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Lindiwe Sisulu’s adviser: ‘Don’t write off her chances in 2022’

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Mphumzi Mdekazi is a political adviser to Tourism Minister Lindiwe Sisulu. He is a member of the ANC at AB Xuma Branch in the Boland Region (WC) and a PhD candidate at Stellenbosch University. He writes in his personal capacity as an ANC member.

Separately or together, both ANC leaders who Ferial Haffajee flimsily writes off – Lindiwe Sisulu and Zweli Mkhize – are credible challengers who have a base and popular support to contest President Cyril Ramaphosa’s re-election campaign in the run-up to the ANC’s elective conference in December 2022.

Polling is a guessing game, not an exact science. Polls are not predictive, they are based on models built on assumptions and deductions that are based on assumptions that are not truths.

Academic literature has documented how journalists largely rely on institutional sources, notably political elites, which produces a top-down perspective of the world around us. After all, those who set the media agenda equally craft the questions and define the answers that set the narrative in hotly contested political environments in a democracy such as ours.

Ferial Haffajee’s article in Daily Maverick on 28 March 2022, “Ramaphosa likely to win ANC elective conference and lead a coalition government in 2024 – research reports”, is a case in point. And Haffajee ropes in “scenario architect” Jakkie Cilliers of the Institute for Security Studies to analyse likely scenarios for the future of South Africa.

A cut-and-paste job of four dissimilar scenarios that predict the demise of the ANC in one form or the other; an exercise in myth-making that casts President Cyril Ramaphosa as the principle actor in this série noire.

Haffajee paints specious analyses of Cilliers’s scenarios, and peddles a politically bleak and unstable future for South Africa. Cilliers pontificates that in three of the scenarios the ANC “will not win the 2024 election” and it is “less likely that the so-called Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction of the governing party wins its elective conference”.

In case we forget, the same argument was advanced for Ramaphosa’s election at the last elective conference in 2017. If we follow Cilliers’s logic, Ramaphosa will win the elective conference but lose the 2024 elections.

Now why would the ANC re-elect Ramaphosa who would then lead the party into defeat in 2024? And why would it follow the path of neocolonial logic and begin “a period of decline mirrored in the fortunes of African liberation movement parties”?

Let’s take a closer look at Cilliers’s scenarios and Haffajee’s narrative.

In Cilliers’s “Bafana Bafana” scenario, Ramaphosa’s re-election will result in the ANC becoming “a largely rural party where it continues to hold a majority with support from local businesses built around the state procurement system, and former homeland factions who hold sway in many provinces”.

A condescending characterisation of the majority of South Africans and a damning indictment packaged as an academic critique of Ramaphosa’s leadership of the ANC.

Then there is the “Thuma Mina” scenario. It projects that “President Ramaphosa wins convincingly at the 2022 conference, and the ANC wins a narrow majority of 51% in the 2024 election”. Fortunately for Ramaphosa, according to Cilliers, the “RET faction splinters off” and is absorbed into Julius Malema’s EFF. Ridiculously simplistic.

To continue the narrative on the demise of the ANC without Ramaphosa, Haffajee introduces the “Nation Divided” scenario, in which Cilliers forecasts “the RET faction wins in December 2022, has a year in which it can extract rents and then the ANC loses in 2024” and continues its accelerated descent into oblivion in the 2029 election.

This is fearmongering at its lowest.

In the oddly named “Mandela Magic” scenario, Haffajee’s description is that “Ramaphosa does not run at the ANC elective conference and leads a breakaway from the governing party… and the ANC falls to 34% support in 2024”, continuing its self-destructive plunge into ignominy.

Cilliers concedes this is “the least-likely outcome”. This advances the narrative that Ramaphosa will stay, will contest the elective conference, and will win. Haffajee serves up a braai: “In all four scenarios, the winners are coalitions, which now define South Africa’s political future” and “the upshot is that Ramaphosa is likely to get a second term as president but as the leader of a coalition government”.

But Cilliers rains on the party and predicts “considerable political turbulence for South Africa whichever way it goes” – civil unrest and turmoil. According to Haffajee, and Cilliers’s scenarios, the “renewal” of the ANC could in no way be led by any other leader President Ramaphosa to rescue the party, and the country, from the doomsday scenarios. Haffajee labels anyone opposing Ramaphosa in the ANC as belonging to the RET faction.

If we follow Haffajee’s illogic further, there are no alternatives to Ramaphosa in the ANC, even in the event that Ramaphosa’s leadership of the party results in its calamitous defeat in future national elections. By this, she is unconsciously narrowing her claim to journalistic ethos and credibility, because she is used to writing to passive audiences and takes a risk by bringing questionable polls to the fore.

