Nonkululeko Hlongwane-Mhlongo, Rise Mzansi’s premier candidate in KwaZulu-Natal, told a meeting that she had the highest regard for the work of the Umgeni mayor and DA candidate for the provincial premiership.
‘I’m a huge fan of Chris Pappas’s work and how he’s able to enter communities and embody their values, as well as how he contextualises the work that he does because that is what we speak about when we speak of active and accountable leaders in this country,’ she said.
She added that Rise Mzansi believed that no single group had all the capacities to deal with South Africa’s challenges. It would need the talents of diverse people to do so.
‘What we say as Rise Mzansi is that we need more people like this [like Pappas] and we know it’s possible because we’ve seen it,’ she added.
She said that she was sometimes concerned for her safety, given the level of political violence in the province.
She said that Rise Mzansi represented an appeal to people to get involved in their own upliftment. ‘My background is in civil society and the advantage I have is that a lot of communities in KZN already know me, not as an individual, but because of the work we’ve done in communities for the longest time’, she said.
Responding to a question about land expropriation, she said that expropriation was a means of acquiring land which was already used, such as a when a road was built. It could be used to facilitate land access to those in need. Her colleague, Professor Nick Binedell, denied that the party had a policy of expropriation without compensation.
Binedell added that the party had not decided on a way forward regarding coalitions: ‘Elections need to happen first and the reason we didn’t go [the multiparty route] is that we want to establish our independence before we talk to anybody else. I think that’s what democracy is about and, in my view, who we might partner with will be subjected to different type of criteria, if it gets to that point.’
[Image: Democratic Alliance, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112523097]