This election is going to break a lot of hearts

You have to be careful nowadays. The things you see on your screen can be faked. Even if you are following a trusted news source it can be faked. I read a piece recently about a couple who paid a ransom to a caller threatening to kill the wife’s mother, who they could clearly hear on the phone pleading for her life.

The money was paid, but when the couple rushed to the mother they found her tucked up safely in bed.

So while I wait for confirmation of social media video purporting to show Durban being systematically trashed by workers inspired by former president Jacob Zuma and the MK Party he’s allied with, I fully believe that former DA chair Athol Trollip, now a leading light in former Johannesburg (DA) mayor Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA party, posted video of an ActionSA crowd in Durban on Friday demanding the “insourcing” of municipal security and cleaning personnel.

It’s not a big thing, but insourcing has become one of Mashaba’s leitmotifs.

He did the same as mayor of Johannesburg, to the loud approval of the EFF. But why would an entrepreneur and a former leader of the Free Market Foundation be opposed to companies encouraging the spread of enterprise by outsourcing non-core functions?

The answer must be because it might be popular and win a few votes. Mashaba is one of the reasons I can’t wait for the results after the May 29 elections. By May 30 we will know some terrible truths.

They will clear the air, but they are also going to break a lot of hearts.

I have a friend who is certain the DA will poll more than 30% of the national vote and that its multiparty charter, the alliance with ActionSA, Inkatha and others, could match the ANC vote. I’m reluctant to burst his bubble.

The DA will probably do better than its unhappy 20.77% in the last elections in 2019. Mmusi Maimane paid the ultimate price for that result, but in 2019 he was up against a still popular Cyril Ramaphosa at the head of the ANC.

In 2014, then leader Helen Zille won a record 22.23% for the DA against Jacob Zuma.

That might be as good as it gets. The DA has been almost theatrically relaxed about the departure of prominent black members in the past five years.

But it matters when you’re looking to run the government in an overwhelmingly black country just three decades after the formal end of apartheid, no matter what the state of the country may be. People vote with their hearts, not their heads.

Which is also why I’m sceptical about all the polls showing the ANC on its knees at around 43% of the vote. That is surely way out, even considering the rise of the MK Party and Zuma’s malignant influence.

If you go back to 2009, COPE, another ANC breakaway, took more than 7% of the national vote — more than any of the new parties will get this time — and the ANC vote trickled down to around 66% from almost 70% in 2004.

That was just under four percentage points. To get the ANC below 50% this time its opponents have to move it from 57.5% in 2019. That is more than 7.5 percentage points to 49.9% of the vote and a massive 12.5 points to 45%, equal to the entire relentless slide in the ANC vote between 2004 and 2019.

I can’t see it happening, Zuma and the MK party notwithstanding. The opposition hasn’t done enough to turn the nation and that’s their fault. The parties which formed the multiparty charter did so out of their combined sense of foreboding, not confidence.

They know what’s probably coming — a narrow ANC victory just either side of 50%, but victory nonetheless.

That would end the careers of many opposition leaders. Especially in a bigger party like the DA — which has altered its course quite dramatically since its 2019 reverse — where after May 29 an opportunity to reconsider would quickly present itself in the absence of a markedly improved performance.

A bewildered opposition clinging to its core constituency rather than trying to reach beyond it is the forever burden of South African politics and it has been there for more than a century.

To beat the ANC you have to get into its ring and fight in its mud. In 2029 it might eventually do us all a favour and totally mismanage itself out of power.

Paul Mashatile then would be a much easier target than Ramaphosa now. It doesn’t mean 2024 isn’t important. It is. It just isn’t decisive.

To beat the ANC you have to get into its ring and fight in its mud