Hi
Finding you guys was a breath of fresh air and gave me hope in the future.
Well done on putting something significant together, in a short space of time. SA needs people like you, and a party like this. My congratulations.
However, while I decided to support you half way through the first page of your website, the naivety of some of your plans is concerning - and I think that might put a lot of people off, who would otherwise support you. I'll offer some blunt thoughts on that below - which I hope will be taken as constructive.
For example, your SOE "privatisation" plan risks the complete collapse of those institutions, if radical changes are made without due care. We all agree that these institutions need to be urgently fixed, and so I agree with your priority of the issue. But there are some very big questions raised by your suggestion, which you do not answer in your documentation, such as how will a new board of directors be appointed? How will you ensure the new directors will be properly qualified and experienced? How will those directors be practically held to account by shareholders - specifically how can they be removed when necessary? How will all the competent people who have left those organisations over the years be replaced, and how will those new people retained? How will the very high salaries and low productivity of all the employees be rectified? How will the cancerous growth of corruption be removed now that it has taken hold? How will the handing of free shares to the population address any of those issues? On the face of it, your suggestion seems to have more in common with ideas we hear from the EFF, how is it different to their radical populism? Hence my concern. And lastly, on this issue, even though I am a committed capitalist, there have been some examples of cases where the privatisation of essential services leads to very negative outcomes in other countries. Especially where shareholders chase returns, in a defacto monopolistic environment, where people have no choice but to buy (water, electricity and transport are examples). Your suggestion should at least touch on how it will address all these issues IMO.
In the interests of brevity, I won't go into all my other concerns in detail, because I think I have expressed the gist above. I understand that you had limited time to formulate these plans in detail, but the risk is your party gets written off as being superficial, or naive, or populist.
Please do not get me wrong - I am not trying diminish what you have done in a very short space of time - which I think is admirable, but rather offer a general comment on how a potential voter perceives your party, and to perhaps offer feedback to improve your performance in the election - although time has perhaps run out for that.
In the interest of being positive and constructive here are some suggestions of my own - FWIW:
1) Instead of proposing to run the country via a series of radical trendy thought experiments (sorry for being blunt), perhaps find ways to include independent experienced experts in each field in your team, who will be tasked with implementing, or advising on turnaround strategies. A priority in that regard, given that you have nailed your colours to the capitalist mast (which I fully agree with), is retain the services and advice of an international economist who has a sound track record and who fully embraces capitalism (my suggestion would be Martin Armstrong who previously advised Margret Thatcher, and who has a very "interesting" CV). Given the publicity and prestige involved with helping a foreign countries in trouble, you might find these people will work voluntarily with you on some basis.
2) Being adherents to the ideals of capitalism, I would suggest you should make it a priority to measure the disposable income of each economic layer of the population and make it your task to maximise that disposable income on an on-going basis for all.
Disposable income can very roughly be defined as monthly income less the cost of living.
Your task then is to measure and monitor disposable income, with the objective of reducing the cost of living, while maximising the monthly income of all people, across all economic layers, on an on-going basis.
The cost of living particularly should be targeted, because there are many unnecessary drivers in SA which force this higher on a continual basis (thereby impoverishing us all) such as:
a) Perpetually higher rates and taxes
b) Inefficient or unreliable service delivery which requires alternative costs (eg health care, schooling, transport, policing and security etc etc)
c) First world nanny state regulations which are not really appropriate for an emerging African country (eg unnecessary or inappropriate building regulations imported from abroad, which are not relevant in our climate/environment and which force up the cost of housing)
d) Railway system which just doesn't work, which forces all logistics via more expensive trucks
The list goes on...and on...
3) Use the Singaporean policing model of imposing hefty fines, payable immediately, which are strictly and efficiently enforced via the police, to deal with everyday petty crime and bylaw infringements. This will free up the courts to deal with more serious offences, reduce the unnecessary criminalisation of the population, while enforcing proper civil behaviour of society.
4) Implement the Singaporean public housing model which has proven the best scheme of it's type in the world.
5) Ditto for the Singaporean Education system.
In fact given our similar ex-colonial history, with en equally diverse range of endemic cultures, we have a lot in common with Singapore, and can perhaps learn a lot from their amazing success story which started quite recently in the 1950's.
I hope this helps in some way?