It will take a miracle for 2024 to be 1994

As far as political slogans go, none of the fresh ones has been as catchy as that reputed to have been coined by Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzansi: 2024 is our 1994!

When you spot a Rise Mzansi volunteer in the new party’s trademark black and white T-shirt, the message catches the eye and makes you think.

It’s so effective in firing the imagination of potential supporters — mainly the under-40s who were either not yet born or too young to participate in the country’s first nonracial general elections — that other opposition parties are starting to co-opt the slogan as their own.

EFF leader Julius Malema now incorporates it as he delivers impassioned speeches across the country promising his followers the economic equivalent of the political freedom Nelson Mandela delivered in 1994.

For all the opposition parties, the central message to the electorate — especially the much-coveted Gen Z market — is that after 30 years in power the ANC is on its knees and the country is ripe for a new government.

But will 2024 be as epoch-making as 1994?

As the new year dawns, I can’t help but wonder if we are pointlessly hyping ourselves up about what, in the long run, may turn out to be another political disappointment.

But it has been a strenuous 2023 and perhaps the pessimism of the dying year is clouding my outlook.

Remember, 1993 was a miserable year too — especially for those of us in townships and peri-urban areas that were perpetually under siege from state-sponsored violence. But even as we stepped past corpses almost daily on our way to school or work, there was that strong sense of hope and belief that the old was dying and the new was about to be born.

The Nats would be ousted, a democratic government would take office and apartheid would be ended. A new nation would be born.

For the overwhelming majority, Mandela and his ANC represented that hope.

Now it could well happen that the ANC will be battered so badly at the upcoming polls that it won’t have enough friends in parliament to help it elect a president and put together a coalition government. It sounds far-fetched, but it is possible.

But who among its opponents can we truly say has captured the public imagination in the same way Mandela did in the run-up to 1994? In other words, if 2004 is this generation’s 1994, then Cyril Ramaphosa is their FW de Klerk. So who is the new Nelson Mandela?

For a brief moment earlier this year, John Steenhuisen’s moonshot pact idea appeared to be responding to this very question.

When he persuaded other opposition leaders — mostly on the Right or adjacent to it — to join him in what is now known as the multiparty charter (MPC), it seemed that the choice for voters would be stark — continued ANC rule or an MPC-dominated coalition government.

But now even the most optimistic of pro-opposition political pundits are telling us that, at most, the MPC will get 36% at the polls — not nearly enough to have a hope of forming a coalition government.

Members of the MPC also sound undecided on who they would put up as their presidential candidate when such a vote takes place in parliament soon after the general elections.

Despite Steenhuisen’s MPC efforts, the reality is that we end 2023 with an even more splintered opposition — thanks largely to a proliferation of new parties that want to take their chances in what appears to be a wide-open 2024 election race.

The Johannesburg metro scenario now looms large. Instead of two clear blocs — one aligned around the ANC and possibly the EFF, and another led by the DA — the next National Assembly promises to be a cacophony of small parties, each too weak to influence the direction the country should take.

As we have witnessed in Johannesburg and several other hung metros, such political cocktails not only result in dithering executives and a collapse in service delivery, they also produce accidental leaders who rise to the top thanks purely to opportunistic horse-trading and not skills and talent.

Such a scenario, as we have seen in Ekurhuleni, Nelson Mandela Bay and Johannesburg, leads to instability with power changing hands several times within a single term.

If that is what 2024 has in store for us, then it won’t be anyone’s 1994.

But then again we are South Africans and believe ourselves to have pulled off a miracle in 1994. Perhaps we are due another one, 30 years later.

Wishing you a happy and prosperous new year!