Cape Town - GOOD Party Leader Patricia de Lille continued her voter registration campaign on Sunday with visits to various locations across the Cape Metro in an effort to encourage people to register to vote for the upcoming local government elections.
During the visit to the voter registration station at Zeekoevlei High School in Lotus River, the Good Party was joined by the Africa Restoration Alliance (ARA), Democratic Alliance (DA) and Cape Coloured Congress (CCC) to encourage the Lotus River community to vote on November 1.
De Lille said her party aimed to achieve between 25 and 30% of votes in Cape Town as its initial target while advocating for social justice, economic justice, spatial justice and environmental justice.
She said a key element in its campaign was to reduce the tariffs for water and electricity since municipalities seemed to be making a profit off of these services’ prices, which had become massively unaffordable for the majority of people.
“The stakes are high here in Cape Town. Wherever I go, people complain about the high water and electricity prices,” said De Lille.
Responding to a few of the issues faced by the Lotus River community – such as unemployment, deteriorating infrastructure and crime – De Lille said: “The role of the government, and of a municipality, is to create an environment conducive for the private sector to create jobs. Therefore, any municipality must invest in infrastructure so that the private sector has the conditions to create jobs.”
De Lille also said any policy addressing unemployment had to consider that the unemployed were either semi-skilled, unskilled or had no skills and thus it had to create jobs that catered to these groups in particular.
Lotus River DA branch chairperson Igshaan May said they received positive support from the community with more than 100 people signing up on Saturday and over 50 people on Sunday morning alone at their voter registration station.
ARA member Gereld Andrews said despite only being an 8-month-old party, the ARA had been getting a lot of support in Lotus River.
“All of us in this party are from Lotus River and the rest of Ward 67, so we see the need in the area and those are changes we want to make in our areas,” said Andrews.
kristin.engel@inl.co.za