How to read the scores
AI analysis assigns a numerical score from -2 to +2 based on the party's stance relative to state control vs. free market, or opposition vs. support for a specific policy reform.
Policy Commitments
Filter by category to explore specific policy proposals.
RISE Mzansi strongly supports strict meritocracy, independent oversight, and robust anti-corruption measures across all spheres of government, including local. They advocate for ending cadre deployment, transparent procurement, expanded public participation, and strengthening independent institutions to ensure accountability and efficient service delivery.
Key Proposals
- End cadre deployment and establish competitive, transparent, and accountable selection processes for key leadership positions based on merit.
- Reform public procurement with digital technology (blockchain) for transparency, tracking, auditing, and swift punishment for transgressors.
- Create an independent and well-resourced anti-corruption agency.
- Provide easy access to government information and protect whistleblowers.
- Implement a constituency-based electoral system with a right of recall for MPs.
- Expand public participation in oversight through compulsory government transparency and digital platforms for citizen feedback.
- Strengthen Chapter 9 institutions by increasing funding.
- Prioritise placing dysfunctional municipalities under administration until they meet Auditor-General standards.
- Digitise public services to increase access, convenience, and security.
RISE Mzansi strongly supports free state-funded ECD centers and comprehensive basic education reform. They advocate for community-based childcare, skills training, improved teaching quality, curriculum modernisation, and safe school environments, with a focus on nation-building through an Africa-centred and civics-inclusive curriculum.
Key Proposals
- Invest in training ECD practitioners and child caregivers.
- Keep community childcare facilities open for 12 hours (6am-6pm).
- Implement a tax rebate system for single mothers and child guardians earning below R500k per annum for childcare.
- Develop a roadmap for basic education reform, including governance, teacher training, curriculum, and technology.
- Make bilingual education (including an African language) and civic education mandatory.
- Introduce an Africa-centred curriculum.
- Eradicate pit latrines and increase security in at-risk schools.
- Invest in community child and elderly care facilities, leveraging existing infrastructure and volunteers.
- Use the schooling system to build a culture of consciousness and care for people with disabilities.
RISE Mzansi strongly advocates for a decentralized energy system with significant municipal and community involvement, moving away from reliance on Eskom. They propose local solar production, energy cooperatives, and free electricity for low-income households, alongside a balanced energy mix including renewables, gas, and nuclear.
Key Proposals
- Accelerate the shift to a more decentralised energy system allowing citizen participation.
- Increase tax deductions for residential rooftop solar.
- Assist low-income communities to develop their own energy cooperatives.
- Provide free electricity to all low-income households between 9am and 3pm daily once the crisis is resolved.
- Develop a local solar production and installation industry.
- Ensure the majority of existing households and businesses are powered by solar within five years.
- Support a balanced, green energy mix, scaling solar, wind, and energy storage.
- Consider gas and next-generation nuclear (small, modular reactors) for baseload.
RISE Mzansi strongly supports state-led provision of affordable housing and serviced stands, integrated with comprehensive spatial planning. Their approach aims to reduce commuting, improve access to amenities and employment, and prioritizes housing for vulnerable groups, including those with disabilities.
Key Proposals
- Reorientate spatial planning for urbanisation, providing a mix of government housing and serviced stands.
- Reshape cities for affordable housing, shorter commuting, and better access to employment.
- Use government's fiscal and urban planning tools to increase availability of affordable housing within city cores.
- Prioritise appropriate housing (access and design) for families with members with disabilities.
RISE Mzansi supports strict management and reduction of irregular immigration, including stronger enforcement against employers and reforming the asylum seeker system. While easing skilled immigration, they also mandate investigation into the local supermarket/spaza sector for unfair business practices, indicating a focus on regulated local economic activity and immigration control.
Key Proposals
- Dramatically reduce irregular immigration.
- Manage inward immigration through diplomatic engagement with neighbouring countries.
- Reduce pull factors for irregular migration through stronger enforcement against employers.
- Fix the asylum seeker system to stop its use as a de facto permit for economic migrants.
- Clear the multi-year backlog of asylum applications.
- Ease skilled immigration and business/tourist travel by simplifying visas and transfers.
- Mandate the Competition Commission to study the local supermarket/spaza sector and investigate unfair business practices.
RISE Mzansi strongly supports expanding free municipal basic services and indigent relief, emphasizing a 'social wage' and using public resources for the welfare of others. Their proposals include comprehensive measures for food security, income grants, food discount vouchers, free electricity for low-income households, and community-based childcare facilities.
Key Proposals
- Use government income grants and food discount vouchers for grant recipients to end hunger.
- Increase access to piped water in rural areas and land for own food production.
- Implement a three-month conditional job-seekers grant.
- Provide free electricity to all low-income households between 9am and 3pm daily once the electricity crisis is resolved.
- Invest in community child and elderly care facilities.
- Provide tax rebates for single mothers and child guardians earning below R500k per annum for childcare.
RISE Mzansi strongly supports a tough-on-crime approach, emphasizing professionalised and well-resourced police, proactive policing, and efficient prosecution of priority crimes. While acknowledging socio-economic causes and advocating for social support for substance abuse, the core focus is on strengthening law enforcement and judicial systems, with increased community involvement in crime prevention.
Key Proposals
- Professionalise and equip the police, appointing ethical and capable senior leadership.
- Shift to proactive, evidence- and intelligence-based policing, directing resources to high-crime communities.
