In a couple of hours, the Referendum Party will be officially launched, with an online press conference broadcast from their headquarters at the Old Tannery in Wellington. Phil Craig, formerly of the Cape Independence Advocacy Group (CIAG), has chosen to lead the party, which has a surprisingly young roster of candidates.

In most political parties in South Africa, candidates for office tend to be middle-aged or older, with the exception of the EFF and a few members of the DA. But out of the Referendum Party’s six main public faces, four are under 30.

Campaign launch will be at 10:30, streamed at this linked location, and this page will be updated to include the statements offered by party representatives.

The livestreamed event will take questions from journalists, though surprisingly, more attention is coming from foreign journalists than local sources, who have recently adopted a quiet policy of embargoing news related to the secession movement, including refusing to publish anything related to the recent polling results.

Nigel Farage of Brexit Party fame, will be hosting Phil Craig on his GB News channel at 21:30 CAT. This will likely put the Cape independence movement at the centre of the news cycle for the coming several months, and will make it impossible for local news to embargo without appearing to deliberately have done so.

While the previous attempt to mobilise a political party in service of Cape independence has failed, this is not unusual in secessionist movements. The UKIP party in the UK failed to achieve significant success in the UK elections, but their successors, the single-issue Brexit Party, swept the federal EU election polls and placed the group at the centre of the news cycle at a crucial moment to push through the results of the referendum campaign to leave the EU.

While other political parties on the offing in the coming national election are facing a declining ANC, for most voters there is little new on the table. All parties in South Africa can be sorted into Charterist (ANC, EFF, PAC), Liberal progressives (DA, COPE, ActionSA, BOSA etc) and ethnic/culturally focused groups (IFP, PA, MF, VF+).

Cape independence introduces for the first time a new political program which offers real historical change, and if it succeeds, South Africa will be transformed forever, for good or ill, in a remarkable and obvious way.