Clean governance, not propaganda, will win votes

It is going to take more than putting up posters of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s beaming face to brush up the battered image of the governing party. The ANC’s own research reveals that its popularity in urban centres, and among the youth, is at its lowest. “Through our own weaknesses and negative tendencies, we have squandered the goodwill we enjoyed from voters [over] the past 24 years. We now face the possibility of losing our majority support in most large cities and in much of the economic heartland of South Africa,” reads an internal party document. It cautions that the ANC will have to do things differently if it is to regain lost support, especially the youth and urban vote.

There is a glimmer of hope that the Ramaphosa ANC may be headed in the right direction with the changes at some of the boards of state-owned companies and the cabinet changes Ramaphosa made when he took over from Jacob Zuma.

But that is not enough. The party must display the political will to deal decisively with everyone implicated in the misspending of public funds, from ministers to senior officials, mayors and councillors.

A manifesto promising free houses and other services will not be sufficient to convince citizens that the ANC can be trusted with the public purse. The party needs to be seen to be holding each and every public official accountable.

But it seems the bigwigs at Luthuli House have other ideas. This newspaper carries a story about Ace Magashule’s announcement to communicators that the party will be bringing officials from the Communist Party of China to help fine-tune its election machinery — especially with spreading propaganda ahead of the elections.

According to Magashule, the ANC can learn a lot from a party that runs a government that has banned and jailed journalists, controls all media and limits the public’s access to social media. The Communist Party’s strategies may work in China, but not in a constitutional democracy like ours.

Service delivery protests are a clear sign that South Africans will no longer tolerate false promises while they deal with escalating poverty and rising unemployment.