After last year’s local government elections, and by winning the Cape Town, Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay metros, the point was made that the DA now controls the vast majority of the local government budget. Conversely, the ANC’s control over that same budget has been decimated.
Writing for the Business Day, Stuart Theobald put it like this: "In total, the metros have a budget of R233bn in 2016, of which ANC-controlled councils command 24%, down from 83% before the election."
If one uses the government’s Community Survey 2016, regarding those same four metros, the DA now has a direct say and influence over the lives of at least 12.2-million people. That is 4-million more than the total number of votes the ANC won in the 2016 election and before one takes into account the other councils it administers.
Nationally, however, the DA has still not managed to breach the 30% threshold. The ANC might have fallen to 53.9% but there remains a substantial gulf of some 27 percentage points between it and the DA, which finished on 26.9%.
Thus, there exists for all intents and purposes a rather profound contradiction in our politics.
Nationally, the ANC enjoys an outright majority but, at local government level, it is the DA that effectively commands the greatest influence. Admittedly, the latter claim rests on access to the local government budget alone, but if one accepts that the metros are the country’s economic hubs, it is not an observation without merit.
That contradiction, however, is not replicated in any meaningful way by the political commentariate; that is, those columnists and analysts that interpret local politics in newspapers and online. For the majority of them, as evidenced by the majority of their analysis, there is only the ANC. Political analysis remains deeply and fundamentally ANC-centric. There are only a handful of people able to analyse the DA, who are familiar with its history, internal politics and organisational culture or, to be frank, who care about it or its prospects.
On November 16 last year, the DA’s health spokesperson, Wilmot James, released an alternative policy proposal to the ANC’s National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme.
Titled Our Health Plan (OHP), it is a superb document. Agree with it or not, it is meticulously researched, carefully referenced, based on international best practice, reasonable, financed and detailed. It is a model of what in-depth policy should look like.
It is 25 pages and profoundly complex. But it is also profoundly significant.
The cost implications of the NHI, which aims to provide every South African with access to essential healthcare, are immense at a time of severe economic distress. The NHI White Paper estimates it will cost some R256bn but that seems premised on the assumption that SA’s economy will grow 3.5% a year — which seems unlikely in the near future.
Other experts say this is a gross underestimation. Business Report wrote in July last year, "The Free Market Foundation has done some ‘back of the matchbook calculations’ and estimated the NHI to cost R367.4bn when fully implemented. Econex says a 16% increase in NHI costs will bring the final cost to R357bn by 2025."
James claims the DA’s plan can be implemented in five to eight years (compared with the 10-15 years it will take the NHI) and will be far more affordable, along with a thousand other proposals from training, to services to financial and administrative reform.
The coverage of the DA’s policy was, however, abysmal. A small selection of papers (four or five) carried minor generic stories on the launch, as did ANN7 and SABC 1, along with four or five radio stations that made similarly generic reference to the launch.
But that, in its totality, was as good as it got. No substantive critique, no health professionals or health media experts commissioned to analyse it, no talk-show discussions, no editorial or opinion pieces on it, and no attempt to put the policy to the ANC or the Department of Health to gauge their response.
From an analytical perspective it was as though the DA had issued no more than a press statement, and a bad one at that.
It is not the purpose of this piece to analyse the DA’s policy — that requires an expert. But that is just the point: where are these people? When Jacob Zuma states, time and time again, that only the ANC has policies, his entirely unsubstantiated attacks generate no end of press coverage. Of course they do, they meet all the criteria for coverage — subjective vitriol that might inspire a confrontation. That’s what sells. But actual ideas that stand in contrast to one another? No, that would seem to be a bridge too far.
There are really only two possible explanations for the press’s attitude. The first is laziness; the second is disdain (although, in fairness, both could hold true).
Either way, it’s the public that suffers.
The DA can rightly be criticised for failing adequately to drive any intellectual contestation, over-reliant as it is on platitudinous rhetoric, but then why bother if this is the kind of reception any genuine attempt receives?
And yes, policy isn’t going to sell newspapers. And yes, this particular battle, between the ANC’s NHI and the DA’s OHP, isn’t going to set Twitter ablaze — but that says nothing about its importance.
The media has a duty to set some space aside to take it seriously. Hell, if it did it might discover there is an actual confrontation at the heart of it; certainly Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has nothing but contempt for the DA’s position. That would be to everyone’s benefit then. But it requires a bit of work and application.
