No-one enters an election race with the aim of losing it. Certainly not a governing party and one that has been in power for several decades.
So it should not be a surprise to anyone that in his video message to the participants at the ANC national election strategy workshop held in Ekurhuleni on Saturday, President Cyril Ramaphosa sounded overly optimistic.
“This election is ours and victory is certain ... We are not campaigning to go into coalition, we are campaigning for an outright victory,” he said.
But the reality is that even the most loyal of ANC leaders and activists accept that the damage to the party’s brand has been too severe for them to expect an outright majority from next year’s general election.
The party’s approach, following this weekend’s workshop, will probably be to throw every resource in its disposal at keeping its share of the national votes above 50% while quietly preparing to enter into post-election coalition talks with amiable smaller political parties.
What is becoming clear is that the ANC has as little appetite to get into bed with the DA as the DA has for forming the next government with the ANC.
The idea that a Ramaphosa victory at the last ANC national conference would strengthen the hand of “moderates” and “reformists” within the ruling party, paving the way for a “centrist” and largely pro-business ANC-DA coalition government, has proven to be false.
Instead, next year’s election will most likely be about choosing between two pacts — one spearheaded by the ANC and the other led by the DA.
DA leader John Steenhuisen emerged victorious from his party’s own internal election last month and immediately started preaching the virtues of his moonshot pact to like-minded parties.
Converts are hard to come by, especially because the DA has not always enjoyed sustainable and cordial relations with partners it has formed coalition governments with in local government. But the party is optimistic that many of them will eventually warm to the idea, mainly because the alternative, it says, would be to hand power back to the ANC.
However the unco-ordinated and even openly hostile manner in which the DA and its potential moonshot pact partners handled the Johannesburg mayoral vote on Friday is a reminder of just how far apart from each other they remain.
While ActionSA and other parties backed Funzi Ngobeni to take on the ANC-EFF backed Kabelo Gwamanda in the race to be mayor, the DA insisted on Mpho Phalatse as a third candidate.
The result was an easy victory for Gwamanda and a return of an ANC-dominated coalition government in the City of Johannesburg.
Back to next year: The ANC will be going all out for an absolute majority with the hope that, if it fails, it would still have won enough votes to need just a handful of seats from a few smaller parties to be able to form a government.
The uncoordinated and even openly hostile manner in which the DA and its potential moonshot pact partners handled the Johannesburg mayoral vote on Friday is a reminder of just how far apart from each other they remain
From the party’s perspective, the worst scenario would be being forced into a working relationship with the DA — which it regards as its strategic and ideological opponent — or the EFF, which ANC leaders say is unpredictable and engages in too much brinkmanship.
Hence its election campaign, in a year in which the country will be celebrating 30 years of democracy and the end of racial oppression, is likely to emphasise its role in bringing about that freedom and portray the DA as the party that seeks to reverse all of those gains.
Will it work? Probably not with most people. It is hard to for anyone to have our dark past foremost in mind when, in the present, the lights go out due mainly to the corruption and incompetence that was allowed to eat away at power utility Eskom on the governing party’s watch.
Even those who may have benefited from social welfare provided by the state over the years may find it hard to continue voting for a party whose actions in government leave primary school children without food across KwaZulu-Natal and starve patients at Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto.
The ANC already knows all of this and expects to be punished at the polls. But, again, no-one goes into an election to lose.
And so, the greatest mistake the ANC’s opponents can make in this election is to behave as if the ANC’s defeat is a foregone conclusion.
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