Neil de Beer wants to be mayor of Cape Town

Dennis TAugust 27, 2021

61 3 minutes read

Neil de Beer, the leader of the United Independent Movement has announced that he wants to be the mayor of Cape Town. De Beer was born in Stellenbosch, in the Western Cape, and joined the uMkhonto we Sizwe in 1989. He is mentioned in a book called Undercover with Mandela’s Spies that was the best-seller last year.

He described himself as a Struggle fighter, a member of the ANC for 30 years and he is a businessman and an entrepreneur but a major activist for the people of South Africa.

De Beer says he came to a point last year when he realised that the wisdom of his ex-father the late president Nelson Mandela was that he died twice, physically and died in the ANC, that’s when he decided that he must again rise, leave what he is doing and get back into the struggle for freedom.

He said he is slowly leaving business because there won’t be time to do two things. Last year he started his movement to find out if the people want to change, and he found out that black, white, coloured and Indians have had enough.
We are all poor, be it in our pockets or in our soul. We are now more racially divided than before 1994, we have forgotten the rainbow nation, we forgot that there was diversity and that made unity. We lost hope and we started again to look at each other across the road and we saw colour but not in a positive way.

“We did not fight for this, economically we are dead, racially we are dead, in hope we have a leaderless state, we have a governing party that is eating each other to death because of greed.

We have a president in limbo who doesn’t know what to do about the people trying to destroy him and to lead a country that is under Covid-19, which is under poverty, crime and 34.4% unemployment,” said de Beer.

“I got up and said I cannot sit here and let a dream become a nightmare, it is not possible. I have international business experience. I have a funding company that funds projects in Africa and you cannot even get funding in South Africa,” he said. He said the country has an ex-president in jail and that is when he said this is not it and he stood up.

“I decided to do what Mandela taught us that if the ANC does to you like the apartheid did to us then do to them what we did to them,” he said. He said as a party they registered as a national party and today he announced he wants to be a mayor.

“My number-one goal is to give crime zero tolerance. We’ve got to bring back law to get an order. We are going to the streets and fight head to head. We will refuse that rubbish and pulverisation of our economy that happens in the crime ridden areas in every part of Cape Town, be it taxi war, gang war whatever makes normal citizens fear their own town.

“Ninety percent of 30 expenditure of our annual budget of R59 billion per year, 90% will be spent on local produce and local expenditure buying resources. Because if we spend that money in Cape Town with the people’s money we can start businesses again. We need jobs in Cape Town by spending money if tax payers in Cape Town.

“We need to focus on youth, youth development will be my pride because we don’t bring them into the system. What future do they have? We will be relooking at our entrepreneurial life-skill development in every single informal settlement and areas in Cape Town where it’s necessary. Take them off the streets, put them back into school, this is hope.

“I will break the two-city mentality in Cape Town, this will be over when I become mayor. The two-city mentality is rich and poor, the people in Bishopscourt don’t care about people in Langa, the people in Rosebank don’t care about the people of Imizamo Yethu, so I am not saying we will take Khayelitsha and upgrade it to look like Constantia but we will give them basic services that humans require.

“People want water not corruption, the slogan of Cape Town ‘the city works for you’, rubbish!, sewerage is flowing in the streets in Lwandle, there are places in Khayelitsha where they don’t have running water or no toilets. And 27 years later this is acceptable to the people? I will change that,” said de Beer.

Source: IOL