Decades back, the Sunday newspapers boasted large comic supplements featuring everyone from Prince Valiant to Batman. One weekly cartoon was called “Spot the Difference”.

It sported a two-panel drawing each of which looked, at first blush, identical to the other. But in fact, the second panel contained some subtle differences from the first drawing. The job of the reader was to spot the differences between the two.

As voters stream to polling stations across the country on Wednesday in what has been dubbed a “pivotal” election, the most interesting late pivot has been the ANC’s lurch into bargain-base populism tinged with a dash of unconstitutional authoritarianism.

In recent days it has been hard to “spot the difference” between the so-called “macro populists” (Trevor Manuel’s preferred putdown of the hard left) on the EFF and MK side of the political ledger and Manuel’s old party on the other. A difference now, at best, of degree not of kind.

Just consider the recent hostages to economic (mis) fortune gifted to the nation by Cyril Ramaphosa: He has grown a magic money tree and conjured up branches loaded with billions of rand of spending commitments “benefits and giveaways” as one journal noted, in the event of his re-election.

Free medical aid for all followed, days later, by a basic income grant for all at the cost estimate of at least R320 billion per annum, according to Peter Attard Montalto of Krutham, an economics consultancy. And not to be outbid by the EFF or MK, Ramaphosa on Sunday pledged to ‘accelerate land reform and redistribution.

Spot the difference if you can here, between Ramaphosa 2024 and Jacob Zuma 2017. Readers might recall that Zuma was largely disparaged as a financial illiterate and raving populist when he announced, without any planning or testing, the immediate implementation of free tertiary education for all. How would it be funded? Who would pay for it? How would it be administered? Zuma did not bother with the detail.

Yet here we are, six years later, and the NFSAS fund set up to administer the scheme is bankrupt and has been comprehensively looted. The much larger and more complex National Health Insurance scheme is signed into law sans funding, minus testing and absent any consultation.

Without exaggeration, Pieter du Toit, in these pages, recently suggested, “Ramaphosa has now reached his Zuma moment”.

But if you want a real populist, unburdened by cost implications and such bothersome details as debt, GDP ratios hurtling toward 80% and a spike on government bonds setting the jaws for a future debt trap, you might as well vote for the real EFF-MK thing, not the Ramaphosa pale facsimile.

Quite why leaders of our business community, unless suffering from advanced cases of the Stockholm syndrome, suggest an ANC victory will be positive for stability is a mystery.

In Roman times, Tacitus predicted the ruin of the empire because its elites had bowed down before various plundering (and worse) emperors for the price of tranquillity. But it came with a hefty price tag: “They make a desert and they call it peace,” he warned.

Just ask the medical insurers like Discovery. Of passing interest is that most government land reform schemes have not achieved their set goals – far from it. As a bizcommunity study summarised it in a recent report:

The intentions of government to empower communities through land redistribution have been thwarted by various challenges, including, among others, corruption among state officials, bureaucratic hurdles, favouritism toward elites, limited access to funding, implementation inefficiencies and external factors like crime and deteriorating infrastructure.

And if that reads like the opposition’s epitaph for the entire Ramaphosa administration, the government’s own “proactive land reform strategy” (PLAS) in November 2022 conceded in a presentation to Parliament that R12 billion had been spent on acquiring farms for land reform. Yet there had been a “75% failure rate” on these farms.

Doubtless, expropriation without compensation will cost the state less and make the failure even more pervasive. And now the government, which has had such catastrophic failures at land reform, student tuition payments, and even just delivering a letter, intends to remove your choice of which doctor you may consult and where you may receive medical treatment if you are to get it at all.

All these delights await us in the “seventh administration” as the ANC grandiosely dubs the next Parliament. But just as the sixth one was heading for the exit, Ramaphosa, who rejoices in his moniker as architect of the Constitution and always pays solemn lip service to its spirit and letter, decided on an abuse of power and hijacked the (willing) public broadcaster to provide his party with a 30-minute free advertorial on its manifest successes, 72 hours before polls opened. Never mind channelling his inner Zuma, this wheeze, in blatant contradiction of the electoral code, was pure PW Botha reincarnate.

Last week, the ANC secretary general, usually reliably a bit of a buffoon, the ‘Chemical Ali’ on the campaign trail, did his own pivot, this time toward religion.

He told a crowd in Botshabelo, Free State, that “the ANC is protected by God and no weapon formed against it shall prosper”.

Quite what the deity made of this suggestion is unknown. But at least one famous biblical verse has been contradicted by both his party’s malperformances in government and now reckless promises to maintain power. As the book of James at 4:17 reminds believers, “Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”

But whether saint or sinner, the saving grace for the ANC election – if there is one – will be determined from the opposite end of the spectrum – the fallen angel himself.

In elections, there are two basic choices. However, many parties compete for votes. And on Wednesday, the one the ANC will be relying on is described best as “the devil you know”.

Not only the nervous business community but plenty of voters old enough to remember apartheid (of which the ANC is happy to relitigate at every turn) or else wearily imagining no other realistic option will back the incumbent. But how many turn up, and in which provinces could make all the difference to the fortunes and misfortunes of the governing party?

The second basic choice in any election is best described as “vote for change” and here voters are confronted by a bewilderingly large range of parties. There are two other versions of the ANC on the ballot, EFF and MK and MK is the real game changer in this election as it promises a change back to an imagined ANC unburdened by constitutional restraint, unmoored by even a vestige of economic sobriety. It is headed by disgraced former president who is almost as popular, according to polls, as Ramaphosa and certainly as well known.

In the “change entirely from the ANC” column there are no shortage of options confronting voters on the lengthy ballot papers on Wednesday.

One of the problems for the change agents here is that some of the hares – such as Action SA, Patriotic Alliance, Rise Mzansi, have run a race spending more energy attacking the DA tortoise than in targeting the ANC big beast. And you need to go back to your childhood and reread Aesop’s fable to remember who won that race. But that is a contest for the silver medal.

Who wins gold, nationally and provincially, is what the nation waits to see, and if the polls are even half right, your vote can make a big difference. Happy voting day!