Songezo Zibi, the leader of Rise Mzansi, has fingered the political parties in the DA-led Multi-party Charter for SA for doing so purely for financial reasons.
According to Zibi, his party rejected being part of the charter because it is based on narrow principles.
Over and above the funding carrot that was dangled for parties to join the Ccharter, said Zibi, Rise Mzansi refused to join in because of the obsession with ANC and EFF, with little solutions on the table.
The Multi-party Charter is a partnership between seven political parties with a stated intention to “stop the ANC and keep out the EFF” in next year’s general elections.
Zibi was addressing a press briefing on Wednesday in Dunkeld West, Joburg, on the party’s state of readiness for their Policy Convention, billed for October 6-8 in Gauteng.
In his view, although it was almost inevitable that a coalition government is on the cards after next year’s national and provincial elections, Rise Mzansi will not be manipulated into marriages that are built on flimsy reasons.
“The question is what material concessions are you going to extract on behalf of South African people in a way that responds to their conditions [before getting into a coalition arrangement]?” said Zibi.
“I saw the Multi-party [Charter] shopping list, and any political party would like to do that anyway, but the specifics matter. You cannot have those conversations now when parties do not even have manifestos, what are you doing? So, part of it is funder-driven, and I know what I am talking about. So we do not want to be part of that conversation because it needs to go beyond that [funding].”
Zibi said although the DA “loudly” tried to recruit them to the Multi-party Charter, they had flatly refused because the whole arrangement was not genuine.
“We have also been asked by some would-be donors that we will get assistance if we are part of the Multi-party Charter coalition, and that is money we could have got by now if we had been part of that. But it does not work because the very formulation of it is premised on fighting the ANC and the EFF. But South Africans want solutions. To get involved in that kind of arrangement, which is essentially deal-making, does not make sense for us.”
Their stance, however, did not mean that Rise Mzansi would not get involved in a coalition government. But doing so blindly was the real problem.
The Multi-party Charter execution was offside, with its timing wrong, and thus bound for failure.
Zibi revealed that the Rise Mzansi People’s Convention (policy conference) will be attended by approximately 800 delegates at the Constitutional Hill.
The conference will debate matters that fall within six broad themes, namely family, community, governance, economy, nation building and climate change.
These were the issues the party felt resonate with daily bread and butter issues that confront all South Africans.
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