It is a mistake, too, to assume this analysis is calling for coverage of the DA’s message for its own sake. Quite the opposite — it is critical coverage that is lacking. And that needs to be distinguished from hard news.
The DA fares disproportionately well in the media when it comes to the sound bites, press statements and responses that define current affairs. But among the commentariate, the country effectively remains a one-party state.
Consider the energy newspapers in particular put into understanding the ANC’s internal politics. You cannot open a paper or website without someone proffering a new theory on the many convoluted and fractious relationships inside the ANC, what they mean and what their consequences might be. Yet, when it comes to the DA, no one has the faintest idea.
Who is Mmusi Maimane’s inner circle? What internal pressures and conflicts are driving decision-making inside the DA? Where does real power in the party lie? These are questions without answers.
In the Western Cape, the lines in the sand are beginning to be drawn for a mighty internal battle for control of the Western Cape leadership, ahead of 2019. Helen Zille does not want Patricia de Lille to win and, by default, become the next premier. Human settlements MEC and Zille surrogate Bonginkosi Madikizela is canvassing for a potential run at the position. Where is the analysis of this? Does anyone even know it is happening?
It is irrelevant in the face of the all-consuming ANC. The great irony is, the sentiment underpinning so much ANC-driven analysis is that the party is in a catastrophic position and its losses in 2016 suggest greater losses to come in 2019.
But that is not matched by any considered analysis of the alternative. Indeed, very often, the DA is abused and criticised when its actions threaten what little remains of the ANC’s unity; the party’s motion of no confidence in the president being an excellent illustration.
So much of the commentariate long for a united ANC, the ANC of old. The DA is for them a helpful crutch when making this point. They use the party to show up "The ANC of Jacob Zuma". So effective have they been, they often have the DA playing their game. But as a stand-alone party, with the support of one in four South Africans and control over budgets of staggering proportions, it has little to say.
What are the internal politics of Herman Mashaba’s administration? Who knows? After all, it’s only the biggest economic hub on the African continent.
It is unlikely 2017 will be any different. With the prospect of an ANC elective conference looming large and the demise of Jacob Zuma’s presidency on the table, it is going to be almost impossible for anyone in the media to bother with the DA.
The practical truth is that the party will be a media irrelevance this year. That, however, does not make it right.
Without a shadow of a doubt, the ANC deserves intense scrutiny and it makes sense that it be in a bigger proportion to that applied to the DA, but as things stand, the DA might as well be nothing more than a press statement-generating machine for the oversight, investigation and critical interrogation the actual party enjoys.
It is worth saying too that the DA faithful are just as guilty. Faced with a morally bankrupt majority party, they have elevated their belief in the DA’s supposedly virtuous nature to fanatical proportions. Because the ANC is bad, the DA must be good and, to have hope, we must believe that absolutely.
The DA might better embody good governance and sound ethics; nevertheless, it is a political party like any other and power plays a primary role in the decisions it makes. Understanding it, how it works, whom it affects and why, is critical. But the DA faithful just want to believe, not to critically engage.
So many commentators feign a desire for a plurality of power. It’s a lie. What they want is enough power among the opposition to keep the ANC honest. But when push comes to shove, it’s the ANC they really want.
Even their analysis of the EFF, equally superficial but disproportionately weighted in that party’s favour, is premised on the notion that, ultimately, the EFF is of the ANC. In effect, they delegitimise the official opposition through omission. There is only one loser in that game, and it’s the public.
If the media wants to better understand the DA, it needs to allocate more resources to understanding it. If it does not, it is effectively giving the party a free ride to manage some R200bn and the lives of around 12-million people, and that’s at a minimum.
Here is a sentence from a Maimane statement, following a meeting of the DA’s federal executive in October last year, in which he set out some of the party’s objectives, on "the road to 2019":
"I am pleased that FedEx has officially adopted a resolution which seeks to ensure that every DA-controlled government is accountable to the federal executive for its performance, implementation of the party’s manifesto and adherence to the party’s values."
It passed without comment. Now, agree with it our not, ask yourself this: had that statement come from Gwede Mantashe, after an ANC NEC meeting, and read as follows: "I am pleased that the NEC has officially adopted a resolution which seeks to ensure that every ANC-controlled government is accountable to Luthuli House for its performance, implementation of the party’s manifesto and adherence to the party’s values", what would the media’s response to that have been?
Like it or lump it, the DA has profound influence and power, and it’s time for political analysts to start taking it more seriously.
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