Welcome to the dispiriting scene that is SA politics

Can we take a moment and look at what has happened in local politics, because I get the feeling a fundamental seachange has taken place, which, not untypically, is not recognised by the political class?

It’s understandable that the politicians and bureaucrats struggle to understand the complexities of running a parastatal as large and difficult as, say, Eskom. But you would think the one thing politicians understand is the process of getting elected. A fundamental aspect of that is submitting the names of people you want elected to the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC).

So leave aside for a moment the decision by the IEC to throw the ANC a lifeline and reopen the submission process – that was always going to happen, and arguably should (you don’t want democracy to be undermined because of a bureaucratic bungle).

Instead, think what it means that the ANC could not actually get that together. The party has all kinds of reasons along the lines of the toner for the fax machine had run out, and the IEC’s website “was down”.

Now add the fact that its own staff have not been paid and tried to bring a court case against the party, hastily withdrawn, to get their salaries. In combination, what you have is the most extraordinary ineptitude, even by ANC standards. How did this happen?

As Carol Paton pointed out in an analysis in Business Day, the precise problems that the ANC has inflicted on the public in general have now, at last, come home to roost within the party.

The issues are what we have learned over the past 25 years: cadre appointments, laxity, greed and factionalism.

The ANC elected two of its worst administrators to, get this, head the party. Ace Magashule ran his province into the ground, and was rewarded with the most senior position in the party. From that elevated vantage point, he has spent the past two years trying to build alliances with the factions of discontented, with an eye to staying out of jail.

Elbowed out by the party, now sensing danger, Magashule’s replacement is the assumptive, off-kilter, gratuitously dysfunctional Zuma-faction acolyte Jesse Duarte. That the party has run out of money under her watch is completely unsurprising.

What about greed and laxity?

Like it has done with public servant salaries, SOE bailouts and the rest, the ANC’s approach to money is so gratuitously unaware of what it takes to make money, and so spendthrift in spending it, that somehow the party has become embroiled in the process.

The party decided to match the salaries of head office positions with those in the public service so that they would not be prejudiced by working for the party. The problem is that it pays public servants with extortionate taxes, but party members with what it can extort from tenderpreneurs. That has kept the party locked in a cycle of having to grant inflated state contracts to its support base, but opened the party to corruption.

There is a twist here, and that is the Political Party Funding Act. The ANC proposed the bill essentially, I think, in the hope it would stymie its opponents because corporate SA would be embarrassed to acknowledge its funding of the DA. But the move backfired since it also puts tenderpreneurs at risk as it makes it more likely that the connection between party payments and state contracts become public knowledge.

It’s also misconstrued because corporate SA stopped funding the DA long ago because the DA’s determination to remain in its racial cocoon means it has no prospect of ever becoming the ruling party.

So how has this played out in the public eye? One insight into the mindset of South Africans is from the small poll done by Ipsos, and the results are just mind-bending.

The poll found support for the ANC in local government elections dropped from 51.8% in December 2020 to 34.9% in August 2021. These numbers are easy to misunderstand since they consist of the proportions of the total sample. In other words, they are not reflective of the outcome of the election because they include those who don’t intend to vote or won’t say how they intend voting.

Ipsos does that calculation and finds the ANC will get just under 50% of the vote.

Clearly there has been a huge mindset change. With the riots and the booze bans and the Covid-19 debacles, South Africans just don’t believe the ANC can be trusted anymore. That is the sum of it.

You would think the opposition parties would be rolling in the sun, but here is the strange thing – they are not. The like-forlike aspect of the poll shows minor gains for the DA and the EFF static.