Cape Town - The newly established Africa Restoration Alliance (ARA) is gearing up to take over a significant number of wards in Cape Town as it is contesting for the first time in the local government elections.
The party, established in November last year, launched its manifesto at the weekend in Mitchells Plain where it revealed that it would be contesting close to 1 500 wards nationally, including in the city.
ARA’s mayoral candidate Grant Classen said the party had adopted and have committed to work towards “seven non-negotiables” which would be implemented in wards.
These included access to superior hospital care and service delivery, lower electricity bills, a taxi protection programme, community policing, new jobs, land equity and crime free schools. He said all these had an objective to provide jobs.
Classen said the party’s ward candidates, are not politicians but humanitarians, prepared to take the mandate forward and ensure implementation.
Those selected were certified to have been involved in humanitarian work to ensure that they were driven by serving the people, he said.
“We have put up these non-negotiables because we know that every manifesto is nothing but a whole bunch of promises, so from the day we launched the party we developed these non-negotiables that we bind ourselves to implement in wards.
“We have chosen the non-negotiables because these are the plagues in many of the municipalities we have visited.
“We know that only a few municipalities are working and most of them have failed the people tremendously,” he said.
Classen said taxis as primary public transportation were currently unregulated on the roads, with no accountability by owners and drivers. ARA would implement a taxi protection programme which would among others ensure that all taxis had trackers to foster monitoring and accountability.
To lower electricity bills, Classen said, the ARA would “get the finances together” to build two power stations and provide people with electricity tariffs they can afford.
Clinics must be instituted to run for 24 hours and must be manned with more doctors and nurses to take the pressure off mainline hospitals, he said.
ARA supporter Bigman Jahmo said ARA would be the champion of people’s solutions post-November 1.
“We need a different local government system to lead our people on the ground,” he said.