With less than a month until election day, pundits are having a lot of fun trying to predict what’s going to happen. Big questions include: what will happen with the EFF? How much of the vote will the DA capture? And above all, what will happen to Zuma?
Political prediction in South Africa is very difficult. In some countries, like the US, there is a long political history, reams of survey data, and so on. In South Africa, which is still a very young democracy and one that is evolving quickly, the past is of limited value in predicting the future and people’s political behavior is not well understood. Few people foresaw Mbeki’s ouster, the rise of the EFF took many by surprise, and we’re very much learning as we go. Thus, any prediction should be taken with a large grain of salt.
That being said, Peter Sullivan, former editor of The Star and longtime journalist turned tour operator is worth listening to. He has a long experience of South African politics, and has interviewed many of the people who make up the powerful backbone of the ANC. And according to Sullivan, if the ANC’s vote share slips below the magical 60% mark, Zuma could be a casualty of the political fallout. If the DA takes about 25% of the vote, and the EFF another 10%, the remaining parties need to capture just 5.1% of the vote to break the 60% mark for the ANC. In other words, the end of Zuma could be a reality. What would follow that, however, is an open question. – FD
PETER SULLIVAN: I’ve conducted two political tours: one at the beginning of last year and one at the beginning of this year. They’re absolutely fascinating and the people who come on them are just delightful, and they enjoy them very much. I put it together to look at the issues of the day, as they were at the beginning of last year and at the beginning of this year.
ALEC HOGG: Who would be the people coming?
PETER SULLIVAN: Well, they’re foreigners, bank managers, and a couple of doctors who run hospitals. One of the guys was, in fact, the chap who wrote the regulations for the Canadian Stock Exchange and for the Canadian banking industry. Nicky Newton-King was very kind to give us breakfast here. He sat and listened to how the JSE works, and he wasn’t quite convinced that the regulations were right. He felt that what the JSE was doing was that it was both player and referee, and that resulted in a wonderful conversation between him and Nicky. We also went down a mine at Marikana, because Marikana was a big issue last year. Of course, we started off at Nkandla. Nkandla, as we all know, is an enormous issue.
ALEC HOGG: But how close did you get to Nkandla – through the gates?
PETER SULLIVAN: Close enough for the police to try to arrest me, so the people on the tour had really big eyes as they watched me tell the policeman to go to hell, because the policeman said to me (he was a captain and I was very pleasant to him, and polite). Then he said ‘well, we’re going to arrest you’. I said ‘well, I’d love for you to do that, because you’ll be all over the front page of The Star and we’ve done nothing. We’re on a public road and we’re perfectly entitled to be here’. He said ‘but you’re not entitled to take pictures, because it’s a national key point’. I said ‘we haven’t taken pictures, so what are you going to arrest me for’, and for the foreigners who were with us, they thought South Africa was like a police state, that I was going to be arrested, and they were all going to be thrown into jail. It made them realise that this is truly an absolutely wonderful country. At the end of the seven days, which is what the tour lasts for, the people just love South Africa. They love South Africans. The people of this country are wonderful. We then went down a mine at Marikana. We went to Nkandla. We came to the JSE. We went to the Constitutional Court. We went down to Cape Town and met with the opposition politicians there and in Johannesburg, and ended up with a Constitutional Court judge that everybody could ask questions of, and what they said afterwards – and I’m bragging a little bit here… One of the women – she was a very interesting woman – she’d been a nurse until she was 40 and then decided she was tired of being a nurse. She wanted to be a doctor, so she went back to university, became a doctor, and she now runs a hospital in Australia. As I went around the table and said to people ‘how have you enjoyed the tour’, I knew they’d all loved it. I got to her and she said ‘I knew you were going to ask me that and I’ve been wondering what to say, and then I thought I’ll just tell the truth. This has been the best week of my life’.
ALEC HOGG: Are you bringing the same people back?
PETER SULLIVAN: No, every time it’s completely different people. It’s a bunch of completely different people who have never been before, so this tour is brand new for me. This is going to be an election observer’s tour. I went to Madagascar in December/January to have a look at the elections there as an observer, and I thought that’s really a lovely way to see a country, is to come in as an election observer but generally, you have to be invited by the government, the ambassador, the EU or the AU – any one of those bunches. Why not have our own election observer’s tour, which I will take around the country, we’ll talk to all the politicians I don’t know, we’ll observe the election independently of any United Nations or anybody else, and decide for ourselves what we think of the election. This will really be for… It’s a high-level tour – it’s not for ‘junior’ people – people who are interested in politics, interested in South Africa, are possibly investing in South Africa, have an interest because they already have an investment in South Africa, own a mine, want to own a mine, run a hospital, run a bank, or diplomats.
