City of Johannesburg mayoral candidate Helen Zille is winding down what will surely go down as a surpringly and impressively innovative campaign. On the best of days, Zille is the ruthless politician; prone to lunging for the jugular on debates and quick to put journalists who ask tough questions in their place. She is vicious, both in speech and her writing – an old school type of liberal with subliminal old-guard conservative proclivities and therefore is usually the last person you’d expect to put together a fresh, dynamic cross-cultural campaign that hopes to go beyond the walls of Constantia.
But that has been her party – the DA’s – archilles heel – their inability to convince the non-white masses that the party is colourblind and fundahas everyone’s best interests at heart. Apart from the messaging of governance that works – a spiel which has increasingly taken hold in the face of crumbling infrastructure and urban decay which is often associated with ANC misrule – how else would Zille try to win the invaluable ‘black vote?’
Clearly the tried and tested would not cut it this time. Kissing babies and dishing out blankets to the elderly is effective but it is also stale. And, the majority of the voting fodder is now made up of young black adults. They are the social media generation. They roll their eyes to the ceiling if your door-to-door campaign is the usual rundown of party hacks handing out t-shirts and promising food parcels. They yawn at the new tap thats just been installed. Washed up speeches about promises to jobs are an insult. Gaslight them at your peril. In their estimation, things like data have more appeal to social welfare grants. So does funding and a leg up for entrepreneurial pursuits because what they want most is to ‘make the bag’ – or, in layman’s terms – to start earning lots of money.
To them, visuals are the new currency. Like the in-your-face, bite-size reels that keep billions of eyes glued to the Facebook and TikTok timeline, long-winded speeches on the podium will hardly keep their attention long enough to remember you come voting day. Neither will your struggle-era dirges. You need to do better – like maybe do something interesting enough for them to cut the camera on and shoot a video for the socials. Perhaps, that has been what the campaigns should’ve focused on – the sort of canvassing that has the young, disillusioned voter in my mind. Energetic, trendy, and the kind that shys away from traditional formalities, populism, and the sort of things that leave one thinking, ‘isn’t this exactly what they were saying and doing five years ago?’
Last general election millions of them stayed away. Millions of those who had registered eventually opted to sit the day out entirely. So, any campaign is virtually a wasted cause if it is not tailored to appeal exactly to these personalities.
Perhaps the somewhat reliable yardstick to assist in making sense of how the various campaigns may have fared so far would be a glance at the polls that are coming out. The recently-released eNCA MarkData survey shows that the DA has widened the gap between them and the ANC in the City of Gold. Placing the DA at a comfortable 35% to the ANC’s 21.8% in Johannesburg, the party appears to be a firm favourite. As mayoral candidate Helen Zille commands 30.6% of the popularity stakes with ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba’s 23.4% putting him at second place.
Because the ANC had not yet announced a mayoral candidate, at 15% Dada Morero is the favourite out of a list of mentioned hopefuls. Parties that also polled strongly in Johannesburg include the MK Party (12.5%), the EFF (11.9%), ActionSA (10.3%) and the Patriotic Alliance (3.7%) being the only parties that enjoyed an above one percent approval by respondents. Although the DA will obviously be thrilled by the numbers, analysts are quick to point out that they will still be forced into some form of coalition in running the city.
In Cape Town, a DA stronghold, pundits are cautioning that the party must ensure that all its voters turn out to cast their ballots if the party hopes to maintain its majority. At 52.6%, however, the DA enjoys a comfortable lead to the ANC’s 23.6% in the Mother City. Despite being touted as the party that would significantly attract the Coloured vote, at a paltry 3.9% the PA limps behind even the EFF (6.5%). The PA will hope to make inroads in the Western Cape’s rural communities but in Cape Town, their numbers appear surprisingly weak. Perhaps the biggest winner in this poll is current Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, who at 55.4% remains the undisputed individual for a second term as the city’s First Citizen.
Capetonians also appear to be happier with how the city is run compared to their counterparts in Johannesburg. 60.5% of them polled approvingly to the running of the city whilst only 29.2% of Joburgers felt the same way. An astounding 88% of Joburgers ‘believe foreigners and xenophobia to be a problem in their city, and roughly two thirds are angry at the current ANC-led coalition government about water provision and infrastructure maintenance.’
Whether these polls are a reflection of the people’s frustrations when it comes to governance or they speak to something else entirely, we do not know. However, some congratulations should go to Helen Zille. At 75 years old, the candidate that they call Gogo (grandma) and whose physical capabilities were questioned has managed to pull off a pretty impressive campaign. Since she kicked it off, swimming in potholes and popping up at random watering holes, the spectacle has only gotten more vibrant and ever on point. Take for instance the entrance to her party’s final campaign rally this past weekend on a Gusheshe (the BMW 325is), with Cassper Nyovest’s eponymously titled hit song as background music and ‘Mr X,’ the buff, no-nonsense television personality from Moja Love’s X-Repo and you realise that she listened to the brief and ran with it pretty effectively. Whether such efforts are enough to sway a voter one can’t say. But they do go a long way in giving a different side to the candidate. Moreover, whether such campaigns are enough to attract favourable polls, again, one cannot say. But what we do know for sure is that come 4 November, in Johannesburg, die poppe sal dans.
Featured image: Helen Zille at her party’s final campaign rally. Source: Helen Zille Facebook page.