Accountability and electoral politics are inseparable. The relationship becomes harrowing as the liberation edge of the African National Congress becomes frayed at the receiving end of a quarter of a century of governance and corruption. It is difficult for the ANC to defend shortcomings of government and leadership in the face of flagrant abuse and appropriation of public resources, and current efforts to correct and upgrade suffer credibility lapses.

To the ANC’s advantage there is still a separation between accountability and election results: many more will vote ANC than the numbers who are entirely happy with ANC performance and accountability offered for suboptimal performance. Part of the reason is the ANC’s persuasive power in reclaiming liberation ethos and Struggle credentials. Its past election campaigns have been able to reinsert preceding struggles into the present. To date in elections and by current public opinion polls venturing into 2019 voting territory, elections have been the time of closing the liberation circle, reinventing the noble struggles, and persuading voters that anti-ANC voting will amount to a reversal of liberation fortunes.

There is, this time around, the added advantage for the ANC (or any party that can claim authenticity of struggle) of heightened popular consciousness of ongoing coloniality and racism. This could help aid escapes from accountability on many issues of social service and government corruption (where current occupants rather than structural deficits cause non-performance).

South African politics is marked by continuous between-election extraction of accountability, especially from ANC leaders who fear for future electoral fortunes (read, for example, e-tolls Gauteng). Voter calls for accountability are aided by opposition parties still in the position to take moral stands, mass media that retain credentials, or pop-up social media mobs who specialise in rapid-response public opinion. The results of the between-election actions to extract accountability have been evident in the fall of former political luminaries, by the exposés on public resource abuse, and a handful of projects to settle urban land hunger.

For now, South Africa is in a period between these preceding efforts to get accountable government and the spectacles of major manifesto launches (and salaried MPs and MPLs doing election rather than parliamentary work). We witness pre-election ANC action to try to demonstrate accountability through select clean-outs and shape-ups.

Voters circa 2018-19 are cynical, their electoral consciousness has been shaped by years of abuse by the Zumaist ANC, long-standing promises of cadre development (with a view to ethical governance), of undertakings to act definitively on corruption (if and when acknowledged), to bring government bureaucracy to work, clean up Cabinet, give teeth to the ANC’s integrity committee, let the ANC disciplinary committee do its work, or to screen the ANC electoral lists for credentials and past as well as ongoing transgressions.

Now is the time for the ANC to demonstrate accountability to the citizens. Yet inspection shows that little has materialised on these fronts. And voters will be asked to pledge their trust that more accountability will be evident in future than in the past.

Accountability by the ANC, directly to citizens, gains in importance because electoral alternatives to the ANC are limited… and have been slipping. The DA is in phased implosion mode, courtesy of the Patricia de Lille sabotage project (Helen Zille’s revenge on the DA, given that the fusion with the Independent Democrats was one of Zille’s DA expansion initiatives). The Economic Freedom Fighters is patron to many in the generation of discontented young voters, but will not grow to supersede the DA. Hence, the ANC is virtually fighting election 2019 against itself, at a time when it is arguably at one of the weakest points in its existence (and would have been decimated had it not had new, tentative leadership).

There is a huge onus on the ANC to self-police and reinvent itself as the epitome of accountability. Power of persuasion will be via deeds, rather than another round of boring unpersuasive wordy reassurances.

There have been sprinklings and tokens of action. Nhlanhla Nene fell, Brian Hlongwa resigned, the integrity committee’s George Mashamba took a stab at VBS offenders (the NEC is to follow through, perhaps), a few worst-offender Zumaists in the Cabinet fell earlier in 2018. The Zondo Commission makes incremental progress, but slow enough still to let ex-President Jacob Zuma play with words: “I have respected the people of this country; I have … done nothing out of order.”

On this deeds front the ANC is likely in the campaign months ahead to offer the small tokens but hope for great effect. The processes and casualties to date will be presented as evidence of great, clean governance things to come. Citizens will be asked to place their trust in the juggling acts of this “new ANC”.

There will be other campaign juggling acts as well, which will be at the rhetorical level and will only demand longer-term accountability. They include: is this new ANC radical or not, is it implementing Nasrec conference resolutions adopted in the shadow of Bell Pottinger-Gupta appropriation of the narratives on the need for fundamental structural change? Finance Minister Tito Mboweni cautioned the ANC not to speak in contradictions while the ANC is the master of speaking left, walking right.

Perhaps the greatest campaign accountability juggle will be the ANC’s standard act of listening and “discovering” the needs of the people. Former and aspiring public representatives will be on the ground and will “discover” the devastation of 27.5% (by narrow definition) joblessness, of collapsed schools and clinics, of municipalities that do not care about sewerage in the drinking water and exposed electricity cables that kill children.

The irony is that in South Africa’s limited democracy (absence of opposition with traction and a declined dominant party) the citizens are big losers. They can extract promises from politicians, can threaten to switch votes, abstain from voting, protest and embarrass the governing party. But come election time, the voters will be asked to extend virtually blind trust.

Do South African voters have the patience and trust to want to extract promises? Is there still hope that campaign promises can leverage a platform for voters to use post-election to bring delivery, and far more incisive change than before?

South Africa’s Election 2019 will be a profound test of the veracity of the country’s 25 years of democracy. DM