Fear factor drives urgent hunt for friends

AThe big question now is whether the ANC’s fabled election machine has any gas left in the tank

s is the case everywhere, South African politics hover between a triad of indifference, confidence and, mainly, fear. It is fear that keeps destructive alliances together and confidence, or success, that often drives them apart, even when they should be doing the opposite.

In South Africa the ANC has weaponised the fear of apartheid returning to keep black voters in line for three decades. And, now that those voters have either died or are drifting away, it is the fear of them leaving that holds the ruling alliance together. When last did we have an election in which either or both of the ANC’s alliance partners, Cosatu and the SACP, wasn’t wondering out loud whether it might be the time to fight the election alone?

This time they’re dead quiet, knowing full-well how close things could get. Similarly, fear would have driven DA leader John Steenhuisen last year to launch what is now the multiparty charter. “We’re better together” sort of thing. This will happen when you are only sure of a quarter of the of the vote at best.

In Spain, where Felipe González’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party won elections in 1982, 1986, 1989 and

1993, alliances with unions held firm in the early years.

But the better they did in elections and the richer Spain became, the faster the bonds weakened.

Even in Israel, it is easy to forget that from its inception until the 1967 war, the Labor Party ran the country. Newly confident after beating off their Arab neighbours in the Six Day War, Israelis stopped holding hands and the country’s politics gradually became hopelessly fragmented.

It’s the confidence that destroys you. Here the ANC has shed a large breakaway ahead of three elections — COPE in 2009, the EFF in 2014 and now former president Jacob Zuma’s cheeky MK Party. New parties peel away from winning juggernauts because they think they can make it on their own. They can’t imagine losing. Thus far only the

EFF has got anywhere, even though polling now seems to show it stagnating at below 11% of the vote it scored in

2019.

That has cheered up the markets and may even end up true. But the same polls also show the MK Party soaring and apparently wooing support away from the EFF, and not the ANC, as Zuma obviously had intended. It doesn’t feel right. The only way this can be even partially understood is to assume there is a cuckoo vote out there and that the EFF and MK Party are splitting it. Who would have thought?

Opinion polls have been sharply criticised this election for not being transparent enough but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful and for the moment there’s a growing uniformity about them. They all have the ANC scoring below 45% in an election today. The Social Research Foundation, which is running the most transparent polls and is updating them daily, yesterday had the ANC, on a 62% turnout, winning 42.2% of the vote, the DA 24.7%, the MK Party 12.5% and the EFF 8.6%.

There are other scenarios but the past three elections (2009, 2014 and 2019) have seen turnout fall from 77.3% to 66% and there’s no reversing that, no matter how many people may be frightened into voting by the polls, this election is not more important than the others. South Africans are still broadly indifferent.

The big question now is whether the ANC’s fabled election machine has any gas left in the tank.

Campaigning seems hardly to have begun. One party official complained the other day that not enough posters had arrived from the printers in China.

In June we will be lectured again on the virtues of localisation, but not now. Now requires all hands on the ANC elections deck. Do or say whatever you have to but get out there.

Electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa managed to persuade the Eskom media team to announce on Friday that he was visiting a new 3,000MW gas-fired power plant in Richards Bay. It doesn’t matter that the power plant doesn’t exist, has not even gone out to tender and has no clear source of fuel. The point is to look busy.

It’s worked for the ANC before and at 42.2% three weeks out it is worth remembering that the same polls three weeks out in 2019 were calling the ANC vote well short of the 57.5% it finally achieved. There’s a lot still to play for.