opportunities lost
Bob Mattes
Clear-sailing? Open-field running? Steaming towards a two-thirds majority? Mixed though they may be, all these metaphors apply to the situation the African National Congress now finds itself in. How did it get here?
As recently as eight months ago, the ANC enjoyed the support of only a half of all voters, and plumbed new lows of identification among black voters. With an economy in crisis, surveys revealed that the government received extremely negative ratings on many of the very issues that voters saw as the most important, namely jobs, crime and, to an increasing extent, management of the economy.
The ANC clearly saw these weaknesses as well. At the same time, it also knew that public opinion enabled it to claim credit for achievement across a wide range of areas, such as national reconciliation, delivery of water and electricity, and increasingly, housing.
Yet it seems that the ANC understood that this election could only be a successful referendum on the first five years if the ANC also acknowledged some of its obvious and serious shortcomings on jobs and crime, and talked about how it would address them.
This approach was apparently worked out as early as February of this year, and formed the framework for President Nelson Mandela’s state-of-the-nation address, a speech that defined what would become a campaign based on a clear and coherent set of messages.
In contrast, opposition parties – without the prominent stage commanded by the government, sometimes short on cash and often short on vision and new ideas – have taken to the field very late in the day, or have abandoned it altogether to the ANC (particularly in the competition for black voters).
On the three issues where the government was most vulnerable, a recovering economy (especially the recovery of the rand and a sharp drop in interest rates) has reduced the importance of macro-economic management as a campaign issue; and no opposition party appears to have made a serious attempt to persuade black voters that it is sufficiently committed or credible to be trusted to do a better job creating jobs or fighting crime in black communities than the ANC.
Through its rapprochement and dalliance with its leadership, the ANC appears to have softened the rhetorical sting of its major present contender for black voters, the Inkatha Freedom Party, as well as opened new inroads into the IFP’s support base.
And by excluding the United Democratic Movement, the ANC’s biggest potential threat to its black support base, from public funding, the Multiparty Democracy Bill ensured that a financially limited UDM could only take its message to vast numbers of voters very late in the campaign.
In the meantime, the ANC has been able to take the initiative and define the UDM and its leaders in the minds of voters. Not coincidentally, UDM support and the public standing of Bantu Holomisa has dwindled over the past nine months, especially among black voters.
The Pan Africanist Congress has decided to campaign around an unfocused scattershot of unrelated issues ranging from the tried and failed emphasis on land redistribution to PAC leader Stanley Magoba’s desperate attempt to gain visibility and sound tough on crime by appealing to the vivisectionist vote.
These moves have only served to further highlight the questions in voters’ minds of the PAC’s competence to govern. Magoba’s standing among black voters and promising levels of support for the PAC have declined steadily over the past few months.
To its credit, the New National Party finally seems to have realised the extent of its image problems and is at least beginning to address these basic problems. The most important and visible instance is Marthinus van Schalkwyk’s trip to Sharpeville and his brief flirtation with ringing rhetoric worthy of an Abraham Lincoln or a Mandela.
The Nats’ problem, however, is that a short election campaign is not the best place to rebuild your image. Campaigns can only highlight, define and sharpen an image that has been built over time.
The trip to Sharpeville should have been the very first thing that Van Schalkwyk did when he took over the party – followed up regularly by similar events, and then gradually by important shifts in party personnel and policies.
In the long run, such a strategy, if sustained and well executed, would offer the NNP the hope of survival, and even a potentially improved position to appeal to a broad cross-racial coalition of socially conservative voters. However, positioning itself as the bastion of law and order and traditional values will take time and sustained sincerity. Until then, “No mercy for criminals” will only sound like “No mercy for black criminals.”
In the short term, the NNP finds itself gradually squeezed as it fails to find new black votes, and the energetic Tony Leon and the Democratic Party raids its traditional white support base.
The DP has clearly resolved in its own collective mind any potential short- term/long-term dilemmas by simply denying any conflict and trying to have it both ways.
Reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s typical gridiron advice to United States Republicans – “Run hard right during the primary elections, but run hard back to the centre in the general election” – the DP is presently running hard after minority voters, and claims it will use its improved position and visibility in Parliament to run hard after the majority black vote in the next five years.
Such a two-step strategy sounds nice in boardroom discussions over a gin and tonic, and 10% of the vote clearly is preferable to where it was a few short years ago. But simply shifting gears is not as easy as Nixon made it sound, especially if voters and the news media have a memory.
It just might be that the way the DP runs after minority voters now will only further “zone” them off from any serious competition for black votes in the future. Ultimately, the DP might even double or triple its present support levels, yet still wind up where the Nats found themselves three years ago: 20% and nowhere to go.
Make no mistake, “fight back” is a clever slogan if one is focusing on gatvol voters who see themselves going in the wrong direction, as losers in the new dispensation. It explicitly slams the ANC for their sins of commission, and subtly attacks the Nats for their sins of omission (they didn’t “fight back”), yet simultaneously communicates a positive DP message of the key issues on which it will “fight back”.
Yet the DP must have guessed how this message would be seen in the black community, among voters who for the first time in their lives see themselves moving in the right direction and hold out hope for the new dispensation.
They must have foreseen that it would be perceived as a fundamental attack on the competence and integrity of the black government as well as on keys to black advancement such as affirmative action and government intervention in the workplace.
If the DP wanted to convince black voters that it had a better plan to improve their lives, and why continued ANC rule would not do so, this certainly wasn’t the way to go about it.
The DP’s inability to retain senior black leadership also cannot have helped its image among black voters, especially the way that an ailing William Mnisi was publicly sjamboked at the hands of the DP’s publicity machinery.
Could it be the DP’s failure to grasp these things, or the fact that it does grasp them but simply doesn’t care, that chased Bukelwa Mbulawa into the arms of the ANC?
Maybe the most apt analogy to be drawn from the world of animation for the opposition is not Mickey Mouse or the Seven Dwarfs but the old line from Pogo, who proclaimed, “We have the met the enemy, and he is us.”
Robert Mattes is manager of the public opinion service of Idasa. The opinions expressed here are his and not necessarily those of Idasa or Opinion ’99, the election research consortium of which Idasa is a part