“Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.”
~ Henry Jekyll (Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886)
The ANC posters in Johannesburg, drenched like everything in the city this week, are peeling off their backing boards. Cyril Ramaphosa’s face, shrivelled and wrinkled, is folding in on itself. It seems an appropriate metaphor for a campaign that has been shuddering along in first gear from day one. This is the ANC’s worst election effort ever.
Any election campaign has a thousand different ingredients. It is helpful to summarise them into three broader categories: the “air war” (essentially, communication of the message, mostly through free media and paid advertisements); the “ground war” (in-person voter activity — canvassing, rallies, marches, meetings, distributing pamphlets and putting up posters); and “logistical support” (all the behind-the-scenes stuff — fundraising, strategy and tactics, budgets, record-keeping, training and so forth).
They should, however, all be tied together by a single overarching theme — the core offer any party makes to the public during an election which should infuse all election activity.
Each of these, in their own way, is a message-delivery system. And that, really, is all an election campaign is: a giant machine designed to deliver a particular offer.
For the most part, the public experiences only the first two aspects, and the ANC has always excelled at the “ground war”, as opposed to the “air war” (the DA vice versa). But this election feels a little different. The green, black and gold army seems less potent. And, as far as the “air war” goes, well, its guns have been firing blanks for months now.
No doubt the foot soldiers are out there, knocking on doors and, in the case of Ace Magashule, opening fridges, but you get the sense they aren’t so much swarming with enthusiasm and purpose as wandering around aimlessly, repeating phrases they have learnt but do not believe. It feels a curious combination of desperate and pathetic. The campaign is not so much animated by a spirit as it is without a soul.
More despair than hope
Part of the problem is the ANC has no grand offer. No singular message that resonates in any meaningful way. “A better life for all.” Now, there was a bit of marketing genius. One of the great election slogans, but that was 1994 and, 25 years later, “Let’s grow SA together” feels more like special pleading than a statement of intent.
This campaign is not about convincing you about anything. It is a final demand. You have lost everything on the stock market. But shares will rise. We have a plan.
The ANC itself has always been the credibility that belies its own message. Hope is the ANC and the ANC is hope. No more, though. These days, the ANC is despair. And, as you watch its foot soldiers interacting with the public, all they seem to do is try and explain away how badly they have failed, before cupping their hands and begging, “Please sir, can I have some more?”
Looks like most people will give them another helping of gravy. We don’t lack for charity in SA. We are a mediocrity in the most profound sense of the word. Trapped by a series of subconscious biases we dare not articulate because to do so would reveal the true extent of our desperation.
So, as the ANC politician, grown fat on greed and incompetence furrows his brow and feigns remorse, the poor and the weak dig deeper into their own guilt and offer up yet more time and opportunity for the ANC to rob them blind.
All this on the basis of nothing. On the back of an offer so hollow you only ever hear its echo. Ramaphosa smiles down on you as you drive past, below him, the bottom line: “Vote ANC” — the only semblance of conviction in a convictionless campaign.
And really, that is all the ANC has. This campaign is not about convincing you about anything. It is a final demand. You have lost everything on the stock market. But shares will rise. We have a plan. A turnaround strategy. We can save this company. Just look at our new CEO.
There is something to that analogy. Those who back Ramaphosa tend to come from the business world. They think of political parties as corporates. It all boils down to the CEO. The ANC, as the phrase has it, is “too big to fail”. The difference, of course, is that in a democracy failure is essential in a certain sense. It is only failure that can engender real reform and the accountability that inevitably accompanies it.
The ANC is doing its bit; trying as hard as it can to fail. The party’s radio and television adverts are devoid of impact. Just tired, empty rhetoric we have all heard before. The idea of “a better life for all” underpins most of it. It is a sign of the times that it feels more like mocking than magic.
On the national stage Ramaphosa drifts around the place, catching trains that stutter to a halt and getting munched by his own party for merely suggesting the past nine years have been anything other than highly productive. He is supplemented by a coterie of the corrupt and conceited, who exude little more than arrogance and contempt.
When they aren’t demanding books be burnt or explaining typos in their billboards, the party treasurer spends most of this time assuring all and sundry that the ANC isn’t bankrupt. That’s a hard sell; it seems to have put this campaign together using the very last of its pocket money.
Power-mad depravity
In his confession, Dr Henry Jekyll says: “The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn to the monstrous.”
If you want the ANC’s real election campaign, it can be found at the Zondo commission of inquiry, where the product of power-mad depravity is being systematically set out in excruciating detail. There, the party’s base instincts are on full and transparent display. They are monstrous indeed.
But really, it is just a side show. The real ANC, we are told, is out there. In the future somewhere. But you will not find it in the here and now. And certainly not in the vague, directionless and uninspiring clichés and platitudes that define its campaign.
If you wanted to do the ANC’s job for it, you might say this election is about change. Ignore the words; focus on the picture, it seems to be suggesting. That kind of thing plays very well in SA. We don’t really do words anyway. And we will take personalities over institutions any day of the week.
It’s perfect. The perfect message: here is a shoddy, hollow, second rate campaign, representing a shoddy, hollow, second rate party: “Vote ANC”. And the people wil
Think of any SA institution — political parties, the public protector, the courts, state-owned enterprises — we quickly reduce them down to one person: the boss. They become no more than the vessel for a single personality, a hero or a villain, and the ultimate embodiment of everything that flows from their particular disposition. It is doubtful we even need institutions in SA. What role do they serve in the public mind outside of the last utterance made by the individual we have confused with the idea of them?
And so it is with the ANC. It’s true, people are having a hard time discerning which “big man” is actually in charge, but the idea that the ANC might just be the reflection of a set of impulses embedded into a broad collective in love with notions of racial solidarity, socialist centralism and authoritarian control is a bridge too far. Well, we might stomach it for a moment, but only in so far as it will allow us to declare the great leader will keep all that nonsense in check. Have no fear.
Seen in that light, it makes a certain amount of sense that ANC has no readily identifiable message in this election. It’s actually rather honest. What is the point of a message after all? “Vote ANC” says everything the ANC needs to say; everything it has ever wanted to really say. It is an instruction, not an argument, and delivered through the imagined smile of man whose poster image has rotted away in the real world.
There are probably a few reasons why the ANC’s posters — all of which went up rather late in the day anyway — are falling apart. One of them is they were poorly produced, the result of rank incompetence and a shortage of funds. The other is that the ANC outsourced that particular incompetence to a company, BEE-compliant but in truth no more than a fly-by-night operation with no clue about the kind of glue and protective coating a good poster needs.
Whatever. It screwed them up royally. Just like it has every element of this campaign. Just like it has screwed up everything over the past decade. It’s perfect. The perfect message: here is a shoddy, hollow, second-rate campaign, representing a shoddy, hollow, second-rate party: “Vote ANC”.
And the people will.
“Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? Or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen, and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.”
The Zondo commission will run for a long time still. The ANC’s election campaign has a few weeks left to live. Thank God the suffering and the pretence will soon be over. Then we can get back to the real campaign.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the SA Institute of Race Relations.
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