It’s manifest: ANC wants Mbalula to rule when he’s 82
President Cyril Ramaphosa has threatened voters in some pretty dramatic ways over the years but at the weekend, as his party waved around a bucket of reheated slop and called it a manifesto, he threatened the nation with something genuinely nightmarish: another 30 years of ANC governance.
Not that his previous threats haven’t been bangers in their own right. His 2021 effort, for example — telling people in Ekurhuleni that if they withheld their votes their collapsing electricity supply might never be restored — was a sparkling mix of cynicism, victim-blaming and outright lies.
And let’s not forget 2013’s threat to Seshego residents that if they didn’t vote for the ANC, “the boers will come back to control us”. I hope he sent Angie Motshekga a special bunch of flowers after that, thanking her for all the hours she’s put in making sure South Africans can’t do the maths required to understand what an absurd lie it was.
Of course, Ramaphosa hastily qualified his comments at the time, saying they “were not meant to refer to a particular section of our population”, but I’m not sure copping to threatening your voters with an invented bogeyman is a whole lot better.
But the last 15 years of ANC governance are all too real; and when Ramaphosa tweeted that the ANC was planning to “continue the journey to the next 30 years” it would have sent shudders down a few spines.
A few, but not all. Because the fact is that for all Ramaphosa’s rhetoric about imposing more decades of ruination on this country, the ANC won’t exist 30 years from now.
Oh, there may be a tiny opposition party called the ANC crouching among chip packets in a corner of the National Assembly, its 82-year-old leader, Fikile Mbalula, croakily exhorting his handful of followers to carry out the party’s sole remaining policy of making sure he dies of old age before he has to get a real job.
But beyond that, the ANC is more or less cooked. All of which is why its grandiose manifesto feels so shabbily delusional. We know these people. And we know that they are hollow men. To be fair, the ANC isn’t alone in this regard: most election manifestos are, by definition, fantasy.
Consider, for the example, the manifesto of the EFF, launched a fortnight ago. Running to well over 250 pages, at first glance it seems to combine the boundless creative energy of children writing to Santa with the relentlessness of people who have somehow managed to get paid to remain social science undergraduates deep into their 40s.
But as I read more carefully I realised that it had far more in common with bad science fiction as it painstakingly created a sweeping and internally coherent world, while simply ignoring certain fundamental realities, for instance, who’s going to pay for the orthodontist stationed in every primary school.
That’s not satire, by the way. That’s point 24 on page 43. And, if I’m honest, some of it sounds quite interesting, like the “state-owned cleaning, horticulture and landscaping company” that will look after state-owned properties, which will be, oh that’s right — everything.
I mean, who wouldn’t want a future in which the country’s largest union of government landscapers marches on parliament, threatening to abandon the aesthetics of harmony and balance unless it gets its 5% increase this year? “What do we want! Beauty! When do want it? As soon as the spring bulbs sprout!”
Yes, the EFF’s manifesto, like that of the ANC, is an exercise in daydreaming; the inevitable result of what you get when you interview a thousand activists and ask them to tell you everything they would want in an ideal state but, for the sake of the exercise, to assume money can be wished into being and all humans fundamentally want to be told what to do by Floyd Shivambu.
And yet why not? Surely we all understand that manifestos are works of fantasy, and read them as such? After all, there are no election manifestos outlining in careful detail a party’s plans for being the official opposition for 30 years, or how it will grow itself from 10% to 11%. Every single manifesto, no matter how dull and grounded in reality, is premised on an assumption just as wild as the EFF’s, namely that it will win a clear majority and be able to carry out every one of its policies.
In 2024 those fantasies are laid particularly bare, even for the ANC. If Ramaphosa’s party scrapes together a clear majority, it will spend its last term in office utterly paralysed by its death throes, with all those fine promises rendered ever more ludicrous with every breaking scandal.
On the other hand, if the ANC loses, [SA] will be led by our first coalition government since the government of national unity in the 1990s, which means every election manifesto launched between now and May will become contested ground, with coalition partners carving up each other’s policies and getting stuck into the horse-trading of modern democracy.
The Latin origin of “manifesto” is “manifestum”, meaning clear or obvious, and in 2024 the promises are as obvious and transparent as ever. But if almost none of them can be put into practice, can you really blame the politicians for making them?
WHO WOULDN’T WANT A FUTURE IN WHICH THE STATE LANDSCAPERS UNION THREATENS TO DROP THE AESTHETICS OF HARMONY?