Build One SA draws community groups under its banner

Build One SA (Bosa) leader Mmusi Maimane has revealed seven organisations have joined his party to contest next month’s elections as the Bosa Alliance.

Maimane said the parties agreed they wouldn’t seek votes as individual entities but rather as a collective under the Bosa banner. Only Bosa will be on the ballot and the parties will campaign for it in the build-up to May 29.

In return, Bosa will accommodate the parties’ leaders as candidates or in leadership structures of the party.

Maimane said the Bosa Alliance wasn’t restricted to this year’s elections, and that it had been founded with the 2026 local government elections also in mind.

Parties to the alliance, who choose to run in their regions in 2026, will have the benefit of Bosa campaigning for their organisations then.

The parties are:

• The Mopani Independent Movement, based in Limpopo and formed before the 2021 local government elections. It has councillors in the Ba-Phalaborwa and Greater Letaba municipalities.
• Lentswe La Batho, founded by Thabo Diseko in Thabu Nchu in 2022. It has a presence in Free State and the Northern Cape.
• Abantu Integrity Movement, founded by Mkhuseli “Khusta” Jack. It operates in the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality in the Eastern Cape and has elected councillors in that metro.
• Moretele Independent Civic Organization, which operates in Mpumalanga and has elected councillors in Dr JS Moroka municipality.
• New Horizon Movement, an independent, non-partisan, community-based organisation operating in Sedibeng district municipality in Gauteng, with representation in the Emfuleni municipality council.
• Movement of the People, a newly formed local political party operating in the Central Karoo District of the Western Cape.
• African Change Academy, which operates mainly in the OR Tambo district in the Eastern Cape.

Maimane said the parties to the Bosa Alliance have signed a pledge to:

• Restore meritocracy to the public service, and hire high quality teachers, law enforcement officials and technocrats from all sectors of society to rejuvenate, refresh and recapacitate government.
• Protect the constitution if legislation is tabled by other parties that the alliance considers to be a threat.
• Seek to bring in more like-minded political parties so the alliance can become a greater force in parliament.
• Share polling data, voter registration efforts, voting district monitoring and technical capacity building through joint training of the public.
• Where possible, open doors to each other’s donors and in-kind support base so the parties can develop common political resources available for the fulfilment of their shared vision.

When Bosa was launched in 2022, Maimane said the political platform would appear on the ballot paper for the May 29 elections as an umbrella body for community organisations across the country.

“We recognised no one party can stand alone and represent the will of many vastly diverse communities across the country in parliament. Rather it will take smaller groupings of citizens who are community based, and community biased, to all coalesce under one umbrella body,” he said on Wednesday.

“With Bosa as the national anchor party at the rational centre of SA politics, we aim to gather several smaller parties under one banner to mount a united challenge to the ruling class and bring change to our country.”

This is necessitated by both principle and pragmatism, Maimane added.

“We champion the principle of ground-up, grassroots decision-making as the most appropriate form of decision-making. Pragmatically, because trust in politics and politicians is at an all-time low in SA; citizens are demanding names and faces who are from their communities and who are accountable to their communities.”   

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