a hard sell
Ivor Powell
Recent opinion polls indicating a slide in support for Bantu Holomisa’s United Democratic Movement could be misleading. According to Human Sciences Research Council statistics released this week, the UDM’s share of the vote has halved from 6% last December to 3%. The Institute for Democracy in South Africa’s latest Opinion 99 survey pegs UDM support even lower – at a mere 2% of the electorate, down from 5% in the middle of last year.
Those numbers, however, though only released much later, were gleaned from data collected in March – at a time when the cash-strapped UDM was still keeping a low political profile. In the six weeks or so since the polls were taken, the situation could have changed significantly. There are signs that the UDM could be eating into the ANC’s voter base.
Last Saturday in Kagiso outside Krugersdorp, the UDM claimed to have picked up about 2 500 new members when three ANC branches defected at a mass meeting. The defection came at the end of a corruption scandal around attempts by West Rand ANC leadership to raise membership fees, including instituting a mandatory insurance policy – which failed to pay out.
As UDM election strategy unfolds, it is becoming increasingly clear that the party is focusing on taking up grassroots issues, largely at local level, and attempting to turn that into the currency of votes. No matter that the party itself lacks a developed or articulated set of policies; the failures of the ANC are (or so UDM organisers hope) grist enough to turn the UDM mill.
In this vein, Holomisa said serious attention was being given to Mpumalanga to capitalise on discontent after the sacking of popular Premier Mathews Phosa by the ANC national leadership.
The election strategy has been forced on the UDM by a potentially crippling lack of resources. Last year the National Assembly effectively cut the as yet untested UDM (along with other parties who had not contested the 1994 elections) off from public funding when it voted to finance parties on the basis of their representation in Parliament. As a result the UDM has been able to afford little more than a month of relatively high-profile campaigning.
The strategy appears to have been closely formulated, though – with co-founder and party deputy Roelf Meyer providing the organisational infrastructure and Holomisa doing his rounds as the man of the people. While party pundits predict something like 15%, in reality the party will be satisfied with getting its two leaders into the National Assembly.
On Holomisa’s dusty rounds in the townships and informal settlements of the West Rand this week, he shakes hands and distributes pamphlets. He stops off at the Holomisa section of the sprawling informal settlement of Bekkersdal. He goes to check in with some people whose water supply he succeeded in getting reconnected after it was cut off by local authorities. The crowd around him swells with the enthusiastic, the idle and the bored.
At one point, as he walks by, some tiny kids start a chant: “Mandela! Mandela! Mandela!”
In some ways, for all the animosity between the two men, you can’t help feeling the children are expressing something that at least some of their elders are thinking.