Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Elections a triumph for SA and democracy
WHATEVER the final result of this year’s local government elections, South Africa’s a winner. The omens for this poll, 10th overall since democracy 22 years ago, were ominous.
The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), the Chapter 9 institution, long holding the same moral high ground as that other modern-day icon, our outgoing Public Protector Thuli Madonsela, found itself under attack on a number of fronts: the tenor of the campaigning descended to the gutter as the race card started getting pulled more often than a red in a soccer match and the cognoscenti of cyberspace, the Twitterati and the trolls, foretold doom upon doom.
Elsewhere on the continent, presidents suborned constitutions for a third term as a precursor to ruling in perpetuity, while the rest of the world started changing their view about strongmen in Africa if it meant that most of the aid money would be spent where it ought to be.
Back home we became accustomed to blue lights, uncaring officialdom, angry arguments, an economy on the ropes, the rand plummeting and our sports teams (with the exception of the Lions) flattering only to deceive and end up as cellar dwellers. This was all on top of a first half of the year where we were tearing each other’s throats out on social media as one horrid racist after another was unmasked, with the only marginally redeemable feature being the fact that racist bile was not the preserve of a single group.
The elections we were told repeatedly were going to be the most closely contested ever. They were also record polls in so many other ways; most people registered, most voting stations, most parties, too.
The biggest triumph of all, though, was us: we still cared enough to vote, even though the weather was appalling, and we did so in numbers that would be the envy of any older democracy where the turnout is never expected to be higher than 40 percent for local government. We queued with good humour, just as we did in 1994 and ever since.
The system, in particular the IEC, worked, everything opened on time, where there were issues they acted on them speedily, officials were fired, problems were reported and corrected.
The biggest thing, though, was reading of some of our former presidents pitching to vote and queueing just like the rest of us; Kgalema Motlanthe was a case in point and Thabo Mbeki (albeit with a posse of bodyguards) in their takkies walking to the poll station.
In fact, Motlanthe had to endure being screamed at by another voter: “How can you sleep at night?” he was asked. Perhaps the most salient thing though was that the heckler wasn’t removed and cast into a cell before being bludgeoned for his cheek.
Can you imagine any of this happening elsewhere in the continent? Can you imagine someone as senior as Baleka Mbete, the ANC chairwoman and speaker of Parliament, being turned back at the polling booth during the special voting session earlier in the week for not having her ID on her?
And can you imagine her taking it on the chin and going off to fetch it rather than throwing a tantrum along the lines of, “Do you know who I am?” But she fetched her ID and duly voted – and the IEC told anyone who would listen what had happened and just how it proved no one was more special than others when it came to voting.
And yet some people were more special – and so they should be: the elderly, the infirm, the injured, the expectant moms and the moms with babes-in-arms.
Coming back to the presidents, though, can you imagine any former president not proudly announcing that he’s just voted for his own party?
Motlanthe and Mbeki did exactly that. Motlanthe did qualify it and own up to voting for the ANC later, but it took Mbeki’s spin doctors a lot longer to come up with the excuse that our former president wanted to protect and entrench the fact that who you vote for is secret by not telling who he’d voted for.
It was a telling lesson for anyone taking note, just like his eschewing of a blue light cavalcade to drive to a polling station. We could all learn from him, like some wellknown folks in Saxonwold who apparently raced up in black SUVs, complete with bodyguards and yellow T-shirts, chanting amandla, according to reports in other newspapers although they’re immigrants and missed the Struggle until it was over. Or for that matter, the disgraced and suspended ANC leader in the Western Cape who was apparently shepherded straight to the front of the queue.
It was Mbeki who reintroduced us to a poet most of us bade farewell at the end of matric. In 2005, he quoted with approval from WB Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming. Inspired by the horrors of World War I, it uses the imagery of a falconer losing control of his falcon and their world descending into anarchy as a result.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all convictions while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Before Wednesday, Yeats might have been writing about South Africa in 2016.
Instead, thanks to his most famous South African fan and millions of other ordinary citizens, we’ve proven once again that the centre can and does hold. And that’s the true triumph of these elections; irrespective of the actual political outcome.