ALEC HOGG: And this is for a week.
PETER SULLIVAN: Yes, I’ll start on a Saturday evening with dinner with the editors in Durban and we stay at Prince’s Grant – you know Prince’s Grant. Its 40 minutes from the airport, which is what Durban is, and instead of staying at some type of anodyne 5-star hotel that looks the same as anywhere else, these people arrive and spend their first night at this beautiful golf course with the Indian Ocean right there. They see the beautiful homes around there, of course, most of which are only used for about a month per year or maybe two weeks per year. From there, the next morning we go to Nkandla, which has some of the poorest people living there. Nkandla’s a very big place: much, much bigger than people think. It has 27 ward councillors, for instance, compared to Dundee, which has seven. Compared to Dundee, it is therefore a very big place. At Nkandla, we visit the poorest families (rather, average families) and then a wealthy family.
ALEC HOGG: Not the Zumas.
PETER SULLIVAN: The undertakers, in fact…they’re the wealthiest people in Nkandla. We see Zuma’s residence, his home, and next door is the one Julius Malema built for somebody, which is now breaking down unfortunately, but that’s what we’ll do and we’ll have breakfast with the Mayor of Nkandla.
ALEC HOGG: Extraordinary. The actual Election Day itself?
PETER SULLIVAN: Election day…we’ll be in Johannesburg. I have to vote, so the whole tour will come and see how I vote. I vote in Melville and they’re staying in Johannesburg, at the Johannesburg Country Club in Auckland Park, so it’s easy for us to go to Melville and we’ll have breakfast with one of the politicians. I’ve been at election days since 1974, and that’s the one day, when politicians are remarkably pleasant to everybody. Whichever politician we meet will be so nice to us until they find out of course, that most of the people on the tour are not voters in which case they’ll ignore us immediately.
ALEC HOGG: Peter, how many people will you be taking around?
PETER SULLIVAN: Well, we have a provision for as many people who really want to come, so I will be taking the first 12 that book. After that will be Harold Parkendorff and Brian Curran, so we have a couple of different tour leaders lined up.
ALEC HOGG: How do you market something like this? How do people get to know about it?
PETER SULLIVAN: Well, the first two I did were done by politicaltours.com, a very interesting company from Britain, run by a chap who was a New York Times correspondent, and he and I did those ones. This time, Peter Mann said to me (from Meropa, and Meropa are really responsible for the marketing), so I suppose we’ll be on radio stations like yours.
ALEC HOGG: Fabulous. All right, Peter let’s move onto another issue: your views on the election itself. You sent me a little of inside information on people you know and how many seats they think the EFF is going to get. Firstly, how many do you think?
PETER SULLIVAN: I think I’ve put 24. I think 24 is round about six percent. There are about four seats per percentage point. At dinner parties I said to people, one of the interesting things in predicting this election is to say ‘how many seats is Julius Malema going to get’. The first dinner party I had, I made people say what it was. The next day, I sent it to them because I know that after the election they’re going to say ‘oh no, I always thought that’s what he was going to get’. Well now, this time they can’t. However, that list has grown to 46 people and they’ve all really enjoyed predicting what’s going to happen. Currently, the average is at, I think, 15.6, but for most of those people… I think eight of them have said there are going to be twelve seats, which Malema will get. They’re allowed to change…well, not at any time…at the beginning of each month, they’re allowed to change, but when they change it is noted.
ALEC HOGG: Has it been going up – the changes?
PETER SULLIVAN: Every single one has gone up. Every single one has gone up.
ALEC HOGG: You’ve been following politics for 40 years here in South Africa. Is it a problem if the EFF gets strong support?
PETER SULLIVAN: No, I think it’s a very good thing. I think one of the real problems in the country is the division between the haves and the have-nots, as it were the ultra-wealthy and the ultra-poor. I don’t know if you do any cooking Alec, but on those old pressure cookers we had, you used to have a little valve, which would blow when there was too much pressure. There’s too much pressure at the moment from the poor, which is really, why you’re seeing all the service protests and the delivery protests. What Malema is, is that pressure valve. He’s never going to win enough seats to take over – certainly not in this election. 2019 might be a different matter, but in this election, the most he could get is probably 40 seats, which is ten percent of the vote. Then at least, in Parliament, you will have people who are talking radical left politics, which is really just ‘confiscate everybody’s homes and redistribute them to everybody’. The basis of doing that is absurd, which is that the homes were originally stolen. I’ve worked really hard to buy my little house in Melville, so I certainly didn’t steal it from anybody and Melville – originally, there was nobody there. You can therefore argue all of that stuff, but Julius really appeals to poor people. He appeals to ignorant people. He appeals to people who have less education than they deserve, the undereducated, and it’s nice to have somebody represent them. It’s really important. The Communist Party should be representing those people, frankly, but the Communist Party is sharing in the gravy train at the moment.
