By Phakamisa Mayaba
Following the colossal pre-election blunder by himself and his team, one would’ve expected Fikile Mbalula to be placed on special leave instead of sitting pretty at Luthuli House. But if the video clips are anything to go by, Mbaks is still the swaggering Comrade SG – bouncy gait, megalonous voice, an insouciant swell, almost as though he knows something the rest of us don’t.
Nothing about his air suggests that he will surely go down as the culprit behind one of the ANC’s most ridiculous cock-ups: ensuring that the names 181 aspirant ANC councillors may not appear on the local government ballots.
The party will either be partially or completely shut out from competing in the upcoming polls in six municipalities, some of them historical ANC strongholds. Among them are Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality, which includes Bloemfontein, the ANC’s place of birth.
In the process, the ANC has effectively peeved off a horde of would-be councillors, leaving them out in the cold until five years from now, or – if current trends persist – permanently.
All of this because party officials – or Mbaks himself — failed to click the ‘submit as final’ icon on the IEC website before the submission deadline. The ANC has fired people for far less, and emergency NEC meetings have been called for smaller infractions. But in this instance they clearly don’t want to give the impression of discord in the run-up to the elections, particularly involving a key official.
So it has put on a united front – first by appealing to the electoral court, which upheld the IEC procedure. As a result, it has escalated the matter to the Constitutional Court.
Its decision will have far-reaching consequences, for the country but most importantly for the ANC. Political analysts, surveys and opinion polls have all claimed the party is about to succumb to the 30-year curse that has affected all liberation movements on the continent in post-liberation settings, namely to continue bleeding support in this election and the next general election in 2029, and will effectively be reduced to a non-started by 2034.
Long-term electoral trends as well as the latest opinion polls all seem to be pointing in this direction. While polls are entirely reliable pointers to what will really happen in the future, no amount of PR clean-up or bureaucratic spin can hide the growing frustration among party faithful, and its dwindling support.
Earlier this year, we reported on how, at a Worker’s Day rally in Bloemfontein, ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa effectively addressed empty stands. These sorts of events do demonstrate real, unfiltered support. Indeed, in its glory days, the ANC did not miss the opportunity to ask cameramen to pan over the crowds, as if to say: ‘What do you mean the ANC is dying — just look at all these people.’ This time around, the more the cameras missed it, the better.
More or less the same thing happened at the party’s storied January 8 celebrations at Moruleng in North West.
But this trend started a decade ago, when this publication didn’t even exist to write about it. In 2016, at the launch of its local government election manifesto in its supposed stronghold of Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth), the party could not even fill up the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, something that had been inconceivable until then.
Despite the spin doctors trying to downplay the poor turnout, the party went on to lose control over three key metros – Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay – which began to show that there was a correlation between the empty pre-election stands and the declining Xs on the ballot paper.
Mbalula’s blunder is an embarrassing sign of the extent to which the wheels have fallen off in Luthuli House, doubtlessly leaving the bigwigs in a state of panic behind the scenes.
And why? The brutal truth is that the ANC as a lofty idea, the hallowed liberation movement that brought apartheid to a fall and went on to usher in a new era of democracy and prosperity, has turned into a myth.
In reality, the party has come to revolve around patronage – people with political aspirations support it because they believe it offers them the best chance of being elected to local, regional and national governments, with big salaries and other perks, and putting them and their families in a small category of privileged and relatively wealthy people.
As a result, this blunder would have come as as massive shock not only to those 181 candidates, but sent a broader message that the party’s power to propel you into a political career is dwindling rapidly.
Seen in this perspective, its failure to register 181 candidates is nothing less than a political catastrophe whose effects will cascade far wider than those people and their families alone.
This is the increasingly fraught and toxic environment in which people like Mbalula have to operate – essentially, trying to keep up appearances as the walls crumble around him and his fellow party bigwigs, and ensuring, in the final instance, that they themselves will survive.
Given this sort of pressure, one begins to understand why that ‘submit’ button wasn’t pressed in time.
Featured image: ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula addressing ‘ANC volunteers, supporters and community members’ in a half-empty stadium in Giyani in Limpopo. Source: Facebook.