one of the provinces identified by the party as one which we hope to win in 2014, but we have certainly been identified as a strategically important province.
“We see our party membership growing astronomically in former ANC strongholds.”
The DA is also looking to build on the gains made in the general election to spearhead its local government election campaign in 2016, when it hopes to snatch the Nelson Mandela metropole from the ANC which Mr Trollip said had overseen a sharp deterioration in living conditions in the province during its 18-year rule.
The conditions in the former Ciskei and Transkei homelands had remained largely unchanged, despite all the delivery promises made by the ANC.
Mr Trollip has been an MP for four years. As the DA’s spokesman on rural development, land reform and alleviation of poverty, he is familiar with problems in the Eastern Cape which he will highlight in his election campaign. Corruption, the collapse of education and health and the widespread unemployment in the province which drives many people to seek work elsewhere as migrants will also be highlights of the party’s campaign for next year’s election.
The DA scored an early victory over COPE last year when former provincial ANC premier and COPE MP Nosimo Balindlela resigned from the party and relinquished her seat in the National Assembly to join the DA.