“Lesufism” is a word that gained a certain kind of official status when it was added to the Urban Dictionary website in 2022.
It is named for Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi and means, according to the site, the “false assumption that rushing to ... the scene of an incident marshalled by the media instils public confidence that politicians are doing their jobs”.
This may be rough on Lesufi, whose main crime might be being the guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. He has the bad luck to be at the vanguard of ANC leaders who are going to lose an election. Gauteng is finish and klaar for the ANC. So much in the province is so shattered that there is little more he can do than run around like a headless chicken attending the latest scenes of chaos and misery his party has created. There is no time to actually fix anything.
It started when he was education MEC, where he would arrive at schools where there had been an incident and say stern things to departmental functionaries in front of journalists. Education outcomes did not improve, but we all learnt his name and in some circles his approach was welcomed. At least he looked busy.
The problem for the ANC is that the whole country is on the verge of being lost if the polls are to be believed. This might explain why Lesufism appears to be spreading from the provinces to national government. When everything is broken, it seems the strategy is to just turn up and say stuff — now ministers and even the president are doing it.
Lindiwe Zulu went to the scene of the Marshalltown fire and blamed apartheid. The mayor of Johannesburg went and told journalists that he was not interested in “a dialogue”. The president went and did his thing; it’s all very bad, there will be an investigation, things must change. He later appeared to join the muppets blaming NGOs. Minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said there was nothing the government could do because all the dead were illegal immigrants. It was a wholly charmless effort really.
I worked long enough in corporate communications to recognise message discipline when I see it. So when Zulu made an intergalactic nincompoop of herself by blaming the horror of the fire on apartheid, I believe she was just trying in her way to be on-message.
This weekend the president announced the start of the ANC’s manifesto review, and apartheid again featured strongly. It “continues to cast its shadow on our future trajectory. We cannot run away from it”, he said. “Just like in America, they are saying the past (slavery) does cast a shadow on African Americans (today)”.
This is clever, because by firing back with the “it’s been 30 years already” shtick, those who like to diminish the depth of the harm and pain caused by apartheid reveal themselves to voters. If you are unable to separate Zulu’s comments from the obvious truth of the president’s essential idea — that apartheid’s legacy still dominates life here — then you’re walking into the ANC’s bear trap.
It’s also a tried-and-tested message — that the average South African is better off than they were under apartheid — but I imagine it’s also a kind of SA political shibboleth of diminishing returns. The young folk who will not vote in the coming election and may therefore help the ANC lose its majority are too young to remember the pre-1994 era, and may be too poorly educated to know much about it.
The president’s insistence — and the messaging coming through on the manifesto — on talking about the effect of apartheid makes perfect sense then. It has the benefit of being both true and talking clearly to a key ANC constituency. But it probably isn’t enough to win this election convincingly, let alone future ones.
The ANC will need to come up with new ideas. This will not be easy. From the outside it appears to be a degraded ideological entity, saddled with a gerontocratic millstone of tired old ideas wrapped up in even older people who don’t understand young South Africans. Zulu blaming a lethal fire in an abandoned state-owned building on apartheid just sounds ridiculous.
Given that the ANC has created so much damage itself and had trashed so many institutions, what can it safely talk about? If its leaders talk about how they’re fixing Eskom in the middle of stage 5 load-shedding they look like fools and nobody believes them.
If they talk about creating an inclusive economy as the cornerstones of it — Transnet, Eskom and the rule of law — collapse, they look like they’re living in another country. If they talk about education when SA children aren’t able to read for meaning, or healthcare when our hospitals have no water, electricity or basic supplies, they look callous.
The party will need to think carefully about this before it embarks on a gigantic national tour of Lesufism we might call an election campaign. Its leaders risk repeating Zulu’s error of rocking up at some godforsaken place and saying silly things.
I have a suggestion: the safest topic of discussion for the ANC this election season is the ANC itself. Many South Africans still want the ANC to fix itself, and think this will address the issues facing the country. If the ANC walks the talk on internal renewal — and actually does it convincingly — that might be enough to get it over the line.
• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.
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