While political parties insist that manifestos play a major part in their campaigns, it appears that many voters don’t consider them at all.
On a list of factors that voters use to decide who to vote for, ”manifestos sit right on top”, says Jesse Duarte, African National Congress (ANC) spokesperson.
”All newspapers had inserts, and we went door to door providing people with the manifesto,” she says.
”Manifestos are the cornerstone of any political party,” she adds, and ”only a mature political party would have a plan and a manifesto”.
Philip Dexter, spokesperson for Congress of the People (Cope), agrees that manifestos are pivotal to the voting process. However, not enough emphasis is placed on manifestos by all parties, he says.
”Parties talk about youth and women, youth and women, but when you start to ask people what they are actually doing, they are quite scant.”
But this is not the case with Cope, he says. ”Issues that have been raised [in our manifesto] have resonated very strongly with the people,” says Dexter. ”We’ve tried to run [our campaign] on our manifesto.
But it doesn’t seem that voters regard manifestos as highly as Duarte and Dexter do.
Dawood Petersen, a Johannesburg attorney, looked at his choice party’s manifesto but didn’t use it to make his choice. ”I considered it, but it’s not the premise of my decision to vote for who I am intending to vote for,” he said. ”I looked at myself and not the country to establish who I am voting for.”
Murray Hunter, an assistant magazine editor from Cape Town, said that he has read the manifestos but didn’t base his choice on it.
”My eventual choice was guided more by ethos than policy. That is to say, I chose a party based on the culture of leadership it displays,” he says. ”Their priorities were important to me, but not as important as the evidence that they played a [mostly] clean game in politics as well as in electioneering.”
A Cape Town economist, Grant McDermott, feels that manifestos should be more distinguishable than they currently are. ”It seems that party politics in South Africa have become strongly ”personified”, so it’s as much about how much we trust and identify with the various party leaders as anything else,” he adds.
Aubrey Matshiqi, a political analyst from the Centre for Policy Studies, told the South African Press Association that manifestos were not very useful.
”Many people do not even read them,” said Matshiqi. ”Voters had already decided who they were going to vote for before the manifestos were launched.”
Perhaps an indicator of the gap between parties and the people, manifestos may be less than worth the paper they’re written on.