It is strange that Haffajee makes no reference to Ramaphosa’s previous electoral performance in all of what she calls analysis. Then the question is: How is she hoping to be taken seriously, and objectively sway the public, with this kind of poorly conducted analytical work, when she not only negated but indolently obliterated the hallmarks and rituals of scholarship in her final product?

Lindiwe Sisulu is disdainfully brushed aside because she is a woman who dared contest democratic elections for the ANC leadership in 2017 and lost. Haffajee doesn’t offer an inkling of analysis on whether Sisulu will contest the 2022 ANC election or on her chances of victory.

Zweli Mkhize is naively written off as a serious contender as he battles to clear his name in a media scandal that threatened to scupper an otherwise promising political career. Here, again, Haffajee fails to offer an objective analysis and exposes her political bias. This failure of balance renders her as a Thuma Mina spokesperson deductively.

One of the great confusions about journalism, wrote Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in The Elements of Journalism, is the concept of objectivity. When the concept originally evolved, it was not meant to imply that journalists were free of bias. Quite the contrary. Ferial Haffajee is proof, notwithstanding her efforts to project an image of objectivity.

It is public knowledge that, separately or together, both ANC leaders who Haffajee flimsily writes off are credible challengers with stronger liberation Struggle credentials than her preferred candidate, and they have a base and popular support to contest Ramaphosa’s re-election campaign in the run-up to the ANC’s elective conference in December 2022.

South African society may be in transition, and the country may be a politically fractured place, but it is not beyond repair. The same could be also said of an ANC faced with internal and external forces against its organic transition in a new era with new expectations.

South Africa shall stretch forth her hands unto the imagined future bequeathed by our founding fathers. All South Africans have a sacred duty to prove the doomsayers wrong. South Africa and Africa shall rise. DM

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Comments - Please in order to comment.

  • Michael Sham says:

    I get the impression that Mr Mdekazi is trying to convince himself, not the readers of his article!

    • Kanu Sukha says:

      I remember attending a public lecture by a friend Neville Alexander (RIP) some years ago in which he began with a declaration about his ‘affiliations’ and the misplaced notion of ‘neutrality/objectivity’ in matters . Here we have a Phd student (which I have never been – I pity his supervisor) pretending to be analytical and objective ! How sad . Is he an unpaid/unrewarded ‘adviser’ to Lindiwe ? Maybe feathering his nest for his perceived/hoped for ‘bright’ future ? What a waste of intellect !

  • Gerrit Marais says:

    “Lindiwe Sisulu is disdainfully brushed aside because she is a woman who dared contest democratic elections for the ANC leadership in 2017 and lost.” No, she is just simply incompetent to run even a spaza shop, never mind anything else. Look at her track record. Her surname is basically the only cachet (if one could call it that) she possesses. And, there are many women who are accepted without question and very competently serve as politicians, regardless of their sex.

  • Rich Field Field says:

    This is not directly about this article, but maybe someone here can help…

    I have a question (it’s not about SA only, it includes the largest “democratic” govt in the world, USA and others)
    Why is it that as the president, you take an oath of office, which essentially gives you 1 job: To uphold the law of the land and see that other do (this is ultimately laid out in the constitution). You swear to put the country first and uphold the constitution (simplistically put – a distillation for me a simple citizen)
    Now you cannot be a lawyer if you are guilty of a criminal offence (I understand or am I mistaken), but you can be the president of a country. The “buck stops here” keeper of the fundamental laws of the country. Isn’t that odd?
    Surely a convicted criminal (Trump was found guilty of stealing money from his own charity. Guilty and had to pay a fine.) should not be allowed to hold a position like that?
    I just don’t get it.
    It’s got nothing to do with party “step aside” or any party political process or policy. It’s a simple case of why does the law not preclude a (convicted) criminal from holding any senior ministerial or public office. (With a record of theft – Trump – he would never get employed to manage anything but his own businesses. Could he be trusted? With your company and its money?)
    I just don’t get it. Can someone please give me the logic attached to this? Not the emotional or reform logic, but the simple common sense of a simple citizen.

  • Miles Japhet says:

    Her ideology will simply hasten the demise of our economy – people are not that blind

  • Craig B says:

    Mkhize is a crook and Sisulu believes she can run South Africa without a constitutional democracy. Both will lead to the starvation of South Africans which is why we definitely have not written them off.

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