Nelson Mandela’s Budget speech last week was co-written by a dozen white female secretaries in Cape Town, a group of female squatters in Gauteng, and some coloured professionals in the Cape. And they didn’t even know it.
Call it Rule by Focus Group. The impact of Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg in the last election has been a new, media-savvy ANC. Whenever the President’s Office needs to know what people are thinking, it rustles up some blind focus-groups (small groups of people from a particular background assembled as a test bed for ideas) via Markinor, and uses the Human Sciences Research Council’s quarterly survey too.
The last focus groups were set up in Gauteng, the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape. The basic question: How are we doing? According to the presidential communications director Joel Netshitenzhe, “both the focus groups and the HSRC survey show the major concern that most South Africans have is with jobs.” That, he says, is why the president’s Budget-speech put so much emphaisis on job-creation.
The other concern is crime. This, says Netshitenzhe, is one of the reasons behind Mandela’s new determination to kickstart community policing in four crime-ridden
About delivery of the Reconstruction and Development Programme, “there is an acceptance that people do have aspirations –they want housing– rather than expectations. The message from our focus-groups is: ‘We’ll give you five to seven years to deliver, but we want to see the foundations now.'” There is also far more goodwill from the very poor –who have physically felt the benefits of school lunches and free medical care.
The President’s Office has decided the problem is not one of delivery but communication. And so, as a result of the focus group research, says Netshitenzhe, “we have decided to be more proactive about the president’s schedule. Rather than just responding to invitations — which tend to come from elites who have computers and fax machines — we are identifying places we want the president to go.”
This week, for example, the president went to open an RDP project in the Free State; in recent weeks he has launched a water project outside Pretoria and also done a tour of schools in Gauteng. “We have found too,” says Netshitenzhe, “that nothing inspires him and gives him strength as much as going out and meeting people. He comes out feeling