By: Clyde Ramalaine
In an April 2016 letter, the late Ahmed Kathrada penned as addressed to then-President Zuma, a time of the firing of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, Kathrada invoked the notion that the people have spoken. He said so because a high-heeled SAVE-SA and a list of Zuma-obsessed foundations [including his AKF] made the call. It appears it was also a call because whites were marching for the first time in history. Kathrada’s letter insisted the people have spoken when his letter never could quantify the actual people he invoked. I remember distinctly that I challenged Kathrada’s claim because it remained an elite campaign that the people in black masses of poverty never identified as theirs.
Well, in the aftermath of the most recent Local Government Elections, there is little doubt that the people have spoken. Out of 42million legible to vote, 26 million registered to vote, only 12 million showed up. The ANC clinched a paltry 45,6% of the votes cast, the worst ever under any leadership since the advent of the SA democratic franchise. Suppose we could, through the portals of death, relay the message to Kathrada. We would have to tell him your research sample possibly constituted the elites and whites, claiming the people spoke as advanced back in 2016. Your research did not include the masses who remain black, poor, disenfranchised, and the evidence of grave inequality. Unfortunately, the elites and whites defined your research sample.
Today we know the people have spoken. They voted in not showing up to vote, and they voted with their sober consciences against the games politicians play, the smiles, the empty promises, sheer arrogance, glaring double standards, and blatant lies.
I wish to postulate that the black masses voted long before the actual historical date of November 1, when they booed the African National Congress and SA, president. This crafted economic messiah, apparently more popular than his ANC organisation. What would Uncle Kathy have said, would he have penned a letter to Ramaphosa to tell him in the wisdom of rebuke Matamela the people have spoken? Your guess is as good as mine because the dead can’t speak. Craig D. Lounsbrough told us, “Ignorance is avoiding that which stands in front of me out of the misplaced hope that it will put what I’m ignoring behind me. Instead, it’s almost certain to drop it on top of me.”
There is a general misconception on the intelligence and maturity of voters, in particular, of black voters in SA. This misconception is that they vote in ignorance and can be bought with a t-shirt when elites determine so. The pervasive belief as the practice has come to define South Africa in democratic era elections history. It is an error and misjudgement committed across the political party divide. It translates to a sense of entitlement and disrespect in which voters are reduced to mere fodder, at least in the minds of the elitist parties.
We have seen how the official opposition, the DA, in previous elections struggled to appreciate the lack of trust the people of SA exhibited in them while they would vote for the ANC. They rationalised that people, in particular, black people are ignorant, suggesting those who vote DA are informed and conscious voters. The ANC, not to be undone, shows itself guilty of the same misreading of the SA black voter. It assumed the black vote is theirs and does not have to be worked for since their managed history of a liberation struggle compels all black people to be loyal to it regardless of how it is increasingly identified with DA liberal politics.
The ANC and its leadership took for granted the black voter on the same diaphragm that they constitute those who are ignorant and can be confused with R100 notes that its Treasurer General, Paul Mashatile, doles out in a church gathering. The majority parties in SA, even the EFF, assume the voters are loyal to them in utter ignorance, defined by stupidity and necessarily uninformed.
This is the ignorance that Lounsbrough reminds us of that the South African political parties such as the ANC, DA, and EFF increasingly emulate. They are learning their ignorance of South Africans voters in particularly those who are yet to benefit are not voting in ignorance but are fully conscious when they decide who must lead them. While we may do a similar analysis of all parties, this musing concerns the African National Congress.
What do I mean the people have spoken?
As with everything in life, nothing comes as a surprise. To pretend we awoke on the voting day without forewarnings in tell-tale signs is to be disingenuous. There are actions and inactions on the part of a cocky Ramaphosa leadership that defined the outcomes long before we all walked into the voting booths. Those signs are what I wish to highlight to make the case the people spoke out of their careful cognisance and very attuned observance of this regime.
Ramaphosa’s political life-saving overreliance on COVID 19 Lockdown as his only means to deal with the plandemic did not go unnoticed by the voters. As the lockdown Emperor, he determined to use these lockdowns to prevent and erode all forms of political formation, programming, organising, and mobilising crucial tenants if not the lifeblood of the ANC. His fear and scare-mongering tactics that led to his soldiers killing and abusing South Africans deceived him into thinking that he had everything under control when the people knew he was arguably the most insecure and paranoid president ever. His strategy was to clearly use lockdowns to stop campaigns that would keep him accountable for ANC resolutions. He gave a double-finger and obfuscated with shibboleths of ‘inclusive economy’ to replace radical socio-economic transformation. The voters and those in the ANC watched him playing them like toys, and they knew the time would come for them to speak.
The people watched how he and his NEC and NWC overnight became the end-and-be-all of ANC authority supersensitive to demonstrate their factional authority. The people saw how the branches were reduced as side-lined to vulnerable groups that must bow to what he and his bought NEC decided.
Also read: Ramaphosa, a leadership suspended in a crisis of legitimacy and shrouded in distrust
Another sign Ramaphosa and the ANC regime he leads failed to appreciate was their orchestration of a charade of State Capture Commission aka the “Raymond and Cyril R1bn show” and its unequal treatment of former President Jacob Zuma. While the meta-narrative led by the media saw nothing wrong and called for more elitist venom, the masses looked on because they know and identify with Martin Luther King Jnr, when he told us decades ago, ‘ injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. While blaming Zuma for the unrest was convenient, they did not appreciate that the masses were registering their long-standing grievances while watching the Ramaphosa regime lost in the translation of its challenges.
