And just like that, it happened: voters stopped caring about the liberation struggle and started demanding service delivery instead.
Overnight the ANC behemoth crumbled, Julius Malema did an about-turn on farm murders, and coalition chess became a national sport. There was no violence, nor significant suggestions of voter fraud.
When dawn rose on November 5, it wasn’t dynamite that shook the foundations of parliament, but the will of the people. We live in a nation where people want the same things: safety, jobs and services. Across the spectrum of class and choice, we have demonstrated a great degree of tolerance for differences and the capacity to make difficult compromises. I am going to indulge my biases here and say that all of this might be evidence that most South Africans are a bit liberal after all.
A new era
“I feel a lot more optimistic about South Africa,” says Nicholas Lorimer, host of The Daily Friend Show, the podcast of the leading liberal opinion site.
“We have been in a pretty bad spot for a while now, but we are starting to see the green shoots of possible recovery.”
Panelists on the show commented on the high quality of campaigning from parties like the DA and said they expected others to follow their lead in future. “If this is the type of politics that emerges from post single-party dominance in this century, count me in! What a time to be alive. What an exciting portent of things to come.”
They remarked on the surprising rise of ActionSA and Julius Malema’s solemn turnaround on farm murders. Malema recently condemned a brutal attack, and the thinking was that perhaps he feared that his Kill the Boer campaign might be blamed, or at least complicit.
Terence Corrigan, still exhausted from extensive election engagement, concluded: “It is good to be in a democracy. We are in a new era.”
A Capitalist beats the Commies
Herman Mashaba beamed with pride when he told BizNews: “It was an earthquake.”
Mashaba exceeded expectations in these elections. Many pundits got it hopelessly wrong, itself a powerful reminder of the muscle of democracy; voters across the spectrum have taken on the right to be taken seriously.
Mashaba is especially exuberant about the fact that he, a committed capitalist crusader and former Chairman of the Free Market Foundation, beat the communists in their own backyard.
‘We took the wards from the ANC in Soweto!’ he laughed, adding that he wants to rebuild Johannesburg. “I want to turn Johannesburg into a construction site again. We can rebuild with a social heart.”
The bitter enmity between himself and Helen Zille as political partners in opposition has become top of mind in a way that has captured the attention as fiercely as a Cold War-era stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union.
Voters and analysts alike have walked away from thinking about politics in terms of monolithic power structures, trading these for enthusiastic exchanges about decentralised partnerships at the municipal level.
Mashaba himself has suggested that both he and Zille stand back from mayoral positions, but that the DA could govern Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni, while ActionSA would lead Tshwane. The ANC also gets something, somewhere.
“It was a wipeout”
Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh calls the election “A whirlwind, a wipeout, and a whitewash.” He remarked on the sadness of seeing the ANC’s liberation movement dwindle like that and said that, for him, this is the prevailing narrative of the past election.
He blames corruption, broken promises, and inability to self-reflect as contributing to the decline. He points out, however, that while the ANC might have lost the major metros, it is still comfortably the biggest party overall.
He predicts that a round-table discussion between the DA, ANC and ActionSA will decide the division amongst the parties in our bigger metros in a brutal horse-trade where nobody gets exactly what they want.
At almost half a million subscribers, the SMWE has a larger following than many long-established formal media outlets. Dr Walsh said that he now feels a responsibility in how he reflects on society.
I recall Joe Rogan verbalising similar pressures when his followers exceeded CNN viewership figures and I remember feeling conflicted about it.
Even so, it is comforting to know that important influencers outside official politics understand they are part of bigger ecosystems and contribute to them. Independent broadcasters have become the mainstream. This might be our first election where their impact became more apparent.
We now see how individual voices, filtering through social media feedback systems, become murmurs that shift governments in the open marketplace of ideas and wants. It becomes ground-level, trickle-up democracy, without the use of pitchforks or bullets.
On the streets
My voting station was around the corner at the church. I walked there. By 7a.m., there was already a long queue. Some people arrived with chairs. Others survived the wait with earphones and regular breaks of impatient tapping at their watches.
It was dustbin day on voting day. On the way over, I greeted a homeless man who had assembled an unusually high number of used dog leashes by that time: pink, purple, brown, black. He wished me a good day.
In the queue, a tall, dark Rasta in a brightly-coloured ANC beanie and regalia swapped notes with someone in a khaki-inspired ensemble. My area is typical of Cape Town in that it swings DA, as could be forecast by the takeaway cappuccinos, boho shag hairstyles, and Rooibos-infused sunscreen that made its appearance by 07h30.
People on the street had the same prediction of the elections as professional pundits, but used different words. A teller from the local hardware store explained with hand gestures: “The problem with the ANC is, even if they lose, they end up on top.” I shared some intimate queue confessions with a woman who came from Krugersdorp about the constant pressure to “Ooh and aah” about the bloody mountain.
A local electrician said he was voting VF+, and he quoted a documentary by Joe Emilio warning of land expropriations. The electrician was the impatient type, hyper-vigilant, and very busy. He almost started a fight when people cut in on the line, but decided against it. He ended up staying in the queue for three hours to make his cross.
Someone summed up their disdain for non-voters by declaring: “In life, as in elections, the winners are the ones who show up.”
I left the queue soon after 08h00 and returned when the lookouts on the local WhatsApp group said it was quiet.
By then, the homeless group had assembled two trolleys of cargo, including buckets, a broken desk fan, packets of clothes, a bicycle wheel, and I assume the two trolleys. I asked a man if he was going to vote.
He said he could not vote because there was something wrong with his ID in the sense that he didn’t have one, but he spent the whole day in the area, hailing the process on with a toothless cheer: “Hou by die blou! The DA is for all!”
Viva!
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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