{"id":10855,"date":"2021-05-22T18:05:17","date_gmt":"2021-05-22T18:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/?p=10855"},"modified":"2021-05-22T16:32:38","modified_gmt":"2021-05-22T16:32:38","slug":"da-believes-early-election-preparation-will-give-it-an-edge-amid-massive-local-government-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\/all-news\/da-believes-early-election-preparation-will-give-it-an-edge-amid-massive-local-government-failure","title":{"rendered":"DA believes early election preparation will give it an edge amid \u2019massive local government failure\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #ff6600\"><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/\">Africa-Press<\/a> &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/south-africa\">South-Africa<\/a>. <\/strong><\/span>With a little more than five months left until the 2021 local government elections set for October 27, Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen says his party has stolen the march on the country\u2019s other political parties as they have long been prepared for the day.<\/p>\n<p>Steenhuisen was earlier addressing the DA\u2019s \u201cTime for Change\u201d virtual rally when he told his party\u2019s supporters that the DA was marching confidently towards October 27 and was ready for the challenge and the contest.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe started our preparations a long time ago, when others were still asleep, and we are ready to take our message to South Africans in every community across the country.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur public representatives are standing by. Our activists are standing by. Our staff members are standing by.<\/p>\n<p>\u2019\u2019We know this won\u2019t be a normal campaign, but nothing this past year has been normal. And the DA has risen to the challenge, consistently, like no other party,\u201d Steenhuisen said.<\/p>\n<p>He said that his party had done its homework, built up momentum and was now ready to take on the ANC in municipalities across the country and to defend their own municipalities.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe list of municipalities in critical condition is now longer than the list of those that still function properly. Service delivery has collapsed in hundreds of towns.<\/p>\n<p>\u2019\u2019Taps are about to run dry in the Eastern Cape. Budgets are being slashed everywhere, from housing to street maintenance to school toilets.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMunicipalities owe billions and billions to Eskom and are on the brink of being disconnected. The massive local government failure in recent years has left many communities almost unliveable. And people have had enough of this,\u201d Steenhuisen said.<\/p>\n<p>He further stated that the poverty that has swept across our country, ruining lives and ripping families apart, should offend and anger each and every single South African.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat is our crisis. That is our number one enemy. That\u2019s what stands in the way of our progress as a nation. And it is a crisis so big and so daunting that our government doesn\u2019t even know where to start fixing it or how.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThirty million South Africans live below the poverty line. That\u2019s half our population. 42% of working-age South Africans don\u2019t have jobs. That\u2019s almost half our adult population,\u201d Steenhuisen said.<\/p>\n<p>He added that the abject poverty affected people in a terrifying way and overshadowed every aspect of their lives as it took away their dreams and threatened their very survival.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe dare not become accustomed to it. We dare not accept it as a given in our society, a problem so big and entrenched that there\u2019s nothing we can do to solve it. Because poverty and unemployment do have solutions. We\u2019re just not doing those things right now,\u201d Steenhuisen said.<\/p>\n<p><b>Political Bureau<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Africa-Press &#8211; South-Africa. With a little more than five months left until the 2021 local government elections set for October 27, Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen says his party has stolen the march on the country\u2019s other political parties as they have long been prepared for the day. Steenhuisen was earlier addressing the DA\u2019s \u201cTime [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":10854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,8,10],"tags":[274,315,275],"class_list":["post-10855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-homepage-english","category-parties","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-south-africa","tag-south-africa-2"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.1 (Yoast SEO v27.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>DA believes early election preparation will give it an edge amid \u2019massive local government failure\u2019 - South Africa<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"With a little more than five months left until the 2021 local government elections set for October 27, 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