ANALYSIS: SA’s lack of a dominant election narrative fractures the national voice before polls

While political parties are devoting a great deal of energy, money and resources to campaigning ahead of the 4 November local government elections, there is very little attempt to create a narrative that will dominate the national discussion.

Granted, this is a local election and not a national or provincial one, but previous local elections were often fought on national issues, such as corruption or service delivery.

The 2016 local elections, for instance, were almost a poll measuring the popularity of the then President, Jacob Zuma, with the Gauteng ANC saying the Nkandla issue cost it votes. 

Zuma overshadowed that election, to the extent that the Gauteng ANC tried to stop the national ANC from using his image on posters in the province advertising the party’s manifesto launch. The province later offered the weak justification that his image was omitted because his appearance at the event was confirmed only after the posters had been printed.

By 2021, Zuma was gone, and President Cyril Ramaphosa had led the party to victory in the 2019 national and provincial elections – a poll fought against the backdrop of intense load shedding and growing economic strain, shortly before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, the overriding narrative was that the pandemic had exposed the profound frailties of the state.

Land, race and local focus

This time around, there has been no central issue in the campaigning.

Instead, political parties are merely preaching to their followers and addressing specific communities with generic messages. This trend is starkly illustrated by their election posters, which pretty much tell people to vote for their gang because it’s better than the other gang.

There are clear reasons for this, chief among them being that no one party or person currently dominates our political narrative.

While 10 years ago the narrative focused on what Zuma had or had not done, and whether you supported him, the situation now is very different. You will still hear the muttered phrase “Cyril’s economy” from time to time, but he does not define our politics as Zuma did.

A big factor in this is the ANC’s ongoing decline. It is no longer able to dominate our politics and has lost the control of our society that it had up until the pandemic. This is exacerbated by major rifts in the party and the incompetence and lassitude with which it’s approached this campaign.

It has been unable to agree on candidates and its campaign has no single punchy message.

Beyond party dynamics, our society has changed in the last decade; long-standing political drivers like race, which historically framed almost every national debate, no longer hold the same overwhelming sway over voters.

While race will probably be a factor in our politics for as long as there is racialised inequality, it does not have the power it once did, and has not been a major feature of the parties’ campaigning.

Even the land issue, which is all about race and was such an important feature of our debates in 2017, 2018 and 2019, has not been used by the parties in this campaign.

Different braai, different conversations

Of course, the DA has tried hard to make its campaign about service delivery, and to an extent, water supplies – which resonates strongly with the communities that support it.

In Joburg, Helen Zille has made every effort to reach out to newer voters, and has spent much time and energy in those communities; it will only be clear on election day whether this has succeeded.

The immediate effect, however, has been to effectively force the ANC onto the back foot over service delivery. As the dominant party in the Johannesburg council holding the mayoral seat, it is widely blamed for the city’s current state of decline. Remarkably, the ANC has failed to assemble even a coherent response to these grievances.

But the political parties are not solely to blame for the lack of a dominant narrative.

Our society has become more divided over the last decade. As the rift between insiders and outsiders deepens and the process of enclavisation continues, our conversations are drifting further apart.

No one party or leader or set of ideas can dominate braais in Khayelitsha, Musina and Parkhurst.

While this has generally been the case in our society, there were times when the political story of the day, whether it be the Zuma rape trial in 2006, or who would win the ANC’s 2017 conference, was common to conversations in many different parts of our society.

Also, the space in which our politics is mediated has changed fundamentally. The SABC, to our eternal detriment, has much less influence now than it did in the past.

Increasingly, our discussions take place on podcasts as the live broadcast media faces unprecedented competition. (Conflict Alert: this writer is a part of that live broadcast media.)

Lacking a shared national reference point, political discourse has fractured, prompting leaders and parties to focus on influencing their local communities.

This would help to explain the rise of actors like AfriForum and March and March. They do not attempt to have a broad constituency. They don’t have to. They only need access to one constituency, which they can then use to leverage power.

Many of these trends are likely to continue and become further entrenched.

The ANC is likely to continue its decline while none of the other parties will be able to dominate our national discussion.

Our enclavisation will continue, and our media will become even more diffuse.

Which means that our future elections are likely to see us continuing to talk past each other. DM