Years ago, with the help of what was then McCarthy Motors and its magnificent CEO Brand Pretorius, and Read, a brilliant NGO, the Financial Mail became the media partner in something called Rally to Read. It has touched thousands of lives.
Essentially, we were the publicity arm of an effort by Read to provide teaching aids to deep rural schools across the country. What it wanted to do was take a portable library of books to schools well off the beaten track and train the teachers there how to use it.
McCarthy supplied the bakkies to get to them. It was always great fun for the companies that participated.
It began in 1997, and it continues to this day. McCarthy is no more but Pretorius still superintends the show. Rally to Read has touched more than 700,000 schoolkids and helped more than 16,000 teachers at more than 1,000 schools.
I was editor of the FM back in 1999 and we were in Mpumalanga. Our convoy of bakkies arrived at a school on a Saturday morning and the women in this poor community had made a huge effort to make us welcome. A choir sang and there were cooldrinks and bunting. Speeches were made.
Then a local man stood and began profusely to thank the ANC for delivering the library to the school, which had thus far been forgotten. Embarrassed, the local education MEC tried to explain that, in fact, this was private business bringing the library, but the man would have none of it.
I remembered it this week when the Social Research Foundation (SRF) brought out polling to show that people were broadly happy with the government of national unity that, having been elbowed into fourth place in the May 29 elections by Jacob Zuma’s explosive MK Party, Julius Malema’s EFF is now slipping even further in the polls. The SRF, whose polling ahead of the elections proved highly accurate, has the EFF, which took 9.52% of the vote in May, on just 6% today.
For African nationalists in South Africa, apartheid is simply a gift that keeps on giving
That may be the beginning of a catastrophe for Malema, but the MK Party vote also slips in the poll, from 14.58% to 12%. The DA climbs from 21.8% to 24% and Gayton McKenzie’s PA nearly doubles its vote to 4% as its leader squeezes every drop of juice from his sport, arts & culture portfolio. Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA gets less than half of the 1.2% he scored in May. Very sad.
But, shock and horror, the ANC vote rises from the laughable 40.18% it won in May to 45% today. That’s not only a big leap, and well outside the poll’s margin of error, it’s also the first time any credible poll has shown the ANC vote rising at any stage of the political cycle that I can remember in at least 20 years. Gareth van Onselen, whose Victory Research conducts the polling for the SRF, tweeted later that “if the ANC continues to recover like this, 50% is back on the cards”.
It’s the GNU effect, and a credit to the political craftiness of President Cyril Ramaphosa. He is a master of gesture politics and he would have perfectly understood the man in the rural Mpumalanga school all those years ago. Nothing much has happened yet for the vast majority of South Africans, but if things are smooth in South Africa then it must be the ANC that is doing it.
That’s the price of apartheid, a gift that keeps on giving. Ramaphosa and other African nationalist politicians will be able to ride it for another 50 years at least. Suck it up. The fact the DA is the critical, confidence-boosting ingredient in the GNU soup Ramaphosa conjured up doesn’t mean it is going to be the biggest beneficiary — the ANC will be.
It’ll be up to the DA, though, if it is at all interested in becoming a bigger party, to look for new and innovative ways to do this.
It deliberately won’t chase black votes any longer to protect its liberal rectitude, but that’s not it’s only route into a deeper national consciousness. It does amazingly little, for example, to campaign for the benefits of enterprise and open markets among the wider population, and there is surely fruit to be picked in making more South Africans start and own their own businesses, and, then, in protecting their interests.
As the SRF polling shows, the DA is indeed getting a bump out of the early and heady days of the GNU. But it needs a strategy quickly to turn that into something more substantial. The bump won’t last forever. Neither will the GNU.
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