ActionSA leader, Herman Mashaba says he is now looking to make his party a national one.
With 27% of voting districts declared, the party is projected to garner 6.6% of votes in Gauteng and 1.6% nationally.
According to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) projection, the former Johannesburg mayor’s newly formed party will take over as the fourth biggest player in Gauteng.
Political analysts say as a result, this will place Mashaba at an advantage in coalition talks in the coming days.
Mashaba says he is already working on starting a national campaign.
“The work of starting a national campaign is already underway because there isn’t a province where you don’t really have people on the ground. That’s why if you follow Action SA, people were looking for us in Klerksdorp, in Mafikeng, in Limpopo and everywhere else. So I think it’s just a question of how Action SA can move as quickly as possible to officially put structures to have a provincial chairperson in the six outstanding provinces,” says Mashaba.
Mashaba has ruled out any coalition with the African National Congress(ANC), saying it is open to talks with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and Democratic Alliance(DA).
“The DA must understand that if they really want to talk to us, we are happy to talk to them because most of our policies and values are not diametrically opposite, but what is fundamentally different between the DA and us – one of our core values is social justice. Our people suffered 400 years under apartheid, our people have suffered under the ANC government, so no one is going to tell us that we cannot really service poor people because they do not pay taxes, it will be an insult.”
The ANC is the only party we have ruled out, but we will only consider arrangements that put the interests of the people ahead of politics and political parties.
— Herman Mashaba (@HermanMashaba) November 2, 2021
In conversation with SABC News on Tuesday, Mashaba speaks about his party’s performance in Johannesburg:
