The ANC revolution will be televised, starting this weekend, on SABC and e.tv.
The ad campaign, designed by the ANC’s advertising agent Ogilvy South Africa, will feature an elderly man in a remote village, a young girl on the crime-ridden Cape Flats and youngsters in a township.
The ANC commercials were screened to assembled hacks at Museum Africa in Johannesburg on Thursday this week.
The clip is a solid, no-frills, competent production. Although predictably celebratory about the achievements of the past, it vaguely gestures at the “challenges” (read failures) of the present.
In this televised revolution don’t expect to see an old woman ambushing a politician at an imbizo to ask when she will get her RDP house.
The first ad shows an old man talking about his dreams, which almost came to naught because apartheid’s boot was on his throat. He tells how his life was renewed when Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Then follows a famous clip of released Mandela, Winnie by his side, smiling at the welcoming world with his arm victoriously held aloft.
The other ads, still to be shot, will focus on ordinary South Africans living in townships on the Cape Flats and in the Vaal.
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa recently gave political parties permission to advertise on television.
ANC spokesperson Jessie Duarte enthused that the ANC would be the first South African party to advertise on TV, but would not say how much the ad campaign will cost.
Confusingly, the DA released a statement on Thursday claiming that its televised ad would be the first to hit the small screen. In fact, it is due to be aired on Monday next week.
Xoli Ntusi, scriptwriter at Ogilvy, told the Mail & Guardian that “the biggest challenge was in the fact that this is a first” and that they did not want anyone to feel marginalised.
Duarte said that through the television commercials, combined with radio, door-to-door and billboard campaigns, the ANC hoped to reach between 20-million and 25-million people a day.
The commercials were inspired by the thousands of suggestions from supporters, received via SMS, email and fax.
“They show South African society as it is,” she said. “And they give a voice to ordinary people. “It’s about getting regular South Africans to tell their own stories of how the ANC has made their lives better and what they expect of it in future.”
Ogilvy chief executive Nunu Ntshingila said: “It’s rooted in the insight that although people’s lives have been improved, there’s still more to be done.”
No standard plot had been followed in making the advert, although Ntshingila let slip that the people featured in the advert were paid.
Duarte said the initiative marks the ANC’s first real engagement with 21st-century technology.
ANC supporters would soon be able to interact with leaders on social networking sites, she said — before teasingly telling the gathered scribes — to look forward to secretary general Gwede Mantashe’s blog.