STRAIGHT TALK
13 October 2021
The DA is South Africa’s most pro-poor party. We do best at providing those living in poverty with the things they need most, such as jobs, piped water, sanitation, electricity, education, school-feeding programmes, ECD support, healthcare, safety, and financially sustainable government.
This claim is based on objective measures from third party sources which have no incentive whatsoever to favour the DA: StatsSA, the Department of Basic Education, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), Ratings Afrika, the Auditor General, the CoGTA report on the state of local government (Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs), court rulings.
Jobs. The DA strongly supports social grants for the poor. But we believe that there is nothing more pro-poor than lifting people out of grants and into income. Where the DA governs, job numbers are highest and unemployment is lowest. At 29.1%, the Western Cape has the lowest broad unemployment rate in South, 17.3 percentage points lower than the average for the other eight provinces, according to the most recent Stats SA Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) released in August 2021. Midvaal, where the DA has enjoyed a full majority for an uninterrupted period of 19 years, has the lowest unemployment of any municipality in Gauteng.
Midvaal is also a “shining light of service delivery”. This should come as no surprise, because service delivery and job creation go hand in hand. Businesses, especially smaller operators, like poorer households, rely heavily on government services.