The Polls, GNU and Cold Beers as History Unfolds.

Two weeks ago I perched myself in my office – really a detached room that functions as little more than an unpretentious sleeping area – to file a story on what ought, in hindsight, to have been the story of the year so far – the 2024 election opinion polls. I’d glossed over a few of them, checked in on what analysts made of the numbers. Although a few, mostly in the conservative and centrist press, believed (often writing like they were hoping the figures would suffice) the data crunchers, mostly they were dismissed out of hand, by myself included. Not even the fact that Prof Mcebisi Ndletyana of the University of Johannesburg (a man that the writer considers an adept weatherman of the country’s political climate) was noting the gathering storm could dissuade my intuitive scepticism.

We had a better chance of Zille turning pro-CRT overnight, Malema literally kissing the Boer or the MKP welcoming Ramaphosa as ‘umfowethu’ – our brother – than the ANC shedding the majority vote. It was heresy, a pipedream; the polls were simply punching way above their weight. Hitherto, the SA voting psyche and patterns could barely be gainsaid. Without putting much effort into it, one was able to more or less predict how things would go down. You see, the polls looked more like an elitist class thing, far removed from grassroots SA life and widened ever more by the ‘new divide,’ namely access to data.

Nicking from the 2008 US Vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, Patriotic Alliance leader Gayton McKenzie was first out of the starting blocks, turning them into a suggestive jibe. ‘Polls are for strippers,’ he quipped a year ago.’ One had to look very hard to find an utterance by the ruling party that suggested they were overtly threatened by what the numbers foretold. To them, the polls seemed like a non-starter. In fact, they seemed more likely to be startled by a McKenzie who’s seemingly taken on an evangelical tone of late than some metadata generated from a computer in Bryanston.

After all, given the number of leaders who’ve been photographed alongside the clergy in recent years, divine intervention has seemed to command more trustworthiness with the powers that be than empirical surveys. ‘All those doomsday predictions,’ said a casual and confident president Cyril Ramaphosa in the run-up to the election, ‘some people think that the ANC is going to lose power and I say that is not going to happen, watch this space when the results are declared…the ANC is going to rise.’

That pronouncement has Ramaphosa – now tasked with the embarassment of going from a popular majority to having to ruffle together a government of national unity (GNU) – eating humble pie against the backdrop of an uncertain ANC future. The storied 30-year deterioration of liberation governments is well-documented and after exactly 30 years of ANC rule, the trend has kicked in just in time.

Depending which poll tickled your fancy, the numbers proffered forecasted drops as low as 37%. The pervasive speculations no doubt drew some momentum from a growing perception that the ANC were simply out of their depth as well as the last local government elections where the party sustained unprecedented losses. They lost three key metros, namely Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay as well as a slew of smaller towns and suffered the embarassment of entering into coalitions in areas where they’d previously never needed to lift a finger. Simply being ANC, Mandela’s liberation party, would do.

The doomsayers (which number in their ranks everyone from academics, to analysts and all the other so-called ‘counterrevolutionaries’ who dared ring the alarm bells – no matter how well-intentioned – about the party) however, had long cautioned that the days of throwing the liberation card around were fast running out. Also, thirty years of gerrymandering and tinkering on an inexorable slide towards apparent regression in parts of the country proved thirty years too many. The voting fodder were pining for more tangible, immediate answers to their lives and ‘we freed you from the Boers’ just didn’t quite cut it anymore to the unemployed youth voter with no resonance of the miseries of the previous regime.

Although the reasons for the party’s self-assurance may be anyone’s guess, one can attempt a few theories. ‘Polls,’ for one, is hardly a word one hears being thrown about at the general community meeting. The bigwigs know this, or so they thought they did. They know that although these things might tell a far more credible story in middle-class black suburbia, in the impoverished, crime-ridden and illiterate township, or the peripheral rural village the only messaging that pays dividends are the RDP houses, food parcels and the councillor who promises that soon, mama, you’ll have your very own tap.

Why else the pre-election dishing out of urban land, sod-turning events, mending of potholes, disappearance of loadshedding? Ramaphosa signed the Cannabis Bill into law on voting day for crying out loud! The Rastas who come in large numbers in the Western Cape where the ANC has never really been able to get a foot in the door must’ve been pleased. But clearly not nearly pleased enough to give the Buffalo their vote. In a country of ridiculously high data prices, even the low-income worker is unlikely to be aware not only of the polls but is deprived of access to other crucial information that would otherwise better inform their vote.

Anecdotal, I hear the dear reader say. Sure, but spend enough time in these spaces and you soon discover that, like veldskoene, polls haven’t quite permeated the social psyche, not least at leadership level. If they had, then surely the Eastern Cape, notoriously corrupt, marred by pitiful service delivery and where school kids drown in pit latrines would not still vote in large numbers for the party responsible for their hardscrabble.

A look at some of these polls then…

An Ipsos poll put the ruling party’s vote at just above 40% (the party bagged 57.5% in the last general election). Another poll by The Brenthurst Foundation and the SABI Strategy Group gave them a paltry 39%. Reuters reported that another poll, this time by the Social Research Foundation (SRF) ‘put ANC support at 44.8% … up from 37.7% exactly one month earlier.’

Take another eNCA poll for example where 30% and 20% of respondents said ‘the DA benefits from apartheid’ and ‘the DA does not govern the Western Cape well’ when asked why the DA was governing that province successfully. A quick Google search will attest that, compared to other provinces, the DA has fared far better in Auditors-General reports. So why would this percentage dispute this? It could be chalked up to the common perception that only ‘white Cape Town’ is well-oiled, or just good old ignorance, or maybe lacking knowledge on account of lacking access to data.

