Just as a National Party minister’s comment about pensioners surviving on R20 a month helped trigger the party’s 1981 electoral decline, today’s ANC leaders are making similarly tone-deaf remarks – from booking hotel baths during water shortages to claiming hospital patients choose to sleep on floors. This could prove electorally disastrous for a party now polling at just 40% and lacking the NP’s once-impregnable electoral buffer, writes Tony Leon.
In the 1981 (white) South African general election, the hitherto dominant – indeed impregnable – National Party suffered a sharp drop in support. This owed little to disenchantment, among most voters, with its failing racial policies and growing international isolation.
Rather, according to the opposition leader, Fredrick Van Zyl Slabbert, a single comment by a dour cabinet member, health and welfare minister Lapa Munnik, crystallised government indifference to its voters. Slabbert cited it as “first prize among cabinet ministers’ unbelievable campaign statements”.
Munnik sparked outrage with his claim that old age pensioners could eat enough on “R20 a month” (adjusted for purchasing power parity – around R 560.00 today).
When the NP dropped 9% in popular support in the election, many commentators cited this comment as symbolising a regime out of touch with the struggles of the economically marginalised and the elderly.
Of course, dropping from 65% to 56% in one election and losing just three seats nett (under the constituency system) hardly weakened the NP’s power grip – other factors would do that, and it would take more than a dozen years to play out.
Still, if history rhymes rather than replicates itself exactly, what to make of the string of faux pas today by leading ANC members? Dancing perhaps on the lip of an electoral volcano for a party, now at just 40% in registered national votes, shorn of the electoral buffer the NP enjoyed in 1981. And on the eve of local elections, where voters are far happier to punish their side than in a general election.
In a force field of negative imaging and crass comments, the water crisis centered in (but not confined to) Johannesburg gravitates the party ever more downward.
While residents, from the leafy suburbs to dusty townships, were left literally high and very dry, Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi offered his notorious comment on booking into a hotel to take a bath. This just days after his own Health MEC Nomanto Nkomo-Ralehoko advised that patients sleeping on hospital floors did so by choice.
Meantime, President Cyril Ramaphosa – who does empathy and concerns a lot better than most of his comrades, used his SONA stage to announce that his minister of water and sanitation, Pemmy Majodina, was in Johannesburg to take charge of the crisis.
And, that he would personally head a committee, to take over from another committee he had previously appointed and headed by his deputy, Paul Mashatile, to get the taps turning again.
Majodina, whose millinery choices mimic a walk-on role in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, did not linger long in Joburg, though. She soon jetted off to Ethiopia, where at Sunday’s AU breakfast on “assuring water sustainability”, she was clapping hands and leading delegates in song.
Since we know from the unceremonious firing of the former deputy minister of trade and industry, Andrew Whitfield, that no member of the national executive travels abroad without presidential approval, Ramaphosa approved her absence from ground zero of the water crisis.
Talk about treading on his own urgent message of hands-on resolution of the issue.
To be fair to Majodina, there is no account of her hiring a private jet to whisk her to Addis Ababa. That was the option chosen for a three-day London shopping spree in 2022 by Ekurhuleni metro manager Imogen Mashazi. And this in-between shielding officials from investigation for tender fraud and worse. That should play out well in the East Rand election campaign. Just an aside here, the municipality in question is in financial crisis and among its creditors is R600 million it owes to Rand Water, a major contributor to water-starvation in Gauteng.
Candid and devious
It would be remiss in the current gaffe-stakes to omit the name and outsized persona of Minerals and Petroleum Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe. He was both candid and devious in the same remark to last week’s Investing in African Mining Indaba in Cape Town.
He said: “Many say [BEE] is driving investors out, it is not.”
[Perhaps he could explain then SA’s lagging reputation as one of the worst mining jurisdictions in the world, with stagnated output over the past 15 years, despite soaring metals prices, etc].
But then he too tread on his own message. He added that “carrying a back partner” in mining exploration was “a burden” that companies need not carry, “because exploration carries no value”.
In this strangulated syntax, cynicism meets reality. BEE requirements are exempt for risky exploration and only apply when profit gouging is in sight. Should do wonders for our investment prospects. But also, such differentiation is unsustainable unless the country is to be reduced to an investment desert.
Institute of Race Relations media head Michael Morris described this as “an astounding affront” and noted that research showed that BEE premiums in state procurement cost “at least R100 billion a year”. Knock them off, and real repairs to neglected water and electricity infrastructure could gather pace.
Costing the party votes
Though Ramaphosa in his SONA address did indicate some or other review of BEE, do not hold your breath. It remains a tentpole in what remains of party ideology.
Though to cast back to the dark years of the 1980s when grim-faced ministers like Lapa Munnik bestrode the political stage and – like his latter-day imitators – cost the ruling party lots of votes.
Back then, apartheid ideology was unravelling amidst its mass of contradictions and its incompatibility with economic reality, never mind the human cost.
So, concessions, from the de facto abandonment of influx control, the de jure legalisation of black trade unions, and the easing of job reservation were made. These were prised from a government and ideology that could not marry the contradiction between the needs of an irreversibly urban industrialised economy and a fossilised racial worldview that stood in its way. It was never officially acknowledged, but bit by bit, reality chipped away at the granite edifice.
The current government’s state-centric, cadre-deployed, corruption-heavy, deindustrialising, racially profiled, infrastructure-starved model of governance creaks to the verge of collapse.
It’s almost biblical in scope, from dry water wells to dying animals in the fields.
So, chunks of the ruling ideology are jettisoned on the hoof, and help arrives from the one sector outside government control that works, the private sector.
It was also in the 1980s that Ronald Reagan, a one-time B-movie actor, commenced his presidency with the aphorism “personnel is policy”. He might have been academically lightweight and intellectually incurious, but he surrounded himself with skilled A-team players, from George HW Bush to James Baker and George Schultz. They were broadly Republican, though not narrow zealots. They filled out and enforced his agenda. And stayed on a message that Reagan expertly communicated.
Our local gaffe brigade was also selected for their posts, either by the president, the party NEC, or its deployment committee. Our president, too, has a soothing and reassuring speaking style. But his messengers and the message itself are another story entirely. One that will be written when SA next goes to the polls.
