As the race to elections intensifies, we have seen a lot of political parties conducting door-to-door campaigns as well as rallies, all these in an effort to woo voters to vote for their differently parties respectively.
While doing so, some political parties meet hostile welcome from communities who believe that political parties only show up during election time and disappear immediately after getting the votes from them.
This was evident when the ruling party, African National Congress (ANC) visited and held a campaign rally in Ga-Rankuwa recently.
The rally which was supposed to be peaceful, quickly turned destructive and resulted into chaos when fuming residents of Ga-Rankuwa demanded that their grievances be addressed immediately.
President Cyril Ramaphosa who was part of the ANC members at the rally tried his best to neutralize the crowd who were carrying placards, demanding answers pertaining to the manner in which the candidate councillors’ process had been handled.
Shortly after the party’s door-to-door campaign, Ramaphosa made his way to a small sports ground nearby where he met mixed receptions as some crowd kept interrupting his campaign speech, while also hurtling insults at the local councillor in the area.
The president tried his best to maintain calm and remain cool despite the distractions, further jokingly saying, “Keep quiet. You are drunk. When it is this hot and you drink alcohol, it is fermenting inside you and drives you crazy”.
Lebohang Tifo who is one of the ANC members in the community expressed disappointment as he thought the president was going to address burning issues in the community which included the issue of councillors in both ward 31 and 32 respectively.
“The problem is they have brought the president and we were expecting the president is going to attend to our problems.
“The processes at ward 31 and ward 32 were nullified because the guidelines were not followed, especially in ward 31. We are not going to accept the ward councillors at ward 31 and 32,” said Tifo.
Resident Lesego Gutvao said residents had been “going back and forth” trying to deal with complaints against their local government representatives.
“We started by closing the IEC [Electoral Commission voting station] because our grievances were not met. Then we went to close the legislature at Sisulu House and Luthuli House, hoping they will attend to them. Even today, we are still waiting,” he said this before adding that the community was “tired of the killings of comrades in ward 32″.
He said one ANC member was shot 22 times at his home, and Godfrey Gauwe was also murdered.
Adding what was bothering him in the community was Sello Mello who had a lot to complain about as far as corruption in the area was concerned.
“We need councillors who listen to the ANC and if they do not, we will refer them to the rules of the ANC,” he said.
Eventually the crowd was brought under control and Ramaphosa continued with his campaign message.
“Let us go out in our numbers . We are going back to Luthuli House to tell them you are going to vote for the ANC,” said Ramaphosa.