When the ANC meets to finalize its go-to-voters message for the 2024 national and provincial elections, the nation will be waiting with the question, 'what will the massage be this time? Polls and surveys indicate a population ready to face the upcoming elections with a resolve to make them yield a truly better life for all. The 2021 local government elections occurred under various difficult circumstances. The Zondo Commission revelations had, by this time, started to be the context of all politics. COVID-19 has started to redefine how humanity does life, interacts, and transacts. It induced the worsening of poverty and inequality. Corruption as the emergent and cardinal enemy of the still fragile new democratic order became the central theme of the 2021 municipal elections, as it had been in the 2019 national and provincial elections.
The service delivery challenges of government, as the arena of politics, the prize of politics, and the residue of past politics made it a subject of an inquest to the extent that public sector corruption was an executive action. As an institution of societal leadership, the question of 'whether it should function effectively because of who leads it or should the institution contribute to its efficacy because of an inherently functional oversight and accountability ecosystem' became foregrounded because of corruption.
President
Ramaphosa was so focused on anti-corruption as a flagship of his presidency
that he delivered the never imagined demise of senior leaders of the ANC.
Immediate memory of such a bold action had to date been the recall of one of the most
sophisticated ANC sitting Presidents, President Thabo Mbeki, in the aftermath of the Polokwane Conference, or 'putsch' as some labelled it. This was despite Mbeki presiding over one of Africa's advanced state power. Equally, and almost reminiscent of the Mbeki recall, President Jacob Zuma was recalled under a dense cloud of state capture and corruption. The Zuma recall domino has further ramifications of claiming a Provincial Premier and, ultimately, the Secretary-General of the ANC. The moral force of fighting corruption was so strong in the Ramaphosa
presidency that lying about people being corrupt became a new form of
corruption to capture the state.
Reminiscent of a hospital whose bed occupancy rate was by world standards the lowest, and not because its patients were receiving adequate treatment but were either dying or having organs removed and amputated, the Ramaphosa presidency dealt with corruption at the expense of service delivery. The fear of those that lied about innocent people being corrupt has dealt with good management practices in the public service, such as bureaucratic discretion, to levels where there is less to no spending of allocated budgets. The amount of accruals in state departments has increased because accounting officers would rather have the courts rule on the correctness of honouring legitimate invoices than take managerial responsibility for what has otherwise been a legitimate contract. The scale of indecisiveness has started to show in several collapses of the service delivery system and low infrastructure maintenance budgets.
This
situation has resulted in the service delivery ecosystem's gradual but
inevitable collapse. Contracts associated with the so-called corrupt public
servants are being renewed month-to-month to levels where this practice is
grossly outside generally accepted public sector procurement standards. In one
state department, a contract of over R100m per annum has been renewed without any
competitive bidding process for a third year running. A narrative of the office
that awarded it being corrupt is kept alive in the media spaces and the
courts, and yet no new contracting to depart from the discredited practice has occurred.
This
and many other similar cases of abuse of the corruption narrative have
exhausted the public appeal of the Ramaphosa anti-corruption anchored renewal
strategy. Whilst society is welcoming to this strategy, the prosecution of
allegedly corrupt officials does not switch on the lights, make clean water
come out of the taps, repair a collapsing public infrastructure, provide an
adequate public health care service, and improve the actual responsiveness of
the state as the provider of a final instance of public goods and services.
When society goes to vote, it will be about what the governing party did for
them to improve their lives. It will be the service delivery track record of
the ANC as a governing party that will count, and unfortunately, the track
record might have an unfair time frame. As one commentator cynically commented,
society may punish the ANC for potholes on a tarred road it delivered where it
never existed.
This
conundrum of human needs and satisfaction measured over time should be integrated
into matrices the ANC will be used to craft a 2024 election campaign message. A
new message and framework should emerge to help the ANC understand the
disruptive changes affecting its traditional support base as vote harvesting
spaces. The complexity of what the dominant ethics of government demand from
politics and actors and the ethics of human survival in a progressively
shrinking economy will spawn new expectations about the 2024 message to voters.
Whilst the message might be centrally construed, unless it can reproduce itself
over several contexts, the corruption message in recent memory might be strong
enough to generate voter response that oscillates around a fulcrum of voter
apathy and voting the closest possible alternative to the ANC.
To
the poor and unemployed, many of whom are youth, the vulnerability of the
message carriers not being an organised ANC youth formation with legitimate
structures to engage young people will push young people into the hands of the
first available maverick appealing to reality. To the chronically in debt, lifestyle-sensitive,
and career-driven middle class, their relationship with the voting message will
require guarantees that the current capacity to deliver might be a discounting
factor to what amount of trust they can invest in the ANC. To workers, with the
job losses blood bath triggered by COVID-19, global financial meltdowns of
recent years, and the energy insecurity which has necessitated production
revisions, the prospect of the ANC as a viable value proposition is under
stress.
The message is that the ANC should emerge with an approach which will make South Africans want to vote. It should be about something other than voting for the ANC but more about understanding the relationship between voting and the civic duty of being a citizen. Getting voters to the voting station and having a relationship with the ballot paper should be the loudest messages voters should hear. The importance of being in a democracy, understanding it, and ensuring it does not get reversed will be more important than entering the corruption discourse space again. The range of capabilities, talents, inclinations, viewpoints, and attitudes the ANC have towards the importance of voting will affect its ability to adjust to changing the new voter circumstances.
As a rule, this election must be about defending democratic gains. It should, in fact, be unusual, if not unacceptable, for South Africans, during the 2024 national and provincial elections, to have bitter arguments over the position and place of the citizen and voter in the desirability of a stable and functioning democratic order. The strategic aspiration of the voter should be the selection of men and women, either as independents or from within a political coalition, otherwise also known as a political party, and create fortified accountability and oversight systems with the objective 'to have a stronger, more direct, and consistent impact on improving the lived reality of ordinary South Africans'. At its core, the purpose of the 2024 ANC message to voters should be about the importance of democracy. CUT!!!
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