Cyril Ramaphosa’s supporters tell me that his position as head of the ANC would be untenable if the party scored 44% or below in the May 29 national election. He would face tough calls to quit.
Why 44% and not 46% or 42%? There is not enough time to listen to the details about the number, and these things are rather unscientific at the best of times. It’s best to sip on the cappuccino and prepare for the storm that is likely to unfold.
It is also revealing that his camp sees a particular number that would trigger serious vulnerability in their guy. I know you want to hear about potential successors, but hold on for now. And don’t even consider Paul Mashatile yet. There is not enough time or column space to get into that issue. Ramaphosa may have enough dirt (or nudes) on Mashatile to make SA’s second citizen think of political betrayal.
I can’t make a call yet on the probability of Ramaphosa’s exit after May 29, but what is clear is that we will have the question in the back of our minds every single day of his possible second term.
We have reached the era of the political unknown, financial market volatility and angst across the economy. Algorithms will drive risk metrics, creating market patterns that often ignore the political fundamentals.
The ANC is incapable of generating enough momentum in the last four weeks of its campaign to raise its share of the vote above 50%. It has a limp campaign in its core provinces
Ramaphosa needs to keep a sheet of scenarios in his back pocket as he runs about the country looking for votes so that the decision-making metrics are accessible in the post-May 29 market storm.
I would be surprised if the ANC gets close to the 50% mark. My range is 45% to 48%, with a bias right now on the lower side.
Also, I do not believe a single one of the polls published in the past 12 months. They have understated the ANC’s reach due to bad design and poor methodologies. Also, the media has misreported the results, failing to emphasise critical elements including the size of the polls and field dates, margin of error, and the non-allocation of undecided voters.
Polls are not predictive but a record of sentiment at the time. Shockingly, some of the polls were conducted by Joburg-based first-language English speakers who phoned registered voters in Mtubatuba and KwaNdengezi in KwaZulu-Natal to poll them on whether they liked Jacob Zuma or not.
I do not have the accent to legitimately conduct an interview of that nature without risking triggering psychological biases in the respondents. Even an isiZulu first-language speaker from Joburg would speak with a Gauteng dialect that could introduce a bias of sorts in a rural voter. The polls have been horribly unrepresentative and cannot give an accurate snapshot of provincial nuances.
For example, a 1,500 poll sample might be OK nationally but can never be accurately divided to create a reliable picture of any underlying nuances in each of the nine provinces.
Tired of all the negativity from pollsters, the ANC has commissioned its own one, due early in May. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad — the alternate poll would not create a different reality.
The ANC is incapable of generating enough momentum in the last four weeks of its campaign to raise its share of the vote above 50%. It has a limp campaign in its core provinces whose total contribution to the national picture is diluted by the party’s decline in the most populous provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.
Instead, it is planning to increase its share of votes from Mpumalanga and Limpopo. There are more maize corn cobs there than there are voters.
The ANC is better off putting its resources in the population-dense, high-return areas of Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal instead of travelling to far-flung places like Kimberley, where there are more goats and sheep than voters. I’m told Ramaphosa will be there on May 9. He is wasting his time.
His choice of coalition partners increasingly looks like a matter of the economy vs politics. The idea of the ANC and the DA is growing within the ANC. Also, the financial markets are dead set against an ANC-EFF coalition.
IF the ANC is seriously thinking of marrying the EFF, the markets will go nuts, but will rally should it choose the DA. The picture will be so frightening to the economically literate that even a vague consideration of an ANC-EFF coalition will look utterly grievous. The markets are not representative of anything, but a huge sell-off could sink the economy.
A marriage between the ANC and the DA would be bad in political terms, but popular in business. Marrying the racial and economic establishment with the political elites would turn the country into fertile ground for a populist wildfire. SA’s economic problems are too deep and too structural to be solved in one term, and therefore it would be easy to run a populist campaign against the establishment coalitions in the 2026 local elections, a precursor to 2029.
• Mkokeli is lead partner at public affairs consultancy Mkokeli Advisory
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