By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
African National Congress (ANC) Secretary General Fikile Mbalula has promised that efforts would be made to find a solution to the housing problems in Alexandra.
Mbalula said they first realised that there was a lack of land in Alex and then set up a place called Tsutsumani so that the many people in Alex would also have a place to call home.
“They lied and said we promised to build a million houses here, but there is not enough land here,” he said.
Mbalula also took a swipe at former president Jacob Zuma and called him a liar.
“He is an old man who loves lies. We need to show him that those who go to Zuma are criminals and also liars, just like him,” he said.
Mbalula was speaking at a rally launched the Peter Mokaba Volunteers Programme which is a youth driven campaign programme aimed at increasing visibility on the ground and convincing an increasingly disillusioned electorate to return the liberation movement to power.
The event was also attended by ANCYL president Collen Malatji and Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi.
In his address to the members, Malatji blamed Zuma for the ANC’s decline.
He said, Zuma was “the first mistake we made, we gave a Grade 2 dropout a country to lead for 10 years.”
He stressed that young people must now apologise to the citizens for “Zuma’s failures” to address the issues facing the county when they do door-to-door campaigns.
Malatji said it was now their duty as a league to apologise to the country for the mistake and try to correct it.
He also admitted that the ANC was not perfect and had its own mistakes.
“That’s why when you go door to door, you must first apologise to the people of South Africa and say the first mistake we made was to give a school dropout a country to lead for 10 years.
“We will never do that again. We apologise on behalf of the ANC. Now this man has taken uMkhonto Wesizwe, which belongs to Nelson Mandela, to uMkhonto Wesisu (stomach) to continue the looting of the movement,” he said.
Zuma served as the fourth president of the democratic South Africa from 2009 to 2018.
He then resigned in 2018 after he was approached by the ANC leadership to quit, following his alleged involvement with the Gupta brothers, the Nkandla saga, and state capture.
Lesufi told an ANC Youth League rally in Alexandra that the ANC government will end unemployment in the shortest possible time through various programmes including the reskilling of the province’s unemployed youth.
He was speaking in his capacity as the ruling party’s provincial chairperson and said the mass jobs programme will cover even thousands of youth he said were unemployable as they’re uneducated and unskilled.
“The Gauteng government will take you to FET and while you are there getting training we will pay you three thousand five hundred and give you a job when you complete,” said Lesufi.
Lesufi said his government will be seeking some fourty thousand youth in the coming work to take up paid internship opportunities.
“We want all those who have graduated, all young people who have got qualifications we are centralizing the internship programs, we are centralizing all the learnership programmes. We are looking for fourty thousand young people who are qualified, we are taking you to government,” said Lesufi to loud cheers at the pact Alexandra stadium.
The ANC’s top seven leaders were also on a campaign trail this weekend to mobilise support for the elections.
President Cyril Ramaphosa accused the Democratic Alliance (DA) is trying to sell South Africa to the United States.
DA wrote a letter to the United States government to seek them to come and oversee the lecetins in May.
On the letter to the United States Government seeking them to come and observe the South Africa’s elections, Ramaphosa says the DA has another agenda of selling the country to other global superpowers.
“The DA’s letter to the United States government is quite disingenuous and it is almost trying to sell our country to other powers in the world. And we have regional organizations in the world like SADC, AU and have the UN as well. They always come to monitor our elections and now for a non-state entity to sell our democracy.”
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Video Courtesy of MYANC.