Election manifestos in many democracies can be both important and irrelevant. They can be irrelevant because so few voters actually read them – they look at the headlines, hear the sound bites and the noise and razzmatazz of an election campaign, and then make a decision about who to vote for. Political identity, here, there, and almost everywhere, is a big part of that decision. But manifestos can also be important, because they are an indication of what the ANC, in this case, our governing party, wants to achieve over the next five years.

However, the ANC also has to break away from the recent past. It may, paradoxically, even have to campaign against its own recent track record. It has achieved this remarkable feat once before when the Zuma-led ANC led the campaign to roll out ARVs as part of its 2009 campaign. That was as clear a break with the AIDS-denialism of the Mbeki era as ever.

This time, however, things may be a lot more complicated – the ANC finds itself once again trying to occupy the middle ground of our politics. While politics in many places is indeed about occupying that ground (hence the search for the swing voter), in this case, that also opens them up to attack from all sides. So, for example, it is likely the ANC will talk about land and changing the Constitution in the blandest and ambiguous of ways. Which will allow the DA to attack it for trying to change the Constitution signed by Nelson Mandela and written by its current leader, while the EFF would claim that the ANC doesn’t actually want expropriation without compensation.

It is also difficult to say, in the heat of a campaign, what the final language of the new Constitutional clause will actually be. This is both because it is a difficult thing to craft – you need about 20 words dealing with an issue as complicated as land. This is further complicated by the fact that just within the ANC, a national executive committee of 80 people and the Top Six officials all need to agree on those 20 words. (Tito Mboweni and Tony Yengeni are likely to disagree strongly on what those words should be.)

There are already some hints that the main focus of the ANC’s campaign in 2019 will be jobs and the economy. The ANC has done this before, with a focus on jobs in the election manifesto that was unveiled in January 2014. The promise to create those jobs, or even to create an enabling environment for the creation of jobs, has obviously not been fulfilled. To be fair, it is also difficult, with the best will in the world, to a spark a job-creating economic recovery in under five years. Particularly with the different and competing constituencies created by our racialised inequality.

That is not going to stop the ANC from trying to convince voters that only they can craft a way out of our current mess. The fact that opposition parties will point to the ANC and its former presidential deployee as being responsible for that mess will probably not be enough to stop it.

For millions of people in our country, the important message will be about what often are the two major problems in governance around the world – health and education. Both matters to almost everyone, and both cost huge amounts of money and can be difficult to run well.

In the case of health, there is a strange contradictory set of facts around the Health Minister, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi. On his watch, life expectancy in this country has risen by nearly 10 years. And yet, our government hospitals are so bad that Cosatu wants him removed. Very few politicians ever use them, with public anger on the rise. Just this week stories emerged of how the allocation of posts for doctors in government hospitals was bungled.

However, it would be a brave politician and a brave political party who would make promises about our health system that can be properly monitored. That would be setting yourself up for failure very quickly. NGOs in this sector are well organised and led from the ground up, and thus are able to quickly demonstrate where the problems are and how they have developed. It would be foolish to attempt to pull the wool over their eyes.

Education carries its own problems. For several years, during his first term as president, Jacob Zuma repeated the refrain, “Teachers must be in class, teaching, for seven hours a day”. There is very little evidence that that actually happened. This may well demonstrate the strength of the teachers’ lobby, and in particular their union, the SA Democratic Teachers Union. The annual national conversation about education that we have at this time of year, after the matric results and in the week of the start of the government school year, also means it cannot be ignored.

The City Press newspaper has suggested that Ramaphosa will announce big changes, including the introduction of coding as a subject, and that each learner will receive information through tablet computers, rather than textbooks. Considering that getting textbooks to every learner in the country has proved difficult in the past, the use of tablets is surely welcome. But education expert Dr Nicholas Spaull has poured cold water on their ability to improve marks, suggesting that the quality of teaching is still key. For many voters, the place to start would actually be in providing safe and clean toilet facilities at schools. In August 2018, Ramaphosa promised that there would be no schools with pit latrines within two years. It may be important for the ANC to provide evidence of progress in this area.

Crime is another area where the ANC may well want to steer clear of making big, or any, promises. The last available national figures show that the murder rate was up by 6.9%. The lived experience of people may also be that they are feeling vulnerable to crime. Callers into radio stations from the Cape Flats have described the terror of simply trying to get their children to school; residents in Westbury in Gauteng held a protest until they received what they saw as proper police attention. This is also a situation where the number of people who have experienced crime never goes down, it can only go up, so politicians need to tread carefully.

However, Ramaphosa may try to show that the police are changing. Certainly, the public image of Police Minister Bheki Cele, the fact that he is quick to respond to particular crime issues, will help. But to promise hard numbers may well backfire.

One of the key questions around this manifesto may be around whether Ramaphosa uses the moment to rally the nation around a “big idea”. Mbeki tried to make the idea of the African Renaissance his motif, his reason for governing. This led to the creation of the African Union in its current form. For a while, NEPAD really seemed to matter.

Zuma did not seem to have any kind of overarching ambition.

The situation around Ramaphosa may be so dismal that he has no chance to implement a big idea because there are so many different parts of the state that need serious repair. And the phrase “Fix Eskom” is unlikely to win many votes on a campaign poster. That said, the fact City Press got hold of details of a possible education plan may indicate that that will be where the focus lies.

It is well known and often analysed that Ramaphosa is in a position where he cannot necessarily move in the way that he would like to. The manifesto could also give a suggestion as to whether that is still the case, or whether he is actually now freer to make certain movements.

There are already indications that the elections are likely to be about identity, land, and other hot-button issues. Saturday is the one chance that the ANC and Ramaphosa may have to lower the temperature and make the polls about governance. DM