I was taken aback when a stranger asked me at a recent book launch which party she should vote for in the national elections. Most consider this a deeply personal decision that you should make with your head, heart and conscience, not on anybody else’s recommendation.
Having subsequently laboured through the election manifestos of the main parties, it’s become clear to me that not only should you never ask someone else who to vote for, you should never, ever ask the parties themselves.
Just as in online dating, where the choice is to swipe left or right, when it comes to choosing who to vote for it’s perilous to judge a party by its own brag sheet. First, there’s the problem that election manifestos are, by their nature, uncosted shopping lists.
In this respect the EFF takes the cake for promising free education, a free computer tablet and state jobs for all graduates. It would also give R1m to every black person who enrols to do a PhD (not graduates with one) and add 80,000 public servants to the government’s payroll. It also promises to reduce state debt to under 20% of GDP (from 55% now) while also magicking up R100bn to pour into a new sovereign wealth fund.
Secondly, election manifestos are not the same thing as government policy — even in the case of the governing ANC. So, no sooner had the ANC published its manifesto promising to dilute the Reserve Bank’s focus on inflation by making it target growth and jobs as well, than President Cyril Ramaphosa backtracked, saying the independence of the Bank was “sacrosanct”. Nobody should be alarmed, he said, the ANC’s manifesto was just an expression of wishes and aspirations, not a change in policy. Ouch!
Thirdly, election manifestos are riddled with contradictions. Even the normally sober DA has fallen into this trap. Take for example its promise to “stop labour unions from damaging the economy”. Among other things, the DA would make it easier for firms to hire and fire workers, and exempt small firms from almost all labour and employment equity legislation. It would also scrap the R3,400 a month national minimum wage and move back to a system of sectoral minimums with a new floor of R1,780 a month. The upshot would be salary cuts for millions of people.
No matter how persuasive the DA’s economic efficiency arguments might be, these reforms would provoke an almighty showdown between labour and any DA government. Yet in the next paragraph the DA pledges to “restore consensus between [the] government, the private sector and unions, recognising that all are important stakeholders in our economy”. How the DA plans to achieve this consensus with labour while attacking all its gains is anybody’s guess.
The new SA Capitalist Party (ZACP) isn’t much better. Thankfully, it doesn’t bother with a comprehensive manifesto. Instead it offers 10 quick-fixes in a series of three-minute videos on its website, presumably having realised this is the concentration span of the average online user. But despite some interesting nuggets, most of its clever ideas unravel at the first good tug because they ignore the complexity of the problems they seek to address.
Which brings me back to how one should vote. It’s clear from the ANC’s manifesto that some of what it wants would be ruinous for the economy; the DA would plunge SA into a period of labour strife so intense economic growth would probably contract; and the EFF’s populist policies would quickly turn SA into Venezuela. Meanwhile, the mad cow (sorry, purple cow) party would teach teenagers to shoot. What could go wrong?
Luckily for voters, 48 political parties are expected to contest the elections — 19 more than contested the 2014 elections. This ups the odds of voters finding the perfect match — but remember nobody can tell you how to vote, least of all politicians.
• Bisseker is a Financial Mail assistant editor.
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