May democracy continue to flourish
On Tuesday President Cyril Ramaphosa finally announced that the 2024 national election will take place on May 29, a week later than many had expected. There will now follow a great deal of noise. For journalists, this will be the most challenging election we have faced since 1994. There is profoundly more contestation, there is diminished fiscal space for expansive promises, and a great many South Africans are living in deteriorating conditions of penury.
The noise will come from all sides. An old-fashioned campaigning tactic is to pick a topic and start a messy street brawl in a location that is uncomfortable for your opposition. The DA, often well organised, has already got in some decent punches, striking the ANC with regard to cadre deployment and allegations of misconduct by deputy president Paul Mashatile. More will follow, and the ANC election machine has scarcely started to turn.
Much will emanate from surveys. Pollsters are a noisy bunch and go to bat hard for their numbers. Their expressions of certainty are not always matched in their margins of error and confidence levels. Polls to date have variously called the ANC just hanging on to its majority, all the way to projections of huge swings of more than 10 percentage points, with the ANC languishing in the low 40% region, which would surely be the end of the Ramaphosa era. That kind of swing would be an astonishing turn of events and seems unlikely in the absence of a full picture of the impact of Jacob Zuma’s MK party in KwaZulu-Natal.
However, in SA you should never say never, and if voting is an expression of your sense of having a stake in the future and is an act of agency, then staying home is an expression of despair. At the heart of the election outcome will be the ability of political parties such as MK, and especially the incumbent ANC, to create enough of a sense of hope to get out and vote.
If the starting gun for the election was the president’s state of the nation address two weeks ago, the ANC’s plan to tackle the issue of lethargy is to piggyback on the celebration of 30 years of democracy (no doubt with a healthy state-sponsored budget). It will contrast life today with the dark days of the 1980s and seek to remind voters that after 30 years of ANC government this country is profoundly changed.
It is an ingenious plan because it has the advantage of being simple and true. No matter how you may have experienced that change, and no matter what you may quite reasonably think the ANC has failed to do in 30 years, opposition parties will be left explaining. That is the benefit of size and incumbency, and with this plan the ANC has tried to determine the terrain upon which the election battle will be fought.
The voters’ duty is to sift through the avalanche of half-truths, disinformation, lies and old-school bad faith that is likely to come, let alone the bots that are no doubt limbering up. We need to seek out what is true and what is fair, and give short shrift to those who would seek to harm democracy in our country.