The African National Congress (ANC) has been lying to South Africans ever since 1994, the Congress of the People's (Cope's) Premier candidate for the Western Cape, Allan Boesak, said on Saturday.

Addressing about two thousand supporters at a rain-spattered party rally in Khayelitsha, he said Cope would deal with the ANC the same way "that we did to PW Botha".

The ANC had been telling people for 15 years that it was ordained by god to be in power forever, but those days were over.

"Fifteen years of being lied to is too long," he said.

"Next Wednesday we will say that 15 years of suffering, after the suffering of apartheid, is 15 years too long."

He said he had told ANC president Jacob Zuma how little had changed in that period, and how the ANC had "betrayed the dreams of our people".

Zuma had not taken part in the United Democratic Front marches of the 1970s and 80s, when people confronted the police, their dogs and their teargas and turned Souh Africa "upside down".

"And I said to him, with the Cope, that's what we will do. We will take this country and we will turn it upside down so that power be given back to the people."

Boesak said he was not threatening anybody, just giving a "little warning".

"We'll do the same to them that we did to [apartheid-era state President] PW Botha, and see where he is now."

Speaking to journalists afterwards, he also drew parallels between the ANC and Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe.

He said Mugabe had begun his descent into despotism by dismembering the judiciary, making light of the Constitution and manipulating the instiutions of democracy.

Those were all the danger signs already visible in South Africa.

"It would be utterly foolish for us to think that that would not be a reality in South Africa if you leave the ANC [in power].

"And the arrogance that is displayed by the ANC in the way that it abuses its power and the way it disregards the needs of the people is exactly the kind of arrogance that we saw in Mr Mugabe."

Earlier, Cope deputy resident Mbhazima Shilowa told the rally that the period of the ANC's deployment of party loyalists regardless of ability would end on election day.

The reason houses stood unfinished was that the contracts were given to "friends" with no capacity to deliver.

"That we have to bring to an end," he said.