As the race towards getting enough signatures to have parties' pics on the ballots speeds up, Duduzane Zuma is looking to make a mark on the world of politics this year with the All Game Changers (AGC) party.
He will have more than just the many issues our country is faced with to deal with as he must also contend with breaking away from underneath the shadow of his father, former president, Jacob Zuma and the associations this connection comes with.
AGC has already come out and firmly disagreed with uMkhonto weSizwe views around LGBTQI+ rights. The connection between Duduzane and his father is not one that he is too concerned about.
“People have their minds made up. They either like me or they don't like me for whatever reason. The colour of my skin, my name, my surname, my experiences, and those who don't like me, I'm not here to convince them to like me.
“All I'm saying is we have a problem in this country. There are a lot of dire, poverty-stricken people in this country we need to get them out of that poverty belt. We need to swell up that middle class, and I'm that guy that will be able to do it.”
Duduzane reaches out to Drum Magazine to unpack parts of his manifesto and to impart what he envisions for South Africa and how he might go about achieving all these things should he be afforded the opportunity.
“What we wanted to do is just to show the practicality and how we're going to approach implementation. I think a strong key point would be the land question.”
AGC on land reform
The AGC manifesto speaks about the land question being different to how everyone else views it, which Duduzane thinks is very realistic and the only way that we'll be able to get through it and that's with a willing buyer and a willing seller.
Duduzane thinks that once land is taken away from people the economy is going to collapse because we fit into a global economy that's based on land and land ownership.
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“We understand the history of the land in South Africa, ownership, and disposition and those issues have to be addressed. But if we're going to address it in land grab style, expropriation without compensation, it's not going to work.”
The energy crisis and infrastructure
The AGC is aiming at achieving the redistribution of land with compensation. To address this, however, he concedes to the pressing matter of our energy crisis.
“Stabilizing the power grid and focusing on using coal as our main source, as you always have whilst we ramp up the renewables, energies programs. We can't be taking power stations offline. We can't ignore coal, which is a very relevant and abundant resource in our country in favour of trying to please the rest of the world. Let's sort South Africa first. Let's stabilize using the assets and the resources that we have.”
He's also considered South Africa’s GDP multipliers being our ports, airports and roads.
“Infrastructure development is high up on the agenda. If we don't have a system that has got our roads, our rail and our ports, as well as our airports, you know, coming from the freight perspective, railing, flights, we don't have an economy.”
Maintaining this infrastructure will be of utmost importance with an emphasis on things at a municipal level.
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“We know we're going to get it right,” he vows.
We need jobs and a drop in crime.
One of the biggest talking points enshrined in his party's manifesto is dealing with unemployment.
“As we said, creating job opportunities is the reindustrialization of our economy. So, reintroducing and reinvesting and making a deliberate concerted effort to get manufacturing up, mining up and reopening up textile plants.”
He has thoughts on trying to make South Africa a better place to live.
“[We need to deal] with crime to have some sort of investor confidence. We also need our society [to be] confident in being safe in our country for men, women, children and whoever else comes to visit our shores.
“We must have an effective policing system, a law enforcement system. The judiciary needs to be up to speed. There are a lot of excuses on why everything's not working. We need to hold ourselves to a higher level of thinking, a higher level of delivery and accountability."
This is a developing news story.
