GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Which party can benefit most from a November 1 election date?

On September 8, co-operative governance and traditional affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma proclaimed the upcoming local government elections would be held on November 1. That left political parties with 54 days to campaign. That is tight indeed. Who will be able to best capitalise on the compacted election timeline?

First, a bit of context. It’s the second time the election has been proclaimed. The first attempt — on August 3 — was deemed invalid by the Constitutional Court. And while the final date is only three days later than the original proclamation (October 27), it means parties have had, in effect, since August 3 to get their election machines started.

Regardless, delivering an actual campaign is hard to do when everything is fluid. So the formal and final 54 days window will be where electioneering starts proper.

So much of any campaign, for any political party, happens behind the scenes. Essentially you need to do four things: First, determine your offer — the central messages around which you will structure your campaign; second, identify your potential — who you are talking to, where they are and how best to target them; third, decide on the mechanisms to deliver your message — posters, pamphlets, billboards, advertisements, and on-the-ground activity; and fourth, execute a significant human resources operation to effectively implement and co-ordinate all of the above.

Let us look at the big three parties — the ANC, DA and EFF — and the degree to which they are able to deliver on these four requirements.

1. The message

Both the DA and EFF have announced a date for their respective manifesto launches. The ANC has not. The DA’s posters have started to go up, and the primary message seems to be “The DA gets things done”, a reference to its service delivery record, which it will obviously look to put front and centre. The EFF has some posters, but most seem to be advertising its manifesto launch and are without an accompanying slogan. The ANC has no posters up.

So you would have to say the DA has the most clarity about its offer, followed by the EFF and then the ANC, which, to date, has none; at least none that is readily identifiable.

2. Targeting your audience

The ANC and DA both are in similar boats here. Both lost support (to different degrees) in 2019. That is helpful, in that it allows you to focus. Where they differ, however, is that the DA’s impulse will be to persuade minority voters that it is still their best home, while still trying to broaden its support. If it does the one at the expense of the other, there will be problems. That is a hard and complex balance to maintain. 

The ANC, by contrast, has lost support across the board. It has a base level support problem. That is an even more difficult boat to turn around. It forces you to stretch your resources and dilute your message. So when the ANC does roll out its message, you can expect it to be something entirely generic. That too is a problem — the general rule is, the more vague your message, the less its particular appeal. People cannot relate to abstractions. And its brand is damaged as it is. Without a particular and defensible focus, whatever it says will be open to so much more contradiction and criticism. 

The EFF is generally superb at targeting its audience. However, it heavily relies on on-the-ground activity to talk to them, something made all the harder by Covid-19 restrictions. The ANC also relies on this but, historically, it has always had a strong national message to back it up. The EFF tends to deliver both in-person. 

This ability, for all parties, to make direct voter contact, is absolutely essential in one important respect: turnout — the number of your voters you can actually get to vote on Election Day. Local government elections historically favour the opposition in this regard (ANC voters are far less enthusiastic about local elections) but apathy is now such an acute problem in SA politics, all three, you feel, will battle to maximise their potential. 

Whichever party is able to best target, mobilise and enthuse their core supporters, even off a low base, will have a profoundly impactful competitive advantage.

In the final analysis, and because of its sophisticated internal polling and systems, the DA is probably best at identifying its audience, followed by the EFF. The ANC, simply by way of its size and reach, has been best at actually making contact with voters. But that record is under severe pressure now.

3. The mechanisms to deliver your message

All of these elements require money. The more money you have, the more posters and adverts you can run. All three big parties, however, are under huge pressure on this front. Covid-19, new fundraising legislation and poor results have certainly decimated the amount of money the ANC and DA can raise. But whatever cuts the DA has been forced to make, the ANC literally appears bankrupt. How it is going to be able to afford posters, when it cannot afford to pay salaries, remains to be seen.

So, while the DA is likely to downscale, the ANC is likely to have huge gaps in its campaign and a number of elements it simply will not be able to produce at all. That will hurt it. The ANC relies so much on the projection of size: its final rallies are always an attempt to demonstrate its electoral dominance. This is a new game for the ANC, though, with new rules, and without that ability it is going to struggle.

The EFF has the least money of the big three and so typically does not do things like TV and radio adverts. It banks on word of mouth, in-person contact and the free media to deliver its message. It will no doubt do its best on this front, but it too will be a down scaled operation.

4. The operation

Here the ANC is in total disarray. Its national staff, responsible for a campaign’s intellectual content and co-ordination, are in revolt, as are some provinces, of which KwaZulu-Natal (so central to the ANC’s national support levels) is the epicentre. And its leadership is divided and compromised, not just nationally but provincially, and that is before one gets into the potential effect of not having a full field of candidates or the backlash from purging so many people from its lists.

There is very little understanding in SA of how much planning and co-ordination goes into something as simple as, say, getting a poster up. The message must be determined, backboards and cable ties must be bought, they need to be printed and stored, you need a separate operation to deliver them nationally and then another cohort of people to put them up. Finally, they need to be maintained and supplemented (a new set of posters put up, say, around a registration weekend or the final push).

This applies to a hundred different operations — in the production of adverts, canvassing lists and pamphlets, you need a highly disciplined, extremely well-coordinated and supremely efficient operation to pull all that off. The ANC gives you the impression it couldn’t run a bath at the moment.

Thus, the DA in particular (which has relatively more resources than the EFF and far more advanced systems) would seem best placed here. Followed by the EFF which, thanks to its authoritarian internal culture, can hit way above its weight. In last place is the ANC.

Conclusion 

It is hard to translate this all into votes. But if the DA is able to deliver on all the fundamentals, in the typically efficient manner it has in the past, pure organisational excellence should give it a significant competitive advantage in this election. The EFF too, should be able to capitalise on the ANC’s incoherence and disorganisation. 

Every percentage counts, nowhere more so than in the key metros. If the DA and EFF (and even smaller parties) can squeeze out an extra percentage point or two, just by being professional, it will be like gold dust.

None of this is to say anything about the inherent appeal of each party, and how well it is able to actually persuade people — that is a subject for another discussion. It is simply an assessment of the practicalities of the election and who is best placed to take advantage of them, in a difficult environment.

If you can get your existing voters to the polls, that counts for a lot at the moment. And on this front, the ANC has delivered the DA and EFF an open goal.