Despite hitherto unsubstantiated claims of insurrection as propagated by the CR22 faction, the July unrest and revolt was perhaps the first public salvo of voters, undeniably sending a message to the ANC. The misreading and utter lack of appreciation of what was at stake saw the ANC leadership putting itself as victims of a plot. They would punt fake intelligence reports that identified 12 instigators across political parties and geographic spaces that somehow orchestrated the events of July.
Deaf to the challenges that define a nation in the brutality of inequality measurable in black and white race classification definitions. Ramaphosa would release his police and army to ransack homes to violently retrieve groceries which, if found, was burnt because his uninformed minister Lindiwe Zulu would contend you cannot bring stolen goods back into the economy.
So deaf and insensitive was the Ramaphosa leadership that when over 320 people died, this president saw no need to have any memorial service. It’s a regime that centralised Ramaphosa as threatened to be toppled, who now was to address SA flanked by the SANDF and SAPS chiefs. These were the tell-tale signs of what was to come in an upcoming election.
I guess if Marikana still does not matter to him ten Marikanas in July equally so did not.
With the 2019 national elections results, which registered a first for the ANC to dip under 60% ever, ANC elections chair, the colourful Fikile Mbalula, started a drum majorette quartet parade that rationalised the outcomes in frames of ‘had it not been for Ramaphosa’s popularity the ANC would have dipped lower.’ Now I can accept that as political banter coming from someone whom many claims often sing for his supper.
However, this week SABC 404 treated us analysts Ebrahim Fakir [someone I usually take seriously on elections matters] and Susan Booysen [whom I struggle to take seriously] going Mbalula on us with their repeat of this fallacy. Firstly, there is no question that the ANC has dipped, but even when it went from 64% under Zuma’s first term to 62℅ in 2014, there was no narrative of had it not been for Zuma, the ANC would have slipped to 52%. Meaning this claim is as unscientific and vacuous as they come. It makes for great political campaign commentary, unfortunately not factual analysis because the yardstick for such, absent of sheer admiration for Ramaphosa, simply does not exist.
So, the popularity of Ramaphosa in comparison to the organisation is the figment of a public relations campaign or, better, the jaundiced and thoughtless but loudmouth Mbalula theatrics because it is borne out nowhere in these elections. If Ramaphosa was this famous, what is the ANC doing with 45%, a historic first in low margin ever? Maybe the analysts must engage the reduction in confidence on the part of voters in the ANC at a scientific level and desist the political banter that defines Mbalula and his cohort.
But if we assess the 2021 Local Government Elections results as the people have spoken, we must not assume the people gave no upfront indication of its intentions. Ramaphosa, the face of the ANC, met with several instances of hostility and spontaneous booing, none more paramount than the people of his hometown Chiawelo Soweto. They showed him and the ANC he leads as wholly out of step with the needs of the black suffering masses. He came on a charm offensive when they had real hardcore issues of intermittent electricity supply, squalor, and joblessness. He came selling vaccines when they told him, “We are less interested in your marketing campaign of jabs saturated with the fear of COVID -19 deaths.” They told him, ” It does not speak to the fact that we are dead economically. We are dead in access to make a living for ourselves. Our children are dead in unemployment and eternally trapped in being slaves to a white-controlled economy that adopted you and a few black elites as a buffer zone.
The booing didn’t stop in Soweto, who now regards him a pathological liar for having made as he did in Alexandra [1 million houses] thoughtless promises of Eskom solutions in two weeks. Ramaphosa met up with the same hostility in Tshwane; it got so bad that he had to rely on two busloads of crowds travelling with him to ensure he had a positive rapport in the media sense.
Ramaphosa and his hired busload crowds came to the black townships that apartheid-spatial-racism produced. Yet today these are the legacy of an obdurate self-serving elitist ANC leadership and organisation that shows absolutely no regard for the plight of the poor. Every year in its January 8 Statement, it pretends to visit the shameful lack of service delivery that its officials are responsible for. Yet nothing happens, as we saw with the Kimberley, Northern Cape walkabout that showed the entire provincial and municipal government as wholly incompetent, since raw sewerage, potholes, electricity, and water challenges are the new diamonds of Kimberley.
He showed up swayed by his spin doctors who told him of his popularity and, in brazen arrogance, dared to tell voters to shut up because they were drunk. Utter arrogance because he was told he is more popular than the ANC. These were the signs of an ANC leadership wholly out of step and arrogantly showing their ill-regard because they were popular as the paid spin-doctors lied. The spontaneous booing at Ramaphosa and the July revolt were the tell-tale signs of what was to come. How do we accept hearing the same guy telling you he is cleaning up the ANC when his cabinet reeks of alleged corrupt ministers. How do we take him seriously on renewal when he refuses to let the masses know who funded him and to whom he is beholden. The masses saw this and then already voted against this charade of leadership who think if he mentions billions, South Africans must get excited.
It is in this context, that #RamaphosaMustGo is not just a hashtag, but it is the core of an ethos of ANC organisational renewal and self-correcting. The ANC will and can never renew itself, while the proverbial wolves in sheep clothes are entrusted to lead any process of its renewal. ANC renewal demands that all these new tendencies where capital dictates the buying of people are eradicated. To do that, Ramaphosa must go.
*Clyde N.S. Ramalaine
African Global News resident analyst
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