South Africa

2019 ELECTIONS

Six Hot Buttons: Key moments in the election campaign

Six Hot Buttons: Key moments in the election campaign
Illustration courtesy of N.D. Mazin 2019

Just five days before the election, the key moments of the campaign are now discernible. Corruption has figured large as have state inefficiency and community protests, which sprung up in a copycat effect.

Election campaigns kicked off almost as soon as 2019 did.

The ANC launched its manifesto early in January and other parties followed – starting a five-month campaign. At the time of writing, two polls put the ANC in the lead at between 58% and 61%, with the DA in second place at between 18% and 20% and the EFF in the third spot with just under 10% of the vote. A poll by the Institute for Race Relations is different. It predicts a drubbing for the ANC and DA and says the EFF will achieve the best growth.

1. Zondo commission of inquiry into State Capture

The Zondo commission of inquiry started 2019 with bombshell testimony by former Bosasa COO Angelo Agrizzi, who took the stand for nine days. In that time he made allegations against ANC President Cyril Ramaphosa and his son, two Cabinet members, MPs and officials from the party.

He laid out an anatomy of how Bosasa, owned by the ANC-aligned Watson family, paid bribes from its vaults and also greased the palms of party leaders through gratuities that varied from security installations to braai packs and expensive booze. These revelations became campaign issues which put corruption at the centre of the campaign.

2. A shocked president

President Cyril Ramaphosa is the face of the ANC campaign and he has carried the party. A popular leader, Ramaphosa has been deployed in an exhausting set of engagements that can sometimes see him undertake six campaign stops in a day with a dinner talk in the evening.

One of the funniest was a March train trip to Pretoria. His effort to take to the tracks failed miserably when he got stuck on the train for three hours. It is, of course, par for the course for commuters, but Ramaphosa pronounced himself shocked. As he made first-hand contact with the life of ordinary South Africans, Ramaphosa used the phrase of being “shocked” a few times, which won him opprobrium from the commentariat, but which pollsters say works on the stumps. Apparently, South Africans like that he identified with how much of a hassle life can be for ordinary people.

3. Alex #TotalShutdown

For at least 10 days of the campaign, the historic suburb/township of Alexandra in Johannesburg was top of the news. Alex is a heaving mass of humanity from across the continent and further afield. It’s alive, entrepreneurial, vibrant and also a total balls-up of bad roads, rapid urban migration and poor planning.

A community group embarked on a protest to shut down Alex and to demand the attention of Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba, who refused to accede to crowd pressure and a thinly disguised ANC campaign. That worked against the DA, which looked uncaring and scared of its own people.

4. Protests

From Alex, the protests spread with both Gauteng and the Western Cape as the epicentres. As usual, housing and land were the issues that came up as the protests are usually (but not always) in informal settlements. Municipal IQ noted 67 protests between January and March 2019. The advisory group says 2018 was the most protest-prone year yet.

5. ANC national election list

When ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule went to deliver the party lists to the IEC in April, he could not have expected the row which ensued.

The party put its candidate lists through the wringer of its selection guidelines and even then, it turned up names of candidates who are at the centre of the party’s State Capture era.

They include Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane, Minister of Women Bathabile Dlamini and the former finance minister Malusi Gigaba. This made public a party schism as the Veterans League (an official structure of the party led by former SABC news boss Snuki Zikalala) and the Elders (a grouping of veterans led by former secretary-general Cheryl Carolus) went public to oppose the lists and to lobby candidates to stand down.

A special national executive committee meeting was called, but it resolved only to refer the lists to the party’s Integrity Commission, where they still languish. The candidates are running.

6. Gangster State

In the middle of the campaign, journalist Pieter-Louis Myburgh dropped his epic opus Gangster State, an investigation into Magashule and his various crony networks. Magashule’s young guns in the provincial Youth League threatened to burn the book at a public bonfire at a Bloemfontein dumpsite.

After a massive outcry, the bonfire was cancelled and Ramaphosa said the ANC did not burn books. Earlier, activists aligned to Cosas, the ANC-aligned student wing, disrupted Myburgh’s Johannesburg book launch, where they tore some books and drank all the wine.

Magashule said at the weekend that his phone was being tapped as he accused the country’s security agencies of interfering in the ANC’s internal squabbles. Ramaphosa denied this. This row and the book have forced ANC divisions into the public domain and have revealed how high the stakes are for Ramaphosa. DM

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