Parties respond to results

Alan Winde, premier elect, DA

The people of the Western Cape have placed their trust in the DA to govern this province with an outright majority.

We are grateful to voters who came out in their thousands to vote on Wednesday May 8, despite the rain and Independent Electoral Commission difficulties, to give us a decisive mandate for the next five years.

We thank you for placing your trust in the DA – we won’t take your vote for granted and will use it responsibly.

We will keep fighting for you, and will deliver on our promise to residents. We will keep growing the economy to deliver more jobs for our people. We will fight for a provincial police service, so that the Western Cape receives the police resources it deserves. And we will fight to run a provincial train service that works and runs on time.

The Western Cape is already recognised as the best province in the country.

Our job for the next five years is to make it even better. We will remain focused on speeding up delivery of basic services, and the best education and healthcare systems in the country.

We look forward to another five years of making progress together.

Bonginkosi Madikizela, DA Western Cape leader

After a grueling campaign, with many challenges the DA emerged victorious in the Western Cape.

This victory is attributed to the voters who braved the weather, stood in long queues in order to ensure we retain the province with an outright majority. Credit must also go to our activists who worked very hard as our foot soldiers on the ground.

This is not the time to gloat, instead it’s a time to reflect, and take in everything our voters said during the campaign. It is time to implement our manifesto with precision, be on the ground and keep our voters informed. There must be less focus internally and we must put them first. We are busy doing proper analysis of these results to see where we can improve.

We have a good track record in the Western Cape, but also have some challenges. Some of these challenges falls within our mandate, in this regard we must go all out without any excuses to deliver on our promises. We must be realistic on what we can do with limited resources, prioritise properly and communicate constantly and consistently with our voters.

We must be under no illusion, this victory is not a blank cheque. We have learned in these elections that we can’t take our voters for granted. I together with my provincial executive, regional leadership, members of Parliament, members of the provincial legislature and councillors must now hit the ground running.

I wish our premier elect, Alan Winde all the best as he prepares for his inauguration. He will get our full support from the provincial executive to execute the mandate given to us by our voters.

Faiez Jacobs, ANC provincial secretary, Western Cape

We want to thank those people who trusted us with their vote. We also want to thank those faithful ANC supporters who stood by us during the past 10 years and who have put their trust in our renewal.

We are also grateful to those former ANC voters who returned and resolved to give us another chance.

We also want to thank our volunteers, candidates and the many people and organisations that assisted us. To all of you, we say thank you, dankie, trammakassie, enkosi.

We won’t let you down.

We pledge that we will honour your trust by going into the Western Cape Legislature as the official opposition that will play a watchdog and activist role.

We also thank the Independent Electoral Commission for managing the elections.

We congratulate the DA on its win but we put Allan Winde on notice that we will be watching them closely to ensure that they govern the province in the interest of all of our communities instead of for a few. It will not be business as usual for the DA.

We will also continue to build non-racialism, unity, non-sexism and equal social economic rights for all. We are still committed to get rid of the divisive negative politics that the DA used in their campaigning to divide black, coloured and white. This scare tactic might have short dividends but in the long term, it produces a bitter harvest. We do not want different groups resenting each other.

Our view, as it has always been, is that South Africa belongs to all its people. We will not stop building one nation that is united through its different groups.

We are encouraged by the election results. Off course we would have wanted to be part of the Western Cape government but we are working towards that.

Our time to govern again is near. We will return as the government of the Western Cape; it’s only a matter of time. To begin that journey we will hold a thorough assessment of what went wrong in our campaign. I have issued an instruction that this process must begin.