After the fog of war lifted from the industrial-scale slaughter which characterised the killing fields of the First World War, which ended in 1918, a psychoanalyst offered an acute observation.
Sometimes, he suggested, the difference whether a soldier was awarded a medal for gallantry or was executed for cowardice, “depended in which direction the person ran after battlefield panic set in”.
In the far lesser contest of our electoral battle here in the run-up to the 29 May polls, there has been a lot of speculation as to what might happen if the ANC loses its overall majority and is forced into a coalition arrangement to govern the country for the next five years.
‘If you’re going to panic, make sure you panic first’
One possible scenario that has seen many analysts and financial market observers reach for the panic button is the spectre of an ANC-EFF (and possible MK Party) tie-up.
The banking adage, “If you’re going to panic, make sure you panic first,” would seem appropriate, except for one salient factor.
In her report on possible post-poll scenarios, Claire Bisseker, writing in the Financial Mail, quoted two market mavens on the probabilities of such an arrangement.
Strikingly, the quoted commentators dismissed this prospect of an ANC-EFF-MK Party coalition as an outlier of extreme implausibility.
PNB Paribas analysts Nic Borain and Jeff Schultz disparaged the credibility of a poll recently published by the Social Research Foundation (SRF) ( for reasons not enumerated in the article), which suggested on current trends, the ANC would obtain 37% of the vote, the MK Party would bag 13% and the EFF around 11%. Incidentally, these three tributaries of the once mighty and united ANC amount, on this poll, to a combined 61% of the total, somewhat more than the 57% obtained by the ANC alone five years back.
PMB Baribas suggests instead that the ANC will obtain 44% of the vote and will form “a benign coalition with the IFP”. They further rate the possibility of the ANC coalescing with the EFF/MK Party at “only 5%”.
It is not clear whether this conclusion is based on hard data, or wishful thinking. And how are such explicit percentages determined?
Conservative ANC
Even more explicit on the topic in the same article is Krutham’s Peter Attard Montalto. He assigns only “a 6% chance” of such a tie-up based apparently on the notion that “the ANC at core is quite conservative”. Again, he does not state how such exact percentages of likelihood are tabulated and why his prediction is more likely to occur than several countervailing views.
I haven’t seen much sign of this apparent conservatism in the legislative initiatives piloted by the ANC, such as National Health Insurance (NHI) (which President Cyril Ramaphosa has promised to sign into law “soon”) and the draconian Expropriation Bill, dubbed correctly as “a backdoor manoeuvre to legislate for expropriation without compensation”. That is embedded in the fine print of that recently enacted Bill (which still needs to be reconciled between two versions passed by the National Assembly and National Council of Provinces). And then there was the weekend attack by the president on the five largest banks in the country for their exclusionary and “monopolistic” tendencies. Not “quite conservative” at all.
Clearly, no one quoted in the article has much time for the real evidence provided in clear sight by the ANC in Gauteng, for example. Despite the national ANC allegedly disfavouring coalition arrangements with the EFF, just two weeks ago, Premier Panyaza Lesufi and his merry gang of gung-ho populists installed an EFF-ANC coalition in Ekurhuleni. And no doubt the Gauteng ANC will be a loud voice in the room, along with their former provincial colleague, now Deputy President Paul Mashatile, when decision time looms after the election for the ANC national executive committee (NEC).
But if prospects of such an arrangement are in doubt or in flux (and for what it’s worth, I think the probability to be higher than the market analysts suggest), there is far more agreement on quite how devastating such a government would be, and how destabilising.
This was expressed in stark terms by the same analyst, Montalto, who on the one hand views an ANC-EFF tie-up as an event of low probability, but one of maximum severity.
Not to mention the jaws of the debt trap closing fast on the country (which means the higher cost of debt servicing will swallow most of government expenditure and the dire need for more buyers of government bonds will exceed the number of willing purchasers bar at prohibitive cost).
And if markets reacted so negatively to Jacob Zuma’s firing of Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister and his replacement for all of three days by Des Van Rooyen (which wiped out an estimated R230 billion of value on the JSE and around R127 billion on the bond market) this “doomsday alliance” would by a generous measure exceed those totals. And however unstable it might prove over time, it will last a lot longer in office and do far greater damage than Van Rooyen (now comfortably sitting again in Zuma’s lap as an MK Party candidate) ever did.
Of course, none of these scenarios has penetrated the carapace of the ANC. The recently leaked audio of their election campaign which suggested a lack of energy by certain NEC members was responsible for a poor campaign, rather than the immense dissatisfaction felt by an overwhelming majority of voters for their own and the country’s condition.
Ramaphosa even suggested the party was on course to achieve or exceed the 57% it obtained last time and was hoping for a poll of 70%, which no other pollster deems remotely credible.
Whether this is based on science and advice better than the legal opinions obtained by the party as it recorded its third successive court loss to MK is unknown. Maybe the party’s acknowledged financial difficulties prevent it from doing its own polling.
But one factor which needs to be accounted for in all the post-election possibilities is in the realm of the psychological not the psephological.
If the once mighty ANC genuinely believes it is electorally unassailable and the voters indeed then humble it on polling day, just imagine the immense shock and disbelief which will take hold of the party high command.
And people, no less than political parties (after all, just an agglomeration of individuals) in a state of shock or post-traumatic stress might not be in the best condition to make a measured decision on either their own or the country’s future.
The electoral uncertainty we now face is good news for our democracy. But it’s less clear what that could mean for our economy and livelihoods after the smoke of the electoral battle ends and a new government emerges.