What a Weird Freak Scene the South African Election Trail Is

ANC leader Jacob Zuma (Photo via)

Most election talking points get forgotten pretty quickly. Joe the Plumber; 1997’s Labour fox and Tory chicken; Gillian Duffy, Gordon Brown’s “bigoted” adversary. It’s grist. It gets milled. No one currently alive can recall a single useful fact about The War of Jennifer’s Ear, but it seemed like something you were supposed to care passionately about in 1992.

Occasionally, though, something under-reported at the time ends up lasting long after the ballots have been recycled. In March, we saw an act of South African political theatre that may be exactly that – myth-making ahead of yesterday’s general elections, a piece of writing that may well last longer for Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (the EFF), than his own political career.

“About 100m from the stage, there emerged a portrait of Julius Malema in the profile of China’s erstwhile leader Mao Tse-tung,” wrote Malema’s Ideologue-In-Chief, Andile Mngxitamain. “It was hoisted high above the multitudes of red. It was an ecstatic moment of symbolic reconstitution of the 60,000 into a single force in the form of Malema as Mao.”

Andile clearly doesn’t view Mao as a bad guy. He takes the view that the lives of 40 million peasants were but a stepping stone to progress, and that is exactly the sort of revolutionary freak scene Andile is proposing for a new version of South Africa led by Malema, the rabble-rousing former ANC badboy. 

Charismatic high-roller Malema was kicked out of the ruling African National Congress in 2011 for bringing it “into disrepute“. So he went off and formed his own political party – the EFF – and shrouded it in a heavy dose of that very 20th century sort of Marxist pageantry, last seen buttressing Hugo Chavez’s thuggy populism. There were the red shirts, the red berets, the Guevarista sloganeering about land, bread, peace, compulsory nationalisation and so on.

And now, finally, the rolling of Malema into a Mao-like pop art icon. 

Julius Malema (Photo via)

Julius has set this election on fire simply because he is the closest thing the country has to an authentic voice of the forgotten millions, who’ve still got long-drop toilets 20 years after the introduction of democracy, and hence have taken to throwing buckets of their own shit onto the highway that leads to Cape Town Airport in protest. Yet, for all the Bolshevik foment, the time is not yet here for Julius to storm The Union Buildings. He is only expected to pick up around 5 percent of the vote when the results of this year’s polls are released later this week, with the majority of pundits predicting the ANC to retain their 20-year rule over South Africa.

For now, at least, the ANC’s only real opposition is still the Democratic Alliance (DA), on course to grow their vote from 16 to 23 percent. But with just 6 percent of black voters inside their tent, they’re already rubbing up against the maximum they can achieve without replacing amiable ex-crusading journalist Helen Zille with a less obviously white leader.

As the curtain came down on the electioneering phase, Malema and the rest spent last weekend at final-push public rallies, each entirely reflecting the character of the party concerned.

In keeping with the spectacle they’ve brought to an otherwise dry campaign, the EFF’s last push was part-Jesus Christ Superstar, part Long March: women in red jumpsuits riding in on Triumph Daytona sports bikes; blokes in wraparound shades lounging against Range Rovers; 28,000 red jumpsuits in the stands of a sports stadium; ten dancing fighters carrying a wooden coffin with an effigy of Jacob Zuma inside, its head consisting of a butternut skewered on a long stick (his head allegedly looks a lot like a butternut). Then Julius, the chosen one, coming out in his red overalls at the head of a motorcade of motorbikes and German whips.

In keeping with their campaign, the DA’s was anodyne, TV-friendly blue gloss, stage-managed to within an inch of its life.

And, in keeping with their campaign, the ANC’s was massive, sprawling and headless. At the FNB Stadium, where a few months earlier Jacob Zuma had been booed in front of Obama at Mandela’s memorial, some 28 trains and 2,000 buses brought ANC supporters from all over the country to Soweto, where, dressed in yellow T-shirts, they were supposed to form an effective backdrop for Jacob to give his big speech. Unfortunately, no one told Zuma’s speechwriters what people are actually like and how they behave. After being brought in with drum majorettes and marching bands, the off-the-cuff charisma of Zuma – a guy who spent a lot of the last election dancing and singing about his machine gun – was replaced by his tendency to read pompous flat speeches in a dry monotone.

