The DA had a plan, in case things went badly wrong during its crescendo rally in Soweto on Saturday. That plan was Prestik. Lots and lots of Prestik.
The Dobsonville Stadium in Soweto has plastic seats arranged in blocks of two alternating colours: a faded blue, which in bright enough sunlight will display on television as close to the DA’s own, more regal shade; and a muted grey, seemingly designed to show up as a yawning gap where supporters should be.
Attached to each of the grey seats — but to none of the blue seats — was four beads of Prestik, between them holding fast a sheet of paper with the slogan “vote for change” on it. The background colour to each sheet of paper was, of course, DA blue.
And so, through the heroic application of labour and Prestik, the DA went into its final rally on Saturday certain that when its leader Mmusi Maimane took to the stage, he would be appearing against a blue background, whether or not it had any people in it.
The measure was unnecessary. The buses rolled into the parking lots, the crowds streamed into the stadium, and virtually every grey chair was filled with a person in a blue T-shirt, each with a blue “DA supporter” wrist band, and many wielding the blue-background poster boards carefully pre-positioned in every row.
That the DA had prepared meticulously for its last major event before the crucial 2016 local government elections was clear from many things small and large: the wifi network named “Freedom. Fairness. Opportunity” (password: “vote for change”); the speeches memorised so that they could apparently be delivered off-the-cuff without the help of a teleprompter, including Maimane’s 35-minute oration.
But only in the Prestik was there any sign of concern, any discernible indication that thought had gone into things going wrong. In every other respect the DA came to Soweto to throw itself a preemptive victory party. As if to emphasise the point, the centre-field confetti canons fired before Maimane even started to speak.
“You are in my home. Welcome,” Maimane told the crowd, before he started telling personal stories. Stories on learning to play soccer, and Soweto, and his parents, and his humble beginnings, and voting for the first time. So busy was he with the anecdotes — each with some carefully crafted moral, but each also about how ordinary and approachable Maimane is — that he was more than a quarter of the way through his speech before he got into walloping the ANC and Jacob Zuma.
Then, to be sure, the pounding was fierce. “We were all warned. We were all told this was going to happen,” Maimane declaimed, as he spoke of an ANC that “governs as though black lives don’t matter”.
Soon enough though Maimane was prowling across the stage again, exuding energy and certainty.
“We can reduce the power of the ANC right throughout the country,” Maimane told the faithful crowd. “We can win right here in Johannesburg.”
“We can win in Tshwane, because the people of Tshwane are already saying they want to bring change… We can win right here in Johannesburg… I am certain we can win in Nelson Mandela Bay.”
He made no mention of a backup plan.