The men jockeying for our attention — and our votes — grin sheepishly from poles, trees and billboards, conveying a sentiment at odds with the public mood. How dare they smile down on us when we’re having such a hard time? The country is in a funk, but they seem in pretty jolly spirits. It’s as if they’re mocking us.
They’re up there in the air, aloof, unreachable, untouchable. A few words on a poster is all we have for an election campaign that everyone assures us will be a watershed, a turning point. If you’re lucky, a big cheese with a gaggle of hangers-on will come by, mouthing platitudes, with nary an idea about what bugs you in the area. We’re saddled with dinosaurs trafficking old and outdated ideas.
A great opportunity is being missed here. A campaign should be about more than just votes. Perhaps more important is the personal interaction, and educating the public about the process, the nuts and bolts of politics and how they can exploit the system to their benefit. Instead, it’s “give me your vote, pal. And sod off”.
And it’s not as if the posters are particularly revealing. We have, for instance, the ridiculous oddity of the IFP using a dead man, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, as the face — or is it an apparition? — of their election campaign, reflecting of a lack of confidence in their current leader, Velenkosini Hlabisa, more than an affinity for the irascible chief from Mahlabathini. He’s literally ruling from the grave. Do it for Shenge, their slogan says. Why? Will the ghost create jobs or smoke out the criminals or stop the sewage running down the streets?
The ANC have missed a trick here. “Do it for Madiba” would have gone down like a bomb. But sentiment doesn’t win elections. It merely panders to the base.
The DA is imploring the electorate to vote for it in order to save the country. Maybe they should have started by figuring out how to save themselves first. They’ve been doggedly plodding on this treadmill for a while now without making any appreciable headway and, if polls are to be believed, the party could be disappointed in these elections.
I suspect part of that rescue mission includes burning the national flag. There’s of course no law forbidding the shredding of the flag. It’s fair game, part of the political discourse. But why create unnecessary controversy for yourselves? An election campaign surely is to win friends and influence people, not alienate them. One would have thought that, if they were so minded, the logical thing would have been to incinerate an ANC flag since it’s that party that destroyed the country.
Tone-deaf or an inability to read the room are words often used to describe the DA, and they have stuck. A few weeks ago, party leader John Steenhuisen wondered why other parties were campaigning in the Western Cape, suggesting they were invading the province to loot since there was nothing left to steal in the rest of the country. This sort of message from the leader of the official opposition must have been met with a jubilant chortle by the nutters campaigning for Western Cape independence.
One of the tragedies of the new dispensation has been the DA’s inability to profit from the awfulness of the ANC. The ruling party’s incompetence, corruption and utter disregard for every governance principle should have been a treasure trove for the DA. Instead, it’s jockeying for second position with the EFF ruffians, and in the Western Cape, its stronghold, a significant portion of its support is seemingly ready to jump into the grateful embrace of Gayton McKenzie’s coloured tribalism.
Tone-deaf or an inability to read the room are words often used to describe the DA, and they have stuck
Disaffected ANC members, for instance, never think of joining the DA; they form their own splinter groups instead. The party needs to speak to people, all the people, in a language they understand, instead of importing and obsessing over right-wing American tropes such as wokeness, or critical race theory, which have no bearing on the lives of voters here. It may be that it’s fight-back campaign of yesteryear has left an indelible and damaging legacy that’s proving hard to shake off.
The ANC, meanwhile, seems to have given up on the so-called white suburbs. Very hard to spot any posters in these areas. But I’d suggest the message on their poster — "Let’s do more" — is incomplete. It should instead read: "Let’s do more damage". That, at least, is more like it, because destruction has been the hallmark of ANC rule. They have a proven record of looting. It’s unassailable, and it’s only fair that they should be running on their record. People should know they’ll get more of the same should they return the ANC to power.
The ANC campaign is a bit of a confidence trick anyway. It’s all about piling on Jacob Zuma. So-called big guns have been wheeled out to emphasise that point. But it’s not as if these grandees are squeaky-clean themselves. They were in fact Zuma’s key enablers. Thabo Mbeki sired Zuma’s ruinous presidency. The man was minding his own business in blissful obscurity in KwaZulu-Natal when Mbeki made him his deputy, thus setting in train events that ultimately led to Zuma’s kleptocracy.
Mbeki has suddenly found his voice now, but he studiously kept quiet throughout his predecessor’s rollicking thievery. And Kgalema Motlanthe, decent man that he is, was Zuma’s chief emissary to break the news to Mbeki that the game was up. And as president, he signed into law the bill that abolished the crime-busting Scorpions, and the rest is history.
There’s not much to learn from the posters, but maybe that’s the point. We’re not only supposed to vote in secret, but in ignorance too.
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