It is almost time to exercise your hard-fought democratic right to decide who will lead you or represent your interests in the City Council.
Many of you are fed up with our establishment political parties who seem to put the interests of the party leaders or the party first. You have been disappointed time after time with broken promises or just wanton corruption, unaccountable leaders or gross incompetence.
The situation has become so dire that you are thinking, ‘is it still worth it to vote’. There is no alternative for you to consider & you are contemplating to rather go away and enjoy the long weekend or enjoy the holiday gifted by #CR17. Let me be honest, about a month ago I was also in that state of mind because of the reasons alluded to above. I issued divorce papers to the political party that was my home but just continued to disappoint me over & over again.
However, just more than a month ago I decided to make this bold (some would say daringly stupid) decision to put my hand up and say again ENOUGH is ENOUGH & decided to enter the ring of local government politics. When I looked at the offerings of establishment political parties and who their mayoral candidates were and then I just listened to the noise with no substance of an offering by others I said to myself, “Rod, this is your last chance to go make a difference in the lives of our people’
I put everything I was busy with or planned to do on hold and then decided to put a CREDIBLE ALTERNATIVE offering for the people of Cape Town together. I led the civil society organisation that I formed in 2016 with a few others, into local politics. I did so because I thought that it was time to go show those who we marched against, HOW IT COULD BE DONE. With a small team I worked exceedingly hard to get an entity registered with the IEC, drafted a constitution, had a logo designed, cajoled a group of people to be candidates, launched this entity, drafted a manifesto & policy papers, tried to get people to donate some resources to assist (there was not much of this forthcoming except lots of good-lucks, A MASSIVE THANKS TO THOSE WHO DID DONATE). Now we are actively going out to get the message of our offering out there with my sleeping patterns massively disturbed
Our offering is simple,… we want to do everything to ensure we all live in a HUMANE, CARING, CAN DO & ENTERPRENEURAL CAPE TOWN with equity & the values charter of the #SA1stForum being its rockbed.
So to you who are undecided or are veering towards not voting at all, my appeal is DON’T do that. That is precisely what they want you to do so that THEIR supporters can go and vote for them again.
I would obviously want you to vote for #Ca1st on 1November because I wholeheartedly believe we have a CREDIBLE OFFERING for Capetonians. However, go into that booth and EXERCISE your democratic right to vote (even if it just to go spoil your ballot) .