Beyond the DA, the Freedom Front Plus (VF+) has already confirmed it will be supporting Cape independence in the 2021 elections, as have the Cape Coloured Congress (CCC), and, naturally, the Cape Party. In 2016, veteran author RW Johnson wrote about the possibility of an independent Cape. Phil Craig is a family man, a serial entrepreneur and a co-founder of the Cape Independence Advocacy Group.
The choice of company was significant. One thing is certain, the next few months are going to be very interesting indeed.
A third are black and about half are colored (i.e. The independence movement itself largely failed to grasp the DA link. I can’t change that but in the Western Cape we can try and get the government that we vote for.
The Cape Party was formed in 2007 and has been contesting elections on an independence ticket since 2009. So, the Western Cape produces 13.9% of South Africa’s GDP. When the majority of your own voters want independence, and two thirds of them want a referendum, you can hardly preach democracy and then simply ignore them. But I think that times are changing and we certainly seeing all around the world the expression of desire to be independent, and let’s see what happens in South Africa.
Read also: Alec Hogg: Cape independence – not so wacky?
When it came to coloured voters, however, 58% of them felt they would be better off in an independent Cape, yet only 39% supported the idea.
We’ve seen since 1994 that ideologically and politically there is a stark divide between what the Western Cape wants and what South Africa wants.
With only 29 percent of the vote, the ANC has been able to impose its will on the province.
So, what now for the DA? The Cape Party stands for greater economic and political independence for the Cape. I’ve got young children. The next phase in their campaign is to transition support from social media on to the streets, which will initially involve encouraging supporters to publicly display independence symbols, before progressing on to public events.
But polls suggest that support for the idea is growing fast.
The DA itself focused on its national ambitions and was just emerging from its disastrous flirtation with racial populism. I suspect the latter is probably more likely, or even, we have to get a fair way down the route of the latter before the South African government buckles.
Indeed, is not a people’s referendum the very purest form of democracy? The Cape Independence Advocacy Group is a political pressure group that is hoping to help separate the Western Cape from the rest of South Africa. The poll also suggested that the CIAG’s targeted threshold of support required to win an independence referendum, was very close to being met among both black and white voters. The poll also investigated why people wanted independence. It’s interesting because a lot of people watching this are probably thinking, ‘oh no, this Phil guy is nuts. As one economist put it to me, look, effectively it would be a giant special economic zone for South Africa. Apart from the 35.8% of voters who already support independence, a further 10.2% of voters were only “somewhat opposed” to it, while the poll also established that voters were unusually open to favourably shifting their position.
Both the Cape Party and CapeXit favour Swiss-style direct democracy, with both organisations wrongly projecting their own ideological affinities on to independence supporters, the majority of whom almost certainly could not care less.
I think this is just a question of self-preservation.
So, at what point does it cease to have the capacity to govern anyway? A few days ago, the results of a poll conducted in the Western Cape by Victory Research — one of South Africa’s most respected polling organizations — were released. The people of the Western Cape have never given the ANC majority in 26 years and we have a situation where the party who got 28% of the vote is dictating how the country must be run to the people who got 55% of the vote. The party will come under increasing pressure to hold a referendum on secession from the rest of South Africa. We’re a political pressure group so we’re not looking for power ourselves. We’re never going to break up the country.’ How does one actually dispel the view that anyone who wants independence of the Western Cape is a crackpot? If it is not going to be utterly hypocritical, at some point, when called upon to do so, the DA Western Cape premier is going to have to call for a referendum.
One DA source described the party as having been “emboldened”, stating that, from an independence perspective, the party was definitely moving in the right direction. And whilst the economist in question lived in South Africa, they were fairly positive of Cape Independence and the argument was, when South Africa gets to the bottom of the cycle and is in deep, deep trouble – do you want a wealthy or a poor nation next door? If the Western Cape does manage to secede, then August 2020 will have been the watershed moment. Look, we don’t have to speculate on that. I think it’s fair to say the Cape Independence certainly isn’t the DA’s Plan A.
In contrast, 75% of white voters felt they would be better off and 65% of them supported independence. Secondly, the majority of people thought independence just wasn’t possible.
So, look, I think I’m just an ordinary person who really kind of hoped that other solutions were going to come along and they didn’t come along, and then we’re in a situation where somebody’s got to step up, or a group of people have got to step up.
When faced with the inevitable response from the ANC that the issue is a racial one, our politicians can simply refer to the demographic realities described above. It’s abdicated its responsibilities around security; it’s abdicated all its responsibilities around education and health, and some economic obligations. The independence campaign has been driven by a handful of small voluntary organisations, with the majority of even its own supporters questioning whether independence was possible. For a number of years the DA just didn’t talk about it as a part of our activities.
As is almost always the case with Western Cape politics, the coloured vote will be decisive. Whatever results they would find were not going to be as easily waived away as were those of VirtuCall the previous year.
We’ve got nothing at all against South Africa. Listen to the story of Cyril Ramaphosa's rise to presidential power, narrated by our very own Alec Hogg.
During August, while the poll results were being analysed, and in response to the attempts by some to portray independence as legally or politically impossible, several legal experts weighed in on the independence debate, establishing that independence was in fact legally possible. Thirdly, independence was primarily perceived, once again with a heavy helping hand from its opponents, as a white project, driven and supported by an unenlightened minority, secretly harking back to some form of neo-apartheid, or volkstaat. So look, at some point they’re going to have to engage, and privately they do behind the scenes.
Then there’s a civic rights organisation, there are two actually, but the main one is CapeXit. Naysayers should keep one word in mind: Brexit — a slap in the face to the forces of gigantism and centralization. The Western Cape’s linguistic, cultural, ethnic and ideological divergences reinforce the argument for independence.
Liberated from a command economy, the Cape would be free to pursue its destiny, elect its own government and hold it to account. The media paid it scant attention, no major political parties supported the idea, and even those that were sympathetic, were half-hearted in their attempts. As David Shapiro says, a split would most certainly hurt South Africa economically as “we’re all integrated”. Victory Research is a highly respected polling organisation, and their chief executive, Gareth van Onselen, has very close links with the DA. Most of the Cape’s adult population consider themselves capitalist. We’re not going to get one as part of South Africa. I was the only Trump supporter among the olive-pickers, Slot machines and psychotherapy in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
The Western Cape’s Premier, Alan Winde of the DA, is entitled to call for a referendum, and in the event of a vote in its favor, to request it formally. 47% – so all but one in two would like to see a referendum on independence. Scotland would be a perfect example of that where the UK government recognised the people of Scotland had independent stirrings and granted the referendum. The Western Cape economy, as it currently stands, is equal in size to the economy of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe combined.
Secession is inherently a political act, the circumstances unique in every case, but the one non-negotiable is the clear democratic will of the seceding people — in this case, Western Cape voters.
Sources inside the DA are already reporting that growing calls for independence are directly affecting attitudes and policies. If the ANC’s affirmative action aspirations were fully implemented in Scotland, as a point of comparison, the arrangement would lead to 90 percent of jobs in Scotland being held by English people, as 90 percent of UK citizens are English. Fundamentally, people want a DA government. What will this shift in power mean for trade and international relations?
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