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This past three days, I have concluded a highly successful visit to the Eastern Cape province alongside ActionSA Provincial Chairperson, Athol Trollip, where we held over five community meetings, visited three schools, engaged with principals and helped register new voters. 

The visit to the Eastern Cape affirms that ActionSA is growing in leaps and bounds and clearly disrupting the status quo across the country. We are able to attract diverse support from various communities who all share our vision of a more inclusive and prosperous South Africa, which places us in a good position as we enter the 2024 election campaign. 

The growth of ActionSA has clearly attracted the attention of the ruling party and our opponents who tried to intimidate our members wherever we went in the province or conducted door-to-door campaigns ahead of our arrival. At one incident in Makhanda, the ruling party even attempted to disrupt our meeting - but we went ahead outside the building as we will never be intimidated or stopped from our mission to fix this country. 

My visit to the Eastern Cape followed the same principles of the People’s Dialogue out of which ActionSA was born by listening to residents in each and every community we visited. On Thursday morning, we started the tour by visiting Kwazakele High School in Nelson Mandela Bay where the principal was held at gunpoint last year. Outside we engaged with the community about their concerns about school safety and quality education and presented our solutions to fix the issue. 

From there, we visited Kariega where the historic Allan Ridge Community Hall have been vandalised to the ground due to a lack of policing and maintenance before engaging with members of the Nelson Mandela Bay business community in the evening. On Friday morning, we started with a business breakfast in Saint Francis Bay before travelling to Sea Vista where we met with the principal of Sea Visa primary and held a well-attended community meeting in the afternoon. We ended the day with a community meeting in Jeffrey’s Bay in the evening. 

In Makhanda, we held a successful meeting with the business community on Saturday morning. In the afternoon we met with parents of the Nathaniel Nyaluza School which had the first black isiXhosa principal 70 years ago but today is a shell of its former self due to lack of maintenance, and in the afternoon, we held a community meeting which the ruling party attempted to disrupt despite booking the venue, but we went ahead outside regardless which was very well attended. 

I wish to extend my gratitude to ActionSA Eastern Cape Provincial Chairperson Athol Trollip and his team for all the preparation that has gone into the visit. It has truly been highly successful to engage with voters across the spectrum on the difference ActionSA aims to deliver. 

ActionSA will build on the momentum of our Eastern Cape visit to mobilise as many South Africans as possible to register to vote in the 2024 elections and take action to remove the ruling party from government. We can fix the country and create a better more prosperous country for all South Africans living in the country. 

Issued by ActionSA President Herman Mashaba