- Employ and train more detectives and forensic specialists.
- Increase community involvement in crime intelligence gathering and prevention.
- Strengthen Ipid and establish specialised courts for police misconduct.
- Modernise the Criminal Justice System with an integrated IT database.
- Resource police and courts to prosecute priority crimes vigorously, including violence, GBV, organised crime, and public corruption.
- Establish special courts for priority crimes.
- Review sentencing and parole guidelines for serious crimes.
- Investigate decriminalisation of drug usage while prosecuting trafficking.
- Prioritise efficient regulation of alcohol sales and proactive preventative policing in violent crime nodes.
- Create a special unit within SAPS for drug trafficking at all levels (local, provincial, national).
- Prioritise citizen-led intelligence gathering against traffickers.
RISE Mzansi strongly supports a state-led, comprehensive primary healthcare system with accessible municipal clinics, expanded mental health services, and rehabilitation facilities. They prioritize strengthening public health infrastructure and services to ensure universal access, rather than relying on private healthcare, and aim to address corruption and improve working conditions for healthcare workers.
Key Proposals
- Install basic healthcare and wellness facilities within a 15-minute ride of every home, and a major health facility within an hour.
- Expand mental health services to all local clinics, including peer-to-peer support groups, social workers, psychologists, and clinic chaplains.
- Invest in specialised substance abuse rehabilitation centres in all nine provinces, especially in underserved areas.
- Convert local clinics into primary healthcare and health promotion centres offering a range of programmes and support groups.
- Improve working conditions for healthcare workers and root out corruption in procurement.
- Expand training for healthcare workers and consider multi-year work permits for foreign specialists to address shortages.
- Integrate health promotion with spatial planning, land distribution for food production, and school curricula.
RISE Mzansi strongly supports state-led and municipally-supported local economic development, focusing on skills training, and targeted support for small, black, women-owned, and informal businesses. They emphasize improving municipal governance and reducing crime to foster a safe and inclusive business environment.
Key Proposals
- Prioritise placing dysfunctional municipalities in major economic nodes under administration.
- Ensure local and national regulations are easy to understand, efficient, and monitored, with digitised licensing.
- Invest in skills training for one million people without matric, including basic business skills for localised enterprises.
- Implement a three-month conditional job-seekers grant linked to skills development.
- Support black, women-owned, and small enterprises with upskilling and access to capital.
- Improve support and market access for informal businesses.
- Support smallholder/emerging farmers and cooperatives with infrastructure, capital, and know-how.
- Invest in community arts and sports infrastructure to build a vibrant amateur and professional arts sector.
- Create an enabling regulatory environment for small, black, women-owned, and rural businesses in the cannabis and hemp industries.
RISE Mzansi strongly supports land distribution and land justice, explicitly advocating for 'lawful expropriation of such land whenever necessary' for food production and spatial planning. Their focus is on state-led land allocation for housing, food production, and addressing historical dispossession within a generation.
Key Proposals
- Accelerate spatial planning and land distribution, using lawful expropriation whenever necessary.
- Provide land for own food production and small-scale farming.
- Reorientate spatial planning to provide for 'green zones' for stock and crop farming.
- Focus land justice efforts on land distribution rather than restitution.
- Create a framework for long-term spatial planning that accounts for historical dispossession and future environmental, economic, cultural, and social needs of rural and urban communities.
RISE Mzansi strongly supports state-owned municipal transport networks, including expanded and integrated electric public transport systems like trains and buses. They commit to significant investment in repairing and building new road and rail infrastructure at local and provincial levels, also ensuring accessibility for people with disabilities.
Key Proposals
- Repair and renew all provincial and local roads to enable local trade and service delivery.
- Build new road and rail infrastructure for safe and affordable local and regional transport.
- Fully electrify the country's transport system.
- Expand integrated public transport networks (electric trains and buses).
- Build and reorientate public infrastructure, including paved walkways and public transport, for safe mobility for people with disabilities in all communities.
RISE Mzansi's ideology is rooted in constitutional values, aiming for a truly non-racial society by addressing systemic inequalities. They advocate for an Africa-centred education, strengthening the AU, and operationalising AfCFTA, indicating a strong Pan-Africanist and regional integration stance. The '2024 Is Our 1994' slogan suggests a transformative departure from the current political status quo, focusing on progressive, non-conservative macro-politics.
Key Proposals
- Build an equal, non-racial society by ending discrimination and structural inequalities.
- Use race, gender, and other classifications for policy interventions to manage specific inequalities.
- Implement an Africa-centred curriculum in schools.
- Advance Africa's development, peace, security, independence, unity, and regional integration through foreign policy.
- Operationalise the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
- Strengthen the African Union's capacity to resolve conflicts.
- Advocate for global governance reforms to reflect African perspectives.
- Reorientate non-racialism to focus on systemic racism and spatial injustice.
RISE Mzansi strongly supports in-sourced municipal provision and significant public investment in water and sanitation infrastructure. They aim to ensure every home has potable water and every community has sanitation, linking these basic services to spatial planning and community well-being.
Key Proposals
- Invest in network infrastructure to deliver potable water to every home.
- Invest in sanitation infrastructure for every community.
- Ensure every stand, rural or urban, has piped water to enable sanitation and food production.
- Invest in the repair of major water and flood management infrastructure.
- Develop new infrastructure for basic service delivery.