With the election now six weeks away, it’s becoming harder not to see the campaign posters on the nation’s lampposts as a symbol of our politics: two-dimensional faces, turning this way and that in the prevailing breeze, just hanging around until they’re taken away and recycled.
Still, some of the placards are quite fun. I particularly like the honesty of Patricia de Lille’s GOOD party posters, begging us to “stop the suffering”, presumably by voting for someone else so all those poor GOOD members can recover their dignity and start healing after five years of being taken for a ride.
I was also impressed by the single IFP poster on a Cape Town highway, emblazoned with a photo of the late Mangosuthu Buthelezi. It’s possible that some canny IFP member saw an opportunity to punt his or her party during the Two Oceans marathon at the weekend, but you have to admire the damn-the-torpedoes attitude of a party using the image of a politician seven months dead to sell itself to a province that gave it 599 votes in the most recent general election.
The DA likewise has posters that really make you think. “Rescue SA,” it urges us, reminding us that the most urgent first step in rescuing this country is to remove the ANC from power. But then that simple slogan goes deeper, asking us: if reducing the ANC’s electoral support is the key to our collective happiness, then surely we should be voting for the people who have made the greatest strides in doing that? And given that the two people who’ve done the most to remove the ANC from power are Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa, surely we should be voting for one of them?
I’m teasing, of course, but then again, so is the DA when it talks about rescuing the entire country. Even its most ardent fans know that in its current form it has probably reached its ceiling and has all but abandoned its ambitions to be a national government in favour of consolidating its hold on the Western Cape and a few municipal enclaves in other provinces.
To be fair, I’m not sure I blame it. It’s one thing to talk about rescuing this country, but the reality of what comes after that — of slowing, then stopping, then repairing the catastrophic economic and psychological damage done by colonialism, apartheid and the ANC; of spending a decade doing triage and then possibly being voted out because you didn’t staunch the bleeding fast enough — must be incredibly daunting to all but the most passionate activists across the political spectrum.
There’s a certain logical pragmatism in the DA quietly retreating from the rest of the country and shoring up its fiefdom in the Cape. Which is why the party’s decision to go after Songezo Zibi and his Rise Mzansi party — a decision that is both illogical and self-defeating — is so strange.
Fellow columnist Peter Bruce and a Sunday Times editorial covered the spat more thoroughly and eloquently than I could, both marvelling at how John Steenhuisen seems determined to shower Rise with as much free publicity as he can, almost single-handedly promoting the new party to the big leagues simply by seeming so rattled by it.
I would add one thing to those analyses though, because Steenhuisen didn’t just give Zibi headlines and column inches. On Friday, he also gave him something far more valuable: a clearly defined piece of territory on the political map. After explaining that Rise was “not making inroads”, except apparently into his haunted dreams, Steenhuisen said the party had resorted in desperation to trying to be “an opposition to the opposition”.
I know what he was going for by using that phrase, and certainly in the polarised them-and-us atmosphere of party politics it would have been a galvanising idea for many in the DA. But what Steenhuisen also did, entirely by accident, was to confer on Rise the status of a second opposition; a party opposed to the ANC and therefore imbued with many of the values DA voters admire, but also opposed to Steenhuisen’s DA and therefore expressing attitudes and frustrations many disgruntled DA voters — and more centrist voters from other minority parties — might recognise.
In short, Steenhuisen did for free what public relations gurus and branding experts charge through the nose for: he cemented in the national conversation that Rise is a third way; a party that by virtue of being in opposition is not the ANC, but that is slightly more like the ANC than the DA. In other words, the perfect home for people who want the pro-business mindset and professional bureaucracy of the DA, but who also want the old ANC’s approach to social justice.
Of course, all of this might simply be pre-election hoopla, as fleeting and ultimately meaningless as De Lille joining or forming a new party. It is possible that the DA will hold the Western Cape without breaking a sweat. It’s possible some might split their votes, voting Rise nationally and DA provincially to send Zibi to parliament while keeping the taps running and the roads usable back home.
Still, if the DA wants to avoid any nasty surprises in six weeks, it might do well to focus a little less on rescuing SA and a little more on rescuing itself.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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