Provincial ANC trains its sights on looming election battlefield

The ANC in the Eastern Cape is on a mission to surpass its last four election outcomes to match the 84% support it garnered at the polls in 1994.

After a two-day election strategy workshop in East London, the party is set to hit the ground running in preparation for next year’s general election.

Using analogies from Sun Tzu’s book The Art of War, ANC provincial chairman Oscar Mabuyane called for an aggressive election machinery to “attack” and be ready for an attack from “the enemy”.

“What is the state of our election machinery? Are our elections structures in place in each branch? Do we have a team of trained and capable volunteers in each voting district? Is our machinery in government geared to reinforce our campaign?

“This is what we are asking when we ask is our election army in a condition to attack?

“How is the morale of our soldiers on the ground? Are we still busy with factional fights and bickering amongst ourselves?” Mabuyane said in his address to members of the provincial executive, branch leaders, the election teams and leader of the alliance partners.

“Going to the 2019 general elections, we should say here that if the outcomes of the August 3 2016 elections did not give us a wake-up call, then nothing can wake us up.

“Our people have given us a clear warning in Nelson Mandela [Bay], Kouga and elsewhere that if we don’t change our wayward ways, they will discipline us in the ballot.

“If we don’t learn, then we will go down in history as the generation that penned the obituary of the ANC.”

Mabuyane called for bold decisions to be taken on lessons learnt in the previous election campaigns.
He reiterated the call for unity in the province, the “bedrock” on which the ANC was founded, and said the leadership of the ANC – at all levels – must be exemplary and beyond reproach in its conduct.

The plan is to target the youth as young people make up the majority of the population in the country.

“The youth vote is likely to be the defining vote in these elections and therefore our ability to capture this vote can mean the difference between winning or losing. The urban centres, particularly the metros, will be the most contested.

“We must also seek to improve the quality of our vote – we must improve the voter turnout,” Mabuyane said.

The party must focus on door-to-door campaigns, clear media messages, visibility among the people, strengthen the propaganda machinery and demystify negative perceptions, and the government must aggressively communicate the ANC’s achievements, he said.

Nelson Mandela Bay, Sarah Baartman, Buffalo City and King Sabata-Dalindyebo regions would be the priority areas, he said.

Speaking on the sidelines of the workshop, which ended yesterday, ANC provincial secretary Lulama Ngcukayitobi said the party was confronting its intra-party challenges.

“We are going to deal with all the internal problems, in particular at local and provincial level, so that we can be bold to deal with any questions that the electorate puts to us,” Ngcukayiboi said.

He said the party had regained lost ground in Port Elizabeth. “We are certain we will win in Nelson Mandela [Bay].’’

During the 1994 polls, more than 2.4 million people voted for the ANC in the Eastern Cape, which secured 84% of the vote.