PHAKAMISA MAYABA / I recently perched in my office – really a detached room that also functions as a sleeping area – to write a story on what ought, in hindsight, to have been the story of the year thus far – the 2024 election opinion polls.
I’d glossed over a few of them, and checked in on what analysts made of the numbers. Although a few, mostly in the conservative and centrist press, believed (often writing like they were hoping the figures would suffice) the data crunchers, they were mostly dismissed out of hand, myself included. Not even the fact that Prof Mcebisi Ndletyana of the University of Johannesburg (whom the writer considers an adept weatherman of the country’s political climate) was talking about a gathering storm could dispel my scepticism.
We had a better chance of Helen Zille turning pro-CRT overnight, Malema kissing the Boer, or the MKP welcoming Ramaphosa as umfowethu – our brother – than the ANC shedding its majority. It was heresy, a pipe dream; the polls were simply punching way above their weight. The habitual SA voting psyche and voting patterns could barely be gainsaid. Without putting much effort into it, one was able to less predict how things would go down. You see, the polls looked more like an elitist class thing, far removed from the grass roots and widened even further by the ‘new divide’, namely access to data.
Prof Mcebisi Ndletyana of the University of Johannesburg … warned early on that the polls were on to something. Image: X.
Nicking from the 2008 US vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, Patriotic Alliance leader Gayton McKenzie was the first out of the starting blocks, turning them into a suggestive jibe. ‘Polls are for strippers,’ he quipped a year ago.’ One had to look very hard to find an utterance by the ruling party that suggested they felt threatened by what the numbers foretold. To them, the polls seemed like a non-starter. In fact, they seemed more likely to be startled by a McKenzie who’d seemingly taken on an evangelical tone than some metadata generated by a computer in Bryanston.
After all, given the number of leaders who’ve been photographed alongside the clergy in recent years, the powers that be have seemed to place more trust in divine intervention than empirical surveys. ‘All those doomsday predictions,’ said a casual and confident president Cyril Ramaphosa in the run-up to the election — ‘some people think the ANC is going to lose power, and I say, that is not going to happen. Watch this space when the results are declared…the ANC is going to rise.’
ANC leaders being prayed for. Image: X.
Instead, Ramaphosa – now with the embarrassing task of cobbling together a GNU with the likes of the DA – has had to eat some humble pie. The storied 30-year deterioration of African liberation governments has been well-documented, and after exactly 30 years of ANC rule, the trend has kicked in just in time.
Depending on which poll tickled your fancy, they forecast drops in ANC support to as low as 37 percent. The resultant speculations no doubt drew some momentum from a growing perception that the ANC was simply out of its depth, as well as its unprecedented decline in the last local government elections. Just to remind ourselves, they lost three key metros, namely Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay as well as a slew of smaller towns, and suffered the embarassment of having to enter into coalitions in areas where they’d previously never needed to lift a finger. Simply being the ANC, Mandela’s liberation party, would do.
The doomsayers (academics, analysts, and all the other ‘counterrevolutionaries’ who dared ring the alarm bells – no matter how well-intentioned – about the party) had long cautioned that the days of playing the liberation card were fast running out. Also, 30 years of gerrymandering and deteriorating services in many parts of the country proved thirty years too many. The voting fodder were craving some concrete improvements in their daily lives, and ‘we freed you from the Boers’ just didn’t quite cut it any longer among unemployed youths with little or no memory of the previous era.
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Although there are probably a bunch of reasons — both simple and complex –for the party’s precipitous decline, one can try to name a few. ‘Polls,’ for one, is hardly a word one hears being thrown about at general community meetings. The bigwigs know this, or thought they did. They know that although these things might tell a far more credible story in middle-class black suburbia, in the impoverished, crime-ridden and illiterate townships or peripheral rural villages the only messaging that pays dividends are RDP houses, food parcels, and the councillor who promises that soon, mama, you’ll have your very own tap.
Why else the pre-election dishing out of urban land, sod-turning events, mending of potholes, reduced loadshedding? For crying out loud, Ramaphosa even signed the Cannabis Bill into law on voting day. The Rastas – most of whom are found in the Western Cape, where the ANC has never really gotten a foot in the door — must’ve been pleased. But clearly not nearly pleased enough to give the Buffalo their vote. In a country of ridiculously high data prices, even low-income workers are unlikely to be aware not only of the polls but are deprived of access to other crucial information that would otherwise better inform their vote.
Anecdotal, I hear readers say. Sure, but spend enough time in these spaces and you soon discover that, like veldskoene, polls haven’t quite permeated the social psyche, not least at the leadership level. If they had, then surely the Eastern Cape — notoriously corrupt, marred by pitiful service delivery, and where school kids drown in pit latrines - would not still vote in large numbers for the party responsible for their hardscrabble.
So let’s have a look at some of those polls …
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An Ipsos poll put the ruling party’s vote at just above 40 percent (remember, it bagged 57.5 percent in the last general election). The Brenthurst Foundation and the SABI Strategy Group gave it a paltry 39 percent. According to Reuters, another poll, this time by the Social Research Foundation (SRF), put ANC support at 44.8 percent … up from 37.7 percent a month earlier.
In an eNCA poll, 30 percent of respondents said ‘the DA benefits from apartheid’ and 20 per cent said ‘the DA does not govern the Western Cape well’. A quick Google search will attest that the DE government in the Western Cape has fared far better in Auditor-General reports than those of any other province. So why would these respondents dispute this? It could be chalked up to the common perception that only ‘white Cape Town’ is well-oiled, good old ignorance, or a lack of access to data.
