THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE INVISIBLE
Election posters aren’t enough to tell you why you should vote for a particular party. But you can learn something from them, from the language they use to the cult of personality they reveal and from their absence, too
As we get closer to election day, there’s the usual escalation into circus-like behaviour by politicians and their parties. Ostensibly tamed predators are wheeled out to do tricks for the crowd, as in the case of the MK Party, and custard pies are flung around in the hope that one of them sticks. There are the inevitable pratfalls, such as DA leader John Steenhuisen complaining that voters seem to believe, mistakenly, that democracy means they can just sommer vote for anyone.
That wasn’t what he said, of course, but it’s the gleeful takeaway that the other parties latched onto. Steenhuisen’s main point, it seems, was that “instead of fighting to fix the eight ANC provinces that have been smashed to pieces, the political mercenaries in parties like the Patriotic Alliance [PA], Rise Mzansi, GOOD and the National Coloured Congress are obsessed with trying to break the one DA province that works”.
Clarifying his comments to
News24, he said he was “cautioning voters not to lend their vote to ‘popcorn parties’ hellbent on ushering in corruption”. The news site quoted him as saying he feared the small new political parties would create a distraction for voters, which could pave the way for the “coalition of corruption
the ANC, PA and EFF to come in through the back door”.
The upstairs/downstairs, colonial image of the popcorn parties having to use the servants’ entrance to get into the Western Cape is unfortunate. Again, not what he meant, but that’s the nature of political discourse, especially during a time of elections. It’s all about twisting words, like the contortionists in the circus.
Steenhuisen pushed the same message at the DA’s launch of its national slogan street posters in Gqeberha at the end of February.
“Voters need to be very careful in this election,” he said. “Because we’ll
be putting up our poster. But our poster’s not going to be the only poster on the pole. I think it’ll be the best-looking poster on the pole. But it’s not going to be the only poster on the pole. And by the time May 29 rolls around, that pole [turns and points accusingly at a random pole] will be filled from the top to the bottom of [sic] many, many posters. But voters in this election need to ask themselves something when they look at those posters. They need to ask themselves, is this a party that is serious about delivering on what they’re promising?”
The unveiling of the actual “Rescue
SA” poster featured Steenhuisen clambering up a ladder to, as DA MP Yusuf Cassim put it, “flight the first-ever DA election poster in the country”. Confusingly, there were already two DA posters on the pole, but never mind. I guess that’s where propaganda allows itself a little bending of reality.
If, as Steenhuisen appears to believe, posters really are that important an indicator when it comes to deciding what party to vote for, then the few that I’ve seen dotted around Cape Town probably deserve a closer look.
The poster for Rise Mzansi simply says “Vote Rise Mzansi”, above a picture of party leader Songezo Zibi. After the recent storms here in the Cape, all these posters have crumpled in half, so that all you can see is Zibi’s forehead peeping out like a shy penis, with the words “Vote Rise” above it. I initially assumed they were adverts for Viagra, to cue up a bunch of electile dysfunction quips. But when not ravaged by the Cape of Storms, the posters carry a simple message. Vote for this guy, he looks trustworthy. That’s the only promise the poster makes. If you vote for me, I’ll keep smiling.
GOOD, the party that puts the Pat into patronising, has a poster that features Patricia de Lille in a victory pose, and the words “Aunty Pat for Premier”. The first one I saw, which had also suffered some wind damage, seemed to have the words “Good Witch” on it. An undamaged poster revealed that the words were actually “GOOD. Switch to Good.”
Another GOOD poster, with De Lille in a more sombre pose, says “Stop the suffering”. That’s not a bad rallying cry, actually, albeit one that most philosophers would agree is even more unattainable than the ANC’s unrealistic promises. But it does, perhaps, allow us an insight into the conditions in which the GOOD party believes its voters exist. And it’s not as if it’s out of sync with other parties. The DA’s “Rescue SA” is playing off the same sense of doom.
Build One South Africa (Bosa) has also gone with the personality approach, featuring a portrait of Mmusi Maimane and the words “A job in every home”.
In his poster launch speech, Steenhuisen spoke about the unrealistic promises that small political parties make, and urged voters to consider whether they wanted to vote for parties that had no chance of keeping their promises.
“A job in every home”, unless Maimane is talking about washing up after dinner, seems like one of those promises that can never be kept. But maybe that’s what Bosa is selling — a dream that the ANC government crushed long ago. And an argument could be made for voting for a dream, perhaps.
ActionSA’s posters proclaim “Only Action will fix SA”, which is a less grandiose appeal than the DA’s “rescue”, which smacks of a superhero complex. Its pragmatic nature is slightly let down by a companion poster, which features Herman Mashaba’s face against the backdrop of the South African flag, with the words “Herman ‘Fix It’ Mashaba” across the top. In a country where perennial candidate for Ineffectual Employee of the Month, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, likes to call himself Mr Fixit, that word has taken on worrying connotations.
We’re used to politicians who claim to be able to fix things, and then we discover that they were using the word in the sense of illegally rigging an outcome.
The EFF’s poster (I’m just writing about ones I’ve seen in my neighbourhood) has eschewed written promises, and instead shows the smiling CIC and his jaunty beret, with the words “Vote EFF”. That’s the cult of personality for you. It doesn’t need too many details.
That does have its drawbacks, certainly, as the IFP is discovering. It is apparently using the face of the late Mangosuthu Buthelezi in this year’s election material, ostensibly in his honour, but actually because hardly anybody knows what the current IFP president looks like.
According to News24, “the face of Velenkosi Hlabisa, the party’s current president, will not be placed on the party’s posters and T-shirts. Rather, all the party’s electoral material for [the] election will bear Buthelezi’s face. Even the ballot paper, they insist, will have Buthelezi’s face next to the party’s name.”
I haven’t spotted an IFP poster yet, so would welcome confirmation of this.
I’m not sure I’d entirely agree with Steenhuisen’s contention that you can judge a party by its posters, but it is striking what you can learn from the ANC’s posters in the Cape. And that’s because there aren’t any. It seems there’s been so much money stolen, there isn’t even any left to reinvest into the future of corruption.
A recent German study showed that people tend to vote for attractive candidates, and “that attractiveness has a positive effect on vote choice for candidates that the voter reports having seen on posters; for candidates that voters have not seen on posters, the effect is essentially zero.”
So posters do seem to have an effect on voting patterns.
Steenhuisen’s plea to voters was: “In this election, look at the DA’s posters, look at our plan that we launched last week to rescue South Africa, and make your own mind up. And when you do that, it makes the choice on that pole that much easier.”
I think most of us would tend to agree with this. The posters function as the sound bites, but to really make a choice, you need to dig into the plans behind the poster slogans. Rescue, fix, save, stop the suffering. All nice words, but people will understand them in many different ways. Good luck with searching for understanding through the party manifestos.