The ANC’s national spokesperson, Mahlengi Bhengu-Motsiri, devoted a lengthy article, “Is the DA’s polling an objective measure or a manufactured narrative?” (Sunday Independent, 29 October) to questioning the credibility of polling by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and other research organisations.*
It is a peculiar response from a party whose electoral support has been declining for twenty years. Rather than examine what South Africans have been telling researchers about their values, priorities, and policy preferences, Bhengu-Motsiri appears more interested in attempting rather lamely to discredit those who report the answers.
Her accusations suffer from a serious defect: she identifies no methodological wrongdoing whatsoever; no manipulated questionnaire, dishonest weighting, fabricated result, or defective sampling procedure is demonstrated. Instead, readers are offered an assortment of professional relationships and political associations, and are apparently expected to conclude that knowing someone who once worked for the DA constitutes evidence of statistical misconduct.
The IRR’s polling methodology meets world-class professional standards. Our surveys employ established techniques including random-digit dialling, Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing, demographic weighting, and structured questionnaires. We publish methodological explanations, sample sizes, fieldwork periods, and statistical limitations. Our methodology is available for scrutiny, as it should be. We welcome substantive criticism, particularly when it identifies something that could improve our research.
What Bhengu-Motsiri fails to appreciate is that our polling offers the ANC something considerably more valuable than estimates of its electoral fortunes. For years, the IRR has provided evidence of a widening distance between the policies pursued by the ANC and the priorities expressed by ordinary South Africans, including the party’s own supporters.
Consider the historical record. In 2004, the ANC commanded 69.7% of the national vote. Twenty years later, it received 40.2%, losing its parliamentary majority. Our 2026 polling subsequently placed its support at 36%. This last figure is a survey finding rather than an election result, but the underlying direction of the ANC’s electoral decline is beyond dispute.
And the warning signs have been accumulating for years.
As far back as 2016, IRR polling found that 84% of black respondents preferred a political party promising faster economic growth and more jobs, against just 7% favouring one concentrating on land expropriation for redress. The preference for growth and employment remained overwhelming in subsequent surveys, standing at 80% in 2018 and 81% in 2020.
These findings were available throughout the years in which the ANC increasingly invested its political energies in expropriation, racial regulation, and state-directed economic intervention. The public was expressing an appetite for economic opportunity while the governing party pursued policies which the IRR has consistently argued would discourage investment, restrict economic participation, and inhibit growth.
In 2024, our polling found that 83% preferred job creation to greater dependence on social grants, while 63% favoured policies encouraging business-led economic growth. In 2025, 84% supported merit-based appointments, whether entirely on merit or accompanied by special training opportunities for previously disadvantaged people. Another 81.7% preferred value-for-money procurement, either without racial considerations or with race used only to distinguish between equally competitive suppliers. Nearly 78% wanted government to prioritise jobs over expanding welfare support.
Perhaps most revealingly, these preferences extended into the ANC’s own remaining electoral base. Among self-identified ANC supporters, 73% favoured merit-based appointments, 65% preferred value-for-money procurement, and 79% opposed the Expropriation Act.
Our 2026 polling added further evidence of the distance between political rhetoric and public values, with 70% opposing the continued use of apartheid-era racial categories to determine access to business and employment opportunities. A truly astonishing 89% agreed that South Africans of different races need one another for progress and should enjoy equal opportunities.
These are findings about the country’s political middle ground that no serious governing party should dismiss. South Africans repeatedly express preferences for work, merit, fairness, secure property, interracial cooperation, and government that spends their taxes responsibly. The ANC’s leadership would surely have much to gain from understanding why its own supporters frequently disagree with its chosen policy instruments.
Yet, the party has continued defending and even accelerating policies which the IRR has repeatedly warned would frustrate the noble and normal ambitions of ordinary South Africans. The resulting economic stagnation, unemployment, and deterioration of public services have coincided with an ANC electoral decline of extraordinary proportions. Quite bizarrely, the ANC appears determined to treat its declining popularity as an unfortunate public misunderstanding, rather than seriously examine whether it has abandoned the broad, pragmatic, pro-growth middle ground on which lasting electoral majorities might be rebuilt.
When Helen Suzman, who led the IRR’s submission to the Fagan Commission to argue for the abolishment of race-based law in the late 1940s, was later accused by a National Party minister of embarrassing South Africa through her parliamentary questions, she replied: “It’s not my questions which embarrass South Africa, it’s your answers.”
The appropriate response to Bhengu-Motsiri is much the same. It is not the IRR’s polling that embarrasses the ANC, but the ANC’s own abandonment over the last two decades of the pro-growth middle ground.
Twenty years ago, nearly seven in ten voters entrusted the ANC with governing South Africa. Since then, millions have withdrawn that trust, while the IRR’s polling has repeatedly shown the party where the country’s policy preferences lie. South Africans have consistently asked for jobs, growth, competent government, fairness, and the opportunity to improve their lives through their own efforts.
The ANC might have used these findings to reconsider policies that have delivered so little of what its own voters want. Instead, Bhengu-Motsiri wants to shoot the messenger. If the ANC genuinely wishes to understand how, in 2026, it has become a shadow of its former self, it would do well to study the very polling it now seeks to discredit. After all, the IRR has been listening to South Africans for years. The ANC’s catastrophic predicament suggests it might have benefited from doing the same.
*This piece was sent to the Sunday Independent on 29 October
[Image: by seleznev_photos]
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