Is the ANC losing the election-posters battle and is that making opposition parties complacent, luring them to believe they are dealing with the same broke and disorganised animal they faced in the 2021 local government elections?
Every other opposition leader one talks to as we move closer to voting day remarks on how stingy the governing party has been when it comes to street posters.
“They are almost invisible,” commented one. An official from another opposition party said he believed the EFF to have won the poster wars hands down — with distant runners-up being Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzansi, the DA, Mmusi Maimane’s Build One South Africa and Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA.
“You seldom see the ANC. It is almost as if they went into this without enough money,” added the official.
It would probably be a huge mistake for the ANC’s rivals to see in the seemingly weak poster game signs of an election campaign in disarray
At a reputed R50 per poster, one’s pockets have to be really deep to mount the kind of national visibility campaign that the likes of the EFF have managed. They are everywhere.
It is not that the ANC hasn’t upped its own game in the past few weeks, it is just that it seems to be struggling to keep up with the pace and is certainly not painting South Africa as black, green and gold as it did in every election up to 2018.
However, it would probably be a huge mistake for the ANC’s rivals to see in the seemingly weak poster game signs of an election campaign in disarray.
In 2021, the ANC went to the polls practically a “broken party” — to borrow from a DA-era Maimane. It had no secretary-general, the “engine of the organisation”, as Ace Magashule was still out in the cold trying to reverse the outcomes of the 2017 conference that made Cyril Ramaphosa party president. Both the party and its senior leaders, some presumed to be in the “Ramaphosa camp”, were weekly being exposed as having been active agents and direct beneficiaries of state capture.
Load-shedding was putting the middle classes off from voting ANC while so-called load rotation was turning townships into semi no-go areas for grassroots ANC election volunteers who usually drive its door-to-door campaign.
Add to all of that the fact that the country was still recovering from a hard lockdown that had destroyed scores of businesses and condemned millions of people in traditionally ANC-supporting areas to unemployment and poverty.
As if all of that was not enough, Ramaphosa had to fight the campaign almost all by himself as some of his comrades stepped back in the belief that a poor showing by the party at the polls would weaken his hand, and strengthen theirs, at the next party conference.
Things have changed since then, at least at party level.
Ramaphosa and the ANC go into this election a united force. It may be forced unity, driven mainly by the fear of the party losing its absolute majority for the first time in the National Assembly, but it has given the party renewed energy and turned its elections machinery into a formidable force.
Whereas in 2021 the party’s campaign would be distracted by different sets of members and leaders taking each other to court on allegations of rigged candidates lists and other fraudulent activities, this time around hostilities and factional rivalries appear to have been put aside for the sole purpose of securing victory. In provinces where the party is unlikely to get 50%+1 to win the legislature outright, the drive is to get near enough to a majority to be able to form a government without having to work with the EFF or DA.
It does the party no small harm that the elephant in the room for the 2021 election has publicly left the country, choosing to set up a new kraal where, with a little spear in hand, he is busying himself with mutilating followers suspected of spying for the enemy.
That has always been his favourite pastime, employing “intelligence reports” to smoke out “enemy agents” in the same way that insecure monarchs of yesteryear used soothsayers to hunt down alleged witches.
But what this does for the ANC is that it frees some of its national executive committee members from the burden of being permanently marked as “Baba’s person”. Those who are truly loyal to him, it is assumed, would have left to form the MK Party with him. And those who have remained are slowly regaining the trust of their comrades.
So whereas the breakaway may mean a loss of votes in some parts of KwaZulu-Natal and small pockets of Gauteng, in other ways it may be helping to strengthen the ANC’s machinery.
Corruption remains one of the main reasons voters are not happy with the ruling party, but some of its campaigners are now selling the establishment of the MK Party and the recent arrest of former National Assembly speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula on charges of corruption, as signs that the much-touted “renewal project” is bearing fruit. Only the election results will tell us if voters who turned their backs on the ANC in 2021 have been persuaded.
What is clear, however, is that if the opposition parties hope to inflict serious damage on the ANC in this election, and even remove it from power, they cannot go about it as if they were facing the same weakened creature as in 2021.
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