COPE needs to update policy to resuscitate: Analyst – SABC News

Political analyst Dr Lilly Phokontsi says for the Congress of the People (COPE) to resuscitate, it needs to work on its policy and ensure it addresses South Africa’s current challenges.
This follows COPE’s Co-founder and leader, Mosiuoa ‘Terror’ Lekota’s burial in Bloemfontein on Saturday.
Teboho Loate is currently serving as the acting party leader.
In the 2024 elections, COPE received 0.09% of the votes, losing all its parliamentary seats.
Phokontsi says it is very difficult to determine the party’s future.
She says, “We have seen how they have performed in the 2024 elections, COPE was destroyed by its own self because there were two things I have observed, number one, there was no strategy to say how do we go forward as a party after breaking away from the ANC (African National Congress) and most of the time they focused on the infighting, fighting for power, who is leading and who is not, that there was opportunism that goes with the party.”
Phokontsi says, “We know that there is Ntate Loate who is currently the leader, but how COPE resuscitates it remains a mystery. They really need to work hard if they are to do anything. The other thing they will have to look at is the issue of their policy, there is nothing new in their policy compared to what you would find  in the Freedom Charter, so they need to work on their policy to address and to try to focus on the current challenges that South Africa is facing maybe in that way they will be able to resuscitate, they must also look at the number of parties that are out there, the contestation for power in South Africa is big.”
She adds, “COPE had a lot of internal fights, remember there was once a press conference called where journalists were hoping to get information about COPE but instead we saw the exchange of fists, the problems within COPE where deeper than what we can just imagine, they we deeper and the depth was something else so what we see it was just the cover on top.”
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