This poll put the ANC at 43.4% of the vote. Ironically, in the lead up to the 2021 local government elections, one eNCA/Ipsos poll had the ANC at a pitiful 30% (the party would get 45.59%). Another Ipsos poll came a little closer at 49.3%. At that election Ipsos also got it horribly wrong when it had the IFP at around 1.4% but the party would confound many when it turned in an impressive 5.65%. They also had the FF+ at 1.2% but to the surprise of many, the party came through with a resounding 2.34%, nearly tripling its council seats from 73 to 220.

In the last general election, some may have come achingly close to the final numbers, still others fell way off. In fact, since 1994 votes for the ruling party have fluctuated around 5% in either direction. With 57.5% in the last ballot, I’d assumed that as bleak as things appeared, the ANC could still possibly just inch itself into a majority. The poll figures that placed them in the lower forties seemed a tad extreme even for an ANC that is nowadays a posterchild for spineless carpetbaggers, derelict inner cities and an unfulfilled promise of ‘a better life for all’. Then came the ‘great disruptor’ Jacob Zuma’s MKP, which the polls said didn’t stand much of a chance, but who blew everyone away by securing himself a 14.58% of the vote.

So now that the numbers have Yours Truly humbled, I’m staring at the phone screen, checking up on the latest GNU developments and trying to find feel-good stories to stave off the panic inflicted upon me by the uMkhonto weSizwe Party. In their bid to boycott parliament, Jacob Zuma’s party is holding an entire nation to ransom. Tomorrow, Friday 14, is D-Day for the seventh administration. I need a laugh because there’s nothing funny about thoughts of a repeat of the sort of carnage that transpired between the IFP, ANC and a so-called ‘third force’ in KwaZulu-Natal in the early 1990s. As a child, watching those VHS tapes the images was a harrowing experience.

Fortunately Mr Alto swings by, a few beers in hand and in no time, JZ becomes a distant memory. Mr Alto is a white man and before politics, he is a capitalist foremost. He’s evidently thrilled at the possibility of a ANC-DA-IFP coalition. Like most of my paler compatriots who populate the comments sections of the various mainstream publications, an ANC-EFF wedding has him breaking into cold sweats at night. Leading up to the election, Mr Alto had been a faithful disciple of the polls, making sure to remind the Doubting Thomas me, that the numbers were gospel.

I know he’s here to gloat so I beat him to it. ‘Bruv, I knew you’d be windgat about it. Don’t be that guy!’

Guffaws!

We need these laughs so I relay a hilarious only-in-South-Africa yarn: You know, I ask, there’s a major witch-hunt unfolding in Orania, the whites-only colony in our Northern Cape?

Why, he asks?

Turns out that there was some errant oom or tannie that decided to vote for the EFF and effectively peeved-off the entire town.

Say whaaat? More laughter! Also, one of the conditions that the Freedom Front+ party has put forward to the ANC in exchange for their support to govern the Northern Cape, is that the latter should constitutionally recognise that enclave.

Next I recommend he finds a YouTube video of Chris Pappas, the white politician and mayor who speaks fluent isiZulu and helped land the DA ‘its first municipal majority in KwaZulu-Natal in uMngeni (Howick)’ reported the Daily Maverick (DM). Like him, Pappas is the sort of white who is not daunted at ‘kicking it’ on the other side of the tracks. But unlike Mr Alto, whose 50+ years in the township streets haven’t advanced his Xhosa beyond the common greeting.

We go online to see what’s happening. According to DM, there are five parties now in the GNU. These include the ANC, DA, IFP, PA and Rise Mzansi, collectively commanding 68.4% of the vote. The EFF, who’d indicated that they’d talk to the DA have done a one-eighty, emphatically stating that ‘the DA is our enemy.’ A blustering Julius Malema announced that the ANC was ‘finalising an agreement to work with the DA, FF+ and other reactionary political parties,’ something he’s strongly opposed to.

These are, to paraphrase him, Oppenheimer-sponsored entities that seek to advance Afrikanerdom, white-monopoly capital, are reactionary and he’d rather not have a prominent position if it comes at the price of climbing into bed with them. He has made it clear that in KZN he would wish to partner with MKP. In yet another unexpected move, Malema said that the days of his party being rebellious disruptors of Parliament are behind them and therefore the country should look forward to their new role as a ‘robust opposition.’

The IFP, which some speculated might go with the MKP, has nonetheless indicated that it would keep communication channels open with that party even though ‘it had stood them up.’ However by Friday morning it emerged that the National Freedom Party (NFP) in KZN had agreed to form a government of provincial unity (GPU) alongside the ANC, DA and IFP effectively thwarting any hopes of MKP running the province. This could not have come as good news to the MKP, and its leader Jacob Zuma who’d clearly had hopes of being the main players in that province.

Of course the inclusion of the DA has widely been dubbed as SA’s only hope out of the cesspit of misgovernance, corruption and patronage amongst an endless list of ANC-caused national ailments. Not to mention that this is the coalition that markets and capital are said to most favour. But as previously stated, will the party go along with working with people it has accused of malfeasance in the past. And, if it does, will its electorate overlook and tolerate the change of heart?

As things stand, in a few hours, Parliament is due for its inaugural sitting where a new National Assembly Speaker and President will be elected. The polls had predicted this bold new age and we thought they were just being melodramatic. Look where we are now: writers are taking their words back, politicians are dumbfounded and surly and Mr Alto has a one-up on this writer. A few parties had declared the 2024 election as their 1994, with the current outcome, they were probably more accurate than most of us.