This poll put the ANC at 43.4 percent of the vote. Ironically, in the lead-up to the 2021 local government elections, one eNCA/Ipsos poll had the ANC at a pitiful 30 percent (it eventually got 45.59 percent). Another Ipsos poll came a little closer, at 49.3 percent. Before that election, Ipsos also got it horribly wrong when it had the IFP at around 1.4 percent, but that party confounded many when it turned in an impressive 5.65 percent. They also had the FF+ at 1.2 percent,, but to the surprise of many, it came through with a resounding 2.34 percent, nearly tripling its council seats from 73 to 220.
Prior to the last general election, some pollsters came achingly close to the final numbers, but others were way out. In fact, since 1994 votes for the ruling party have fluctuated at around 5 percent in either direction. With 57.5 percent in the last ballot, I’d assumed that the ANC could still scrape together a majority. The figures that placed them in the lower forties seemed a tad extreme, even for a party that has become a poster child for spineless carpetbagging, derelict inner cities, and an unfulfilled promise of ‘a better life for all’. Then came the ‘great disruptor’, Jacob Zuma’s MKP, which the polls said didn’t stand much of a chance, but blew everyone away by securing 14,58 percent of the national vote.
So now that the numbers have Yours Truly humbled, I’ve been staring at the phone screen, checking up on the latest GNU developments and trying to find feel-good stories to stave off the panic inflicted upon me by the MKP. True to form, by boycotting parliament, they have tried to hold the entire nation to ransom. And this after issuing unspecified threats against the IEC should it go ahead with its planned announcement of the election results.
We may laugh now, but there’s nothing funny about a repeat of the carnage between the IFP, ANC and a so-called ‘third force’ in KwaZulu-Natal in the early 1990s. As a child, watching those events on videotape was a harrowing experience.
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Fortunately, Mr Alto swung by, a few beers in hand, and in no time JZ became a distant memory. Mr Alto is a white man, and besides politics a capitalist first and foremost. He was thrilled at the possibility of a ANC-DA-IFP coalition. Like most of my paler compatriots who populate the comments sections of the various mainstream publications, the spectre of an ANC-EFF wedding had him breaking into cold sweats at night. Leading up to the election, Mr Alto had been a faithful disciple of the polls, reminding me that the sthe numbers were gospel.
I knew he was here to gloat, so I beat him to it. ‘Bruv, I knew you’d be windgat about it. Don’t be that guy!’ Guffaws!
We need these laugh, so I relay a hilarious only-in-South-Africa yarn: You know, I asked, there’s a major witch-hunt unfolding in Orania, the whites-only colony in the Northern Cape?
Why, he asks.
Turns out that there was some errant oom or tannie that decided to vote for the EFF and effectively peeved-off the entire town.
Say whaaat? More laughter! Also, one of the conditions that the Freedom Front+ party has put forward to the ANC in exchange for their support to govern the Northern Cape is that the latter should constitutionally recognise that enclave.
Next I recommended that Mr Alto find a YouTube video of Chris Pappas, the white politician and mayor who helped land the DA its first municipal majority in KwaZulu-Natal, namely uMngeni (Howick). Like him, Pappas is not daunted by ‘kicking it’ on the other side of the tracks. But unlike Mr Alto, whose 50+ years in the township streets haven’t advanced his Xhosa beyond the common greeting, Pappas speaks fluent isiZulu.
Chris Pappas, Mayor of uMngeni Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal .. the guy is fluent in isiZulu. Image: Wikipedia.
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We then went online to see what was happening. According to DM, there were five parties in the GNU — the ANC, DA, IFP, PA and Rise Mzansi — collectively commanding 68.4 percent of the vote. The EFF, who’d indicated that they’d talk to the DA, had done a one-eighty, emphatically stating that ‘the DA is our enemy’. A blustering Julius Malema announced that the ANC was ‘finalising an agreement to work with the DA, FF+ and other reactionary political parties,’ something he’s strongly opposed to.
According to the Commander-in-Chief, these are reactionary Oppenheimer-sponsored entities that seek to advance Afrikanerdom and white monopoly capital, and he’d rather not have a prominent position if it comes at the price of climbing into bed with them. He has made it clear that he would wish to partner with MKP in KwaZulu-Natal. In yet another unexpected move, Malema said the the days of his party being rebellious disruptors of Parliament are behind them, and the country should look forward to their new role as a ‘robust opposition’.
The IFP, which some speculated might go with the MKP, has nonetheless indicated that it would keep communication channels open with that party even though ‘it had stood them up.’ However by Friday morning in emerged that the National Freedom Party (NFP) in KZN had agreed to form a government of provincial unity (GPU) together with the ANC, DA and IFP, effectively thwarting any hopes of MKP running the province. This could not have come as good news to the MKP and its leader, Jacob Zuma, who had clearly hoped to play a leading role.
Of course, the inclusion of the DA in the GNU has widely been dubbed as South Africa’s only hope out of the cesspit of poor governance, corruption, and a host of other national ailments, all induced by the ANC. Not to mention that this is the alliance which the markets are said to favour. But as previously stated, will the party go along with working with people it has accused of malfeasance in the past? And, if it does, will its electorate overlook and tolerate the change of heart?
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At the time of writing, Parliament was due to meet to elected a new Speaker for the National Assembly, as well as a president. When the polls had predicted this bold new age, we thought they were just being melodramatic. But look where we are now: writers are taking back their words, politicians are dumbfounded and surly, and Mr Alto has a one-up on this writer. A few parties had declared the 2024 election as their 1994. Given the current outcome, they were more accurate than most of us.
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FEATURED IMAGE: President Cyril Ramaphosa addresses the first sitting of the National Assembly after being elected as president on 22 May 2019. He’s made it again, this time with the support of his partners in the GNU. Jairus Mmutle/GCIS via Flickr.
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Phakamisa Mayaba’s website, eParkeni. Used with permission.