ALEC HOGG: Indeed, they are. Is this going to come away from the ANC and again, the future of Zuma after the election if Julius Malema gets as much as ten percent?
PETER SULLIVAN: Well, I think most of it will come away from probably the ANC and COPE. I think COPE was seen as the alternative, and COPE’s no longer an alternative so COPE will lose most of the seats it had and certainly, the ANC is going to lose quite a lot. I’m sorry, what was the last one?
ALEC HOGG: What happens to Zuma after the election?
PETER SULLIVAN: That’s a big question. My belief is that the ANC can’t continue with him. Certainly, if they get 59 percent, which is what I would predict – I’m not a predictor, but I would say they’re going to get 59%– and in politics, it’s quite interesting. If they get 59.9%, I don’t think Zuma can survive. If they get 60.1%, he may be able to.
ALEC HOGG: Why is it such a big number, though – that 60 number?
PETER SULLIVAN: To drop below 60 percent, is just a huge thing. To drop from 65, to 64, to 63, or 61 are not quite the same, but if you go below 60 percent you’ll be perceived by your own party as really have wrecked the elections. My belief is that Zuma won’t survive the year.
ALEC HOGG: If that happens, he’ll be recalled.
PETER SULLIVAN: He’ll be recalled, just as Mbeki was or he’ll be asked to resign.
ALEC HOGG: How has he survived Nkandla? You’re even seeing people such as Gwede Mantashe distancing themselves from him, which was never the case in the past.
PETER SULLIVAN: Yes, I don’t know. He hasn’t survived Nkandla yet, because we’re still talking about it. He’ll have survived Nkandla when we stop talking about it and I think that’s still a long way off. I did say to the political tour, you know… They said to me ‘will Nkandla be a factor in the elections’ in last year’s political tour – last year, in January 2013 – and I said ‘I doubt it because President Zuma seems to have made about three wrong moves per year, from the Gupta’s plane to Nkandla, so he’ll make a couple of wrong moves again before the elections’. Well, I was wrong. Nkandla has survived all the way through to these elections. The Gupta plane thing seems to have gone away. That is no longer a factor. People aren’t talking about it. It isn’t a big factor in the election.
ALEC HOGG: But I guess the key issue as you were saying now, is below 60 percent he has big problems and above 60 percent – maybe just in people’s minds – he might be okay.
PETER SULLIVAN: He might survive. He might survive. The ANC…they’ll have to see what they do with him.
ALEC HOGG: Just to close off with, the official opposition – the DA – do you see them coming out of this election stronger, despite that misstep with Agang?
PETER SULLIVAN: Yes, my feeling on the DA is that they’re going to get about 25 percent, which is pretty good going. If they had Mamphela with them, it may have been a little bit more, but I think 25 percent is about their ceiling. Unless Helen Zille pulls some kind of rabbit out of the hat and makes another coalition, the DA are going to get about 25 percent of this election and probably the same in 2019.
ALEC HOGG: So, we’re unlikely to have a change in government.
PETER SULLIVAN: Well, I think there may be a change in government in Gauteng, but in Gauteng, it’s going to become very interesting if the ANC don’t get an overall majority, which I think they won’t get. They then have to decide whether they are going to be in an alliance with the EFF or in an alliance with the DA. Now, what happens then is that both sides have to offer. Do you offer the Premiership to the lawyer, Dali Mpofu, because he’s their kind of leader, which the ANC won’t do, whereas the DA will do in order to govern, and the EFF I think, will be very malleable. They’re brand new on the political scene, but everybody’s going to be courting them as a bride if the ANC doesn’t get a majority in Gauteng, so there may be a change of government here.
ALEC HOGG: There is a month to go to the election. Peter, we’re forgetting your views on your old employer, the Independent Group about the changes there.
PETER SULLIVAN: Lots of changes. You know Alec, when I left as editor I went from editor to being group editor-in-chief, I said I’m not going to criticise whatever my successors do, because it’s just the wrong thing to do. It’s much easier to second-guess somebody after they’ve decided what to lead with and what stories to run etcetera. I think it might be a little bit premature of me to second-guess the new owners, as well. I’m not there. There have been…I don’t know if it’s a spate of resignations, but there have been 8/9/10 people who’ve left, often on principle. However, everybody I speak to tells me that editorially, nobody has been told what to write and what not to write so at this stage, the Independent Group is still independent.
