Spin: Dr Malinga performed at the ANC’s recent elections manifesto review at the Orlando Stadium in Soweto, one of several such reviews countrywide. Photo: Papi Morake/Gallo Images
Thursday.
There are still eight months to go until South Africans get to vote in the national and general elections, but campaigning is well underway.
Granted, it’s nothing compared with the epic political prayathon we are set to experience next Easter, when President Cyril Ramaphosa and the other party leaders will seek the blessings — and the votes — of the faithful of various denominations in the country, but the hustings are already being husted.
It’s not just the review of its 2019 manifesto by the ANC that’s been taking place around the country for a month now, or the weekly naming of premier candidates by the Democratic Alliance as it gets its ducks — and coalition partners — in a row for the big push ahead of next May.
Road names that have been unaltered since liberation are suddenly being changed: an old favourite on the part of the governing party and an indication that an election campaign is taking place.
The unerring ability to remember to honour the fallen — who had previously gone forgotten and dishonoured — when voting day comes around again is a thing, not of beauty but of ugliness, a crass reversion to form that takes place every half a decade.
Sports stadiums are set to follow — there’s no money for new ones, so old ones will have to get new new monikers, along with municipal buildings and even a school or seven.
Roads themselves are being gravelled, graded, re-graded and then paraded, reminders that there is, actually, a government that can build new roads, but which are aimed at diverting the punters from its failure to maintain and repair the roads they already have.
Apartheid is being blamed, another golden oldie for the comrades in black, green and gold ahead of voting day; a hardy perennial dusted off and hauled out every five years, cyclically and cynically, when the going gets tough.
It’s a card normally played later in the game — along with the land issue and a promise to take over the commercial banks and the mining houses, another indication that the ANC has run out of ideas, money and steam.
We’re not yet in the launch and opening stage of the campaign — another five-year staple — when the incumbents trot around the provinces, turning sod on new projects and cutting ribbons on those commissioned earlier in their term of office.
It will come, although the diversion of funds to buy German vehicles and the occasional mansion or two — and to fill the party’s election war chest over the years — means that not much in the way of ribbon-cutting will go down, this time around.
So will the baby-kissing, along with the choreographed door-to-door visits and the stage-managed imbizos at which Ramaphosa and his cabinet colleagues will pretend to listen to residents’ problems and promise to solve them — despite having caused them — in return for another five years in office.
Eight months to go and there are already nearly as many parties wanting to contest the elections as there are seats in the National Assembly and the National Council of the Provinces combined.
The ballot paper already resembles a telephone book of acronyms and is likely to make the voters’ heads spin — and their eyes water with laughter — when the big day comes in May.
Perhaps the Electoral Commision of South Africa (IEC) will start printing their ballot papers on till slip rolls — long ones — ahead of May to solve the congestion issue, and save a tree or two.
The governing party has given birth to a fair number of the new arrivals on the ballot paper, in addition to a good number of those that have contested elections since 1999, when the first of its offspring, the United Democratic Movement, contested a poll.
After that, we had the Congress of the People and the Economic Freedom Fighters, two more of the ANC’s unplanned offspring.
Now we have Carl Niehaus and his African Radical Economic Transformation Alliance and Ace Magashule’s African Congress for Transformation, two peas in the radical economic transformation pod that have sprung up as a result of the ANC’s most recent cleaning of house.
It was no surprise that neither Niehaus nor Magashule would join the other’s party, given the nature of the two men involved.
There’s only room for one head on the ballot paper, after all, and there is no way either was going to give way for the other — or trust them with their membership fees, given their mutual and individual track history when it comes to other people’s money.
We are led.