ActionSA president Herman Mashaba highlighted on Thursday that putting forward a credible policy offering, or plan of action, that ordinary South Africans can believe in is vital to inspire the “unheard majority” to go to the polls and vote for change.

Mashaba was speaking during the party’s launch of a “ground-breaking policy process” in anticipation of its inaugural policy conference, to be held in September.

He said the plan must make South Africans believe that change was possible, and that their votes could help create a better future.

He noted that while it was “easy” to start a new political party in South Africa, despite the proliferation of new parties, very few have succeeded in providing a credible and compelling alternative that inspired hope.

He said the success rate for new parties was less than 1% and this was clearly seen in the declining voter turnout witnessed over the past three decades.

“In the 2019 general election, of the roughly 36-million eligible voters in South Africa, a mere 17.6-million cast a vote. Put differently, more eligible voters did not vote than those who did,” he said.

He explained that at the heart of the problem was that many of these new parties succumbed to internal leadership battles while failing to focus on the work of putting forward a credible alternative that would take South Africa forward.

He noted that the desire to inspire hope for change in South Africans was what guided the launch of ActionSA’s South African Dream plan in February this year.

“The South African Dream is our vision for an inclusive and prosperous future for South Africa. This is a vision for what we believe a future South Africa freed from the African National Congress (ANC) and led by an ethical and caring government can look like,” he explained.

INAUGURAL POLICY CONFERENCE

In September, ActionSA will hold its inaugural policy conference to solidify its policy offering that will serve as the party’s election platform next year.

The conference will bring together over 600 delegates, representing the party’s structures in all nine provinces.

Mashaba said the policy conference would be the culmination of an “expert-led, public engagement process” that will serve to refine ActionSA’s policy offering and it would solicit inputs from internal structures, but also from South Africans that had the knowledge and skills to enrich the party’s offering.

“We believe that drawing on the views of people with first-hand knowledge of dealing with the challenges we face will ensure that the solutions we put forward are not just based on academic research and international best-practice, but also on real-world experiences,” he said.

Mashaba noted that after spending the past three years engaging countless South Africans about the future of the country, he could say without fear of contradiction that South Africans were not interested in lofty ideals, grandiose speeches or endless analyses of the problems faced in the country.

“They want to know, in simple terms, how ActionSA plans to fix South Africa. What they are looking for is a party that can credibly put forward concrete plans to place our country on a path to a prosperous future. When we launched ActionSA in August 2020, this is exactly what we set out to do. We were not guided solely by a desire to unseat the African National Congress, but to provide an alternative to the failed political establishment in South Africa,” he said.

While the formal part of the public consultation process will commence in May, this is the continuation of a process that started with the wide-scale public engagements held during the People’s Dialogue, he said.