Jacob Zuma addressing thousands at ANC’s rally in Soweto

This was a speech that had the exact pompous, flat tone his speechwriters had clearly been seeking to hone for years. And Jacob, sensing his big moment, duly read it in the driest monotone he could muster. The result? Nearly a third of the 80,000 hot, hungry bored people up in the stands began leaving the FNB stadium while Jacob was still in mid-flow. Towards the end, like any good impresario, he cut to the song – a little ditty that has replaced his machine gun anthem – about how Mandela said, “Meet me there on Freedom Day.” But, by then, it was too late. He is a president without a political constituency – a rudderless, drifting hulk at the heart of power.

Two days later, Zuma rounded out his faltering campaign by taking his message to his biggest opponents: the press, who have been merciless in making hay over his scandals, infidelities and bloopers. The questions, as ever, concerned the big scandal of this election cycle: Nkandla. At one point, a scandal so big it seemed it might actually unseat this Teflon don.

Nkandla, Zuma’s personal homestead in rural Natal, was re-kitted from the public purse at a stonking cost of around £14 million. It grew a pool, a fence, a chicken run and a tuck shop, all at the taxpayer’s expense. Entirely by coincidence, you understand, a further £13 million was spent building a road that would lead straight to its door.

After years of whistleblowing and shrieking from the media, the Public Protector’s report forensically laid out all the wrongdoing at Nkandla – the architect who made a R16 million (£900,000) personal profit, the fact that the budget had run ten times over the initial projections, the misleading way Zuma had presented the matter to Parliament. In response, The Ministry of Public Works, who’d built it, held their own bizarre press conference, where – with a Stalinism that may become more familiar to South Africans if the EFF come to power – they helpfully explained that the publicly-funded swimming pool was, in fact, not a swimming pool at all. It was a water reservoir, very important for the safety of the president, in case of a fire. Then some infiltrator from the press gallery asked whether they had purchased any hoses or pumps, in order to move this water towards a fire. No, the spokesman was forced to concede… you would have to use a bucket for that.

Helen Zille, head of the Democratic Alliance (Photo via)

At his own Monday press conference, for his own strange lofty reasons, Zuma decided it would be a good idea to play the victim: “If the Public Protector has a duty to protect, she has a duty to protect me as well,” he said. “The guys talking about [Nkandla] are you guys, the media and the opposition. It’s not an issue with the voters. It’s an issue with the ‘bright people’, the very ‘clever people’.”

Sensing a lingering frost in the room, he then made an even worse decision to play the rape victim. There were actually very good reasons, he announced, for all of that security. In the 90s, he continued, burglars had broken in and raped one of his four wives there. So security was not an abstract concern for him – it was very real indeed. When it was reported back on the afternoon’s airwaves, the nation’s face twitched between sympathy, anger and plain discomfort.

In a nation where rape is a real problem, it is good to talk of such things, to draw attention, to speak up. But in a nation with some small remaining sense of dignity, it is perhaps not ideal to use such things as an ass-covering get-out-of-jail-free card for your faltering political career. 

The problem is that, for all the talk of effective opposition, the ANC is too enmeshed in the national psyche as saviour-daddy to be pushed from power along conventional First World lines.

Nkandla, Jacob Zuma’s private compound (Photo via)

So, in desperation, a few ex-cadres have gone Gandhi. Rather than get involved in the endless sideshow of mushrooming and collapsing mini-parties, they are asking the electorate to “vote no”. Ronnie Kasrils was defence minister in Mandela’s government. Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge wasn’t. But she was also in the cabinet. Now, they are the public figureheads to more than 100 struggle veterans who have signed a document called “Sidikiwe! Vukani! Vote no!” translated as: “We are fed up! Wake up!” Supported by Desmond Tutu, the campaign calls upon ANC voters to spoil their ballots or vote for a minority party, to fire a bunch of vaguely pointless warning shots across the government’s bow.

Compared to what came before them, these incursions are petty, the moral blankness workaday. But the sense of inertia is sometimes the most chilling thing in the South African political landscape. Nkandla may have been the fire in the election campaign’s belly, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to make a difference to the outcome. Zuma’s party will still take 60-odd percent of the vote – same as it always has. And that is the eternal mystery of the country’s politics; there is no shortage of incident, scandal, personality clashes and delicious intrigue, but, in the end, the slate gets wiped, the votes stay the same and you get what we have now: zombie president for a zombie electorate.

In 1994, everyone predicted that the ANC would be in power for 20 years, and that the system would then inevitably fracture towards a more conventional left-right situation. It’s 20 years on. A few cracks are showing, but given its staying power, there’s every chance this monolith could continue to wobble unsteadily for another generation. 

@gavhaynes

More stories from South Africa:

Growing Up in Apartheid-era South Africa

WATCH – South Africa’s Illegal Gold Mines

WATCH – Violence and Private Security in South Africa