Build One South Africa (Bosa) has secured the required signatures to take part in the 2024 national and provincial elections.
“I am here to tell you that Bosa, in the 2024 elections, will be on all national ballots, including provinces. We are today submitting 140 000 signatures to the IEC (Electoral Commission of South Africa).
“We are here to say to the IEC that you can set up many rules, you can make it difficult but we will prove you wrong at every step,” party leader Mmusi Maimane said outside the offices of the electoral body in Tshwane on Thursday.
Political parties and independents wishing to take part in the 2024 elections have until Friday to submit candidate lists and pay their deposits by 5pm.
New parties and independent candidates have to submit a certain number of signatures to contest the elections.
Independents candidates are required to submit 1 000 signatures. New parties need between 10 000 and 13 000 to take part in the national elections and between 4 000 and 8 000 in provincial elections.
Maimane said the requirement for his party was 60 000 signatures.
He said Bosa had secured 140 000 signatures, indicating the support the party enjoyed among South Africans.
“We are grateful to the people of South Africa for giving us this mandate and we will endeavour to run a clean and hopeful campaign to inspire millions of people who are tired of the status quo and want real change.
“By deadline, that number would have equally increased as I am sending resources to all provinces.”
Maimane said his party had publicised its candidate lists late last year.
“We made it an open process for people to interrogate the lists. I am grateful to announce today (that) Bosa will field over 120 candidates on all lists in South Africa,” he said.
“In essence, we say to the people: ‘We are submitting 19 lists to the IEC,’” he said, referring to one national to national list, nine lists for regional to national and nine regional to regional.
“All of those lists will be available not only on the IEC website but I want to make sure they are available on Bosa’s website, so that if you want to know who is who, you can interrogate and see if any of them are charged under state capture.”
He said the candidates on the lists were ethical leaders. Each of them had collected 1 000 signatures from communities before they had been allowed to stand for election.
“When we go across the country, we will show the calibre of people that are there. In due course, Bosa will announce premier candidates in all provinces.”
Maimane said his party would deploy 1 000 full-time “champs” to conduct door-to-door campaigns between now and the elections, May 29.
“If we are able to get signatures, wait until we arrive on election day. We will show you South Africans are committed to voting for Bosa.”
Maimane said that raising funds for his party had been challenging and that it had launched crowdfunding to help raise money.
“As required by law, we have disclosed all donations received that exceed R100 000, which is made public each quarter. While we have received a number of donations exceeding that amount, there have been countless more donations which were less than R100 000,” he said.
“To date, we have raised several million rand in funding, most of which were small donations from ordinary South Africans who believe in the Bosa vision. We wish to thank every one of you, and we will use these funds to run our national election campaign.”
Cape Times