UDM launches manifesto with renewed warnings about the ANC

Against a background of the ruling ANC coming under pressure from the electorate due to poor service delivery, the United Democratic Movement (UDM) launched its 2019 elections manifesto in Port Elizabeth at the weekend, promising better healthcare, investment in education, strengthening the criminal justice system and job creation.

Supporters thronged to KwaZakhele township’s Isaac Wolf-son stadium to hear UDM leader Bantu Holomisa tear into the ANC for being “untrustworthy”, saying President Cyril Ramaphosa was “a decent man, but one person”.

He said: “There is nothing to stop the ANC from deciding to remove Ramaphosa, just as they recalled Thabo Mbeki, replacing him with a person facing 800 criminal charges.

“Today we hear noises from the ANC that the past nine years have been disastrous under the Jacob Zuma administration. Yet the current crew was the very one who said it did nothing wrong.

“They even invented a slogan: ‘We have a good story to tell’,” he said.

“I ask whether we can trust them, given the fact that it was the same organisation that was at pains to defend Zuma and was hellbent on discrediting the public protector and the judiciary.”

In its manifesto, the UDM promised to:

• Introduce a better healthcare, linked to other social government clusters, like social welfare, water and sanitation.
• Make additional funding available to ensure that every school has the required learning resources, delivered on time.
• Reopen teacher training colleges and impose national standards for teachers to provide the highest level of professionalism.
• Bring back school inspectors to deal with erratic attendance by pupils and teachers.
• Professionalise the criminal justice system.
• Launch a massive initiative focussing on job creation through infrastructure maintenance and development.

Said Holomisa: “The UDM believes for the development of the SA and African economies to take place, it makes sense to gradually cease the mass export of raw materials, so jobs are created locally through homegrown processing and manufacturing.

“There must be a paradigm shift in the way that we think of job creation and focus on the empowerment of our youth to be wealth creators of the future .”

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