Parties share mixed views on joining the DA’s ‘moonshot pact’

Cape Town - Political parties reacted differently to the proposal made by DA leader John Steenhuisen to create a coalition or what the party refers to as a ‘’moonshot pact’’ before the national general elections, which will take place within the next 16 months.

President of the United Democratic Movement (UDM), Bantu Holomisa, said his party would not be joining the moonshot pact, which aims to bring together political parties in order to oust the ANC from government.

Holomisa said last month, the forum of opposition parties met on the same subject of uniting parties for the 2024 general elections, which said they must meet first and discuss the state of readiness of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) and also the new legislation for independent candidates that was signed on Tuesday.

‘’After we then planned to discuss coalition politics if they were to happen in 2024 at the national level. The DA was present at that meeting, so we were surprised when they said: ‘Hey, let's go to the moon’. So we said we were not ready to be stuffed, just like that,’’ said Holomisa.

He added that ‘’they will come back from the moon because this forum has been working for many years. They should have invited us to a meeting of the forum of opposition parties and tabled their views, not just expected us to react when they just asked us if we were in or not. That's not how we work. We are not branches of the DA.’’

Michael Beaumont, ActionSA National Chairperson, said this election would be the first time since 1994 that the ANC will lose its majority in Parliament, and this means this election is the first one since democracy, where South Africans have the possibility to change the government.

‘’The only way we are going to unseat the ANC is if we, like we have managed to do in the City of Tshwane, build a collective that has the majority of seats in Parliament in order to run the country and return us to prosperity. And, one of the key ways we will be able to build this movement is if we are able to build a viable alternative that can attract support away from the ANC and towards an opposition coalition,’’ said Beaumont.

He said if parties managed to work together to present a united platform that showed the real possibility of unseating the ANC, it would likely inspire exponential voter turnout across South Africa from people who want change but just have not had any reason to believe it can happen.

‘’The 2024 elections provide the first real opportunity to remove the ANC, and we should not allow this opportunity to pass us by. A prosperity pact may just be the missing piece necessary for change in South Africa,’’ he said.

Tertuis Simmers, DA Provincial Leader in the  Western Cape, said the DA in the province fully supports the efforts to remove the ANC from government nationally.

‘’We worked hard to obtain an outright majority in the Western Cape, and our goal is to keep that for the upcoming election. As DA Leader John Steenhuisen made clear during his speech to Congress, a DA outright majority in the Western Cape is a non-negotiable requirement for the DA to get enough votes nationally to anchor the pact and ensure it gets into the national government,’’ said Simmers.

He said across the province, the DA’s structures are working diligently to ensure they do not need a coalition in the Western Cape.

The recently launched political party Rise Mzansi said they do not believe that a mere desire to remove the ANC, which has and continues to fail South Africans, is a sustainable basis upon which to create a coalition that enjoys broad support.

“These coalitions of convenience have shown themselves in various metros and municipalities to be generally unprincipled and driven by a naked desire for power and positions for party leaders. Political parties do not exist in a vacuum where they have a monopoly on determining South Africa’s future, especially not in this time of crisis,” said Songezo Zibi, Rise Mzansi National Convenor