Eusebius McKaiser
If it were up to the ANC, you and I wouldn’t vote on the basis of the party’s local governance record later this year. If we did that, then the party would obviously take a massive hit because local government is in a shambles.
The ANC probably wishes voters to vote on the basis of identity politics, nostalgia, a very generous assessment of its governance record, plus instinctive disapproval of the political alternatives.
But what is the basis on which we vote? The short answer is that we simply do not know. In the absence of scientifically rigorous data, we are left guessing, really, and that makes the job of political parties harder too because they need good instinct when campaigning. Some do internal research, yet some past campaigns have been so clumsy that one wonders about assertions of rigorous internal polling.
Take the recent tactics of the ANC. It has been at pains to convince us that the DA is a party of racists. This refrain is aimed at alienating black voters from the official opposition by appealing to black people’s daily experiences of anti-black racism. The idea is that if the party can reinforce perceptions of the DA as racist, then it won’t lose many more voters to that party.
This is a crude tactic that betrays a lack of strategic complexity. The tactic is weak on several grounds. Firstly, president Jacob Zuma already showed us that he takes racism no more seriously than the DA when he declared institutional racism to have been defeated in the 1990s already.
For a split second, I thought I was hallucinating, and in fact, watching an interview with Uncle Joshua Doore, aka FW de Klerk. So, the party has lost credibility when it comes to discourse on racism.
Secondly, the ANC is more blameworthy than the DA for the deep structural racism that proliferates throughout our society. Sure, racism demands every single one of us to fight against it if we have any moral sense, but specifically in the political arena, the ANC cannot escape the brutal truth that it has had almost 22 years of enormous constitutional powers with which to do something about racism.
It hasn’t done so nearly adequately, despite some impressive lawful powers it has been enjoying, and which powers could have effected meaningful structural change by now.
The lesson, for political campaigning, is this: the ANC should stop the simplistic appeal to black voters to regard the DA as racist. The ANC must, on the facts, try to defend its record in government. It needs to either claim and try to prove that its local government record is better than us critics imply, or it must try to argue that expectations have been unreasonable all along. It should do so while humbly confessing that local government has been a site of cronyism, and corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy, before then begging us for more opportunity to govern, and offering an unlikely but ambitious plan to overhaul service delivery at the local level.
But the party won’t do the latter. Banging on about racism is easier than defending your record in government. And that is why government is not in a hurry to announce the election date.
Once it does, it will be confronted by further campaign complexities. The EFF is a “known unknown” factor in this election. Local elections are different to national elections (despite many people wrongly plotting them on one graph when looking to spot trends). It is possible, for example, that a voter who is excited about the EFF’s national role, like its impressive parliamentary strategy, might not be keen to have an EFF local government in the area they live. Or not?
Whether the EFF’s national debut success guarantees a repeat of that success locally, only time will tell. But the implication for the ANC is that it cannot simply appeal to nostalgia or identity or preying on racism associations with the DA. The EFF isn’t the DA, and so doesn’t have the same historic baggage and negative associations with its brand.
And so, while some of us care about identity politics, even at the local level, in areas like Rustenburg, for example, the ANC will be engaged hard on what it has done for the unemployed and exploited workers in the region. Identity politics won’t help. And the EFF, rather than DA, will be the serious electoral threat in many parts of the poorest provinces.
Should you be depressed by this electoral challenge if you’re an ANC supporter? Not really, unless you’re drunk on power, rather than a genuine democrat. The elections constitute a critical accountability mechanism, and since no party has a right to govern until Jesus comes (sorry to break the news, Number One), it is healthy to ask the electorate what it makes of the ANC’s governance record over the past five years.