ANC should get rid of Zuma, watch out for EFF – election analysis

The election results are all in and tallied – we know the ANC will lead the national government and most of the provinces, with the DA heading up the Western Cape and forming the biggest opposition party in Parliament. Now, in the aftermath of the election, is the time when analysts come out to give their opinion on what the election means for politics and parties going forward. Looking over the results, the biggest news is clearly that the ANC lost 3.75 percentage points and 15 seats, while the DA gained 4.65 percentage points and 18 seats, and the EFF gained 6.35% of the vote and 25 seats – a very impressive showing.  Given this, the lessons of the election are clear enough. The ANC needs to deal with its Zuma problem and its corruption and delivery problems, or it will continue to see vote share erode. The DA still needs to expand its base, but has performed well, and the EFF is clearly striking a chord with voters, which should prod the DA and the ANC to up their respective games. – FD 

ALEC HOGG:  Welcome back to Power Lunch.  Joining us now to discuss his views on South Africa’s recent election and provide some advice to political parties, is Clive Simpkins, Market and Communications Strategist.  You wrote a great piece over the weekend Clive, where you took each of the political parties and applied your mind to what they can learn from the election.  Some of it was tongue-in-cheek, but I think some of it was pretty focused.  Let’s start with the ANC.

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  The bottom-line to it is the fact that they got a reduced majority would say ‘you cannot sit back on your laurels now because the people have sent you a message’.  There were entire sectors – geographically – who didn’t vote for them again, for example.  If I were the ANC right now (and that’s what I wrote in the article), I would get rid of Mr Zuma.  The party played it extremely cleverly during the elections, as they’ve always done right back to the days of Madiba, talking about the ‘collective’ and ‘it’s not about one person.  It’s about the party’.  That was the DA’s failing, because they targeted Zuma instead of targeting the ANC.

ALEC HOGG:  Just to go with the ANC as well, I’m reading an amazing book that Tony Leon wrote – in fact, he’s coming to the studio in two weeks’ time I think – called Opposite Mandela, I think.  It’s a great reminder of what happened at the time of the transition to democracy in that first election where the ANC got just over 62 percent of the voters’ role, so it’s almost as though the party went back to where it was.  It’s not really that much of a disaster.

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  If one looks at the trend line during the tenure of President Mbeki and to where Zuma is, it has consistently declined under Zuma.  Despite the fact that they say it’s not about the individual, unfortunately you don’t want to have the kind of PR that comes with the President at the moment, which is scandal after scandal after scandal.  I really think they need to start building a credible base again for 2019 because if EFF grows as it assuredly will – maybe not by one million people every eight months as Julius Malema says he would like it to do – there’s going to be a major problem.  I have no doubt of that.

ALEC HOGG:  EFF was perhaps the biggest winner in the election.

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  Absolutely, although they keep saying they have zero budget.  Donations in kind or in support, albeit helicopters or whatever, constitutes a budget.  They did phenomenally well.  I think they would have done even better had this 180-degee turnabout in the image of Malema been something one could trust.  My view on it now is that people will look at EFF and say ‘let’s see what you do in Parliament.  Let’s see what you do to succeed in delivering.  Let’s see where this re-imaged Malema – the calmer, more rational, more economically literate version of him – is a sustainable one, or whether this is just papering over cracks in order to have gotten those votes.

ALEC HOGG:  Your advice to the ANC: get rid of Zuma.  Your advice to EFF?

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  My advice to EFF would be continue on a moderate tack.  Don’t throw hand grenades and Molotov cocktails into media broadcasts etcetera, because people who may not have voted for you this time will vote for you next time, if they see a more measured tonality about you.

ALEC HOGG:  What about the DA?  Again, going back to Tony Leon…  In 1994, the DA had seven seats.  Today, it’s many times that.  It appears to have been a good election.  You think it could have been even better.

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  Alec, I really do believe it could have been better.  I was appalled to find that there were people around me who chose not to vote DA simply because of Helen Zille riding a turbo-charged broomstick on Twitter. 

ALEC HOGG:  A turbo-charged broomstick…you must have thought that one through.

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  No, I didn’t.  The Bette Midler movie that featured her riding a vacuum cleaner once, was rather that…  I do think that Helen is too strident in social media.  When one has some sort of affiliation with any grouping, one doesn’t want to see the leader of that grouping become very personal as she did with Carien du Plessis for example, and become very vindictive with journalists in general, as she did.  I think she came under a lot of pressure in the elections.  She became short-tempered, frayed around the edges, and was over-extended.  I would say ‘just consider the message you’re sending out here.  It’s not a good one’.

ALEC HOGG:  Think before you tweet.

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  Yes, that would apply to all of us.

ALEC HOGG:  Take a deep breath, maybe.  What about the Agang disaster?  There’s no other way to describe it.  At one point, Mamphela Ramphele would be – today – the leader of the opposition in the House of Assembly.  Now, she’s going to…

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  Nobody.  As Helen was quoted as saying on Twitter, ‘we offered her the world.  She wanted the universe, and she’s landed up with a shack in Khayelitsha’, which was the bitchy comment of the year.  The bottom line is, she suffers from ‘queen bee syndrome’ and she suffered from exactly what COPE did, which was that everybody wants to be a leader.  If one looks at Africa’s history and one looks at the years Daniel Arap Moi held sway in Kenya, it was for exactly that reason.  You had umpteen little opposition parties, all of whom wanted to sit in state houses.  Consequently, they would not unite.  They never formed a decent coalition as opposition, and the dictatorship continued.

ALEC HOGG:  So, what would your advice be to her?

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  Well, a new dynamic just happened with Lindiwe Mazibuko going off to Harvard, which is going to be absolutely phenomenal.

ALEC HOGG:  Let’s just dwell on that for a moment.  It’s a strange thing.  The timing of the announcement is rather strange.  You have an election and a couple of days after the results are announced, your leader of the opposition party is on a sabbatical.

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  Look, Rebecca Davis, the one journalist who said ‘excuse me.  Can I have my vote back now that Lindiwe’s going off to Harvard’…  The timing was a bit bizarre.  A media report also said that Miss Mazibuko made the announcement to the media before she discussed it with Helen.  I see massive damage control that came into action there, so I’m not quite sure what the real story is.  The fact is, apparently Mmusi Maimane is not going to go to Parliament as the Parliamentary leader of the party, so they’re going to have to find somebody else to do that.  I don’t think it’s going to do huge damage, but the timing was certainly very peculiar.

ALEC HOGG:  All right, so we’ve deal with most of those parties.  What about Mangosuthu Buthelezi?  Again, going back to 1994, his party ran KZN; he was a cabinet minister in the Government of National Unity despite only coming into the election at the last hour – a week before the election was held.  Now, he appears to be a completely spent force in the IFP.

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  There’s this problem and Americans suffer from it to a great extent.  The analogy I use is you have to know when to get off stage.  There was a seminal moment at Covent Garden many, many years ago where Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were onstage.  She leaped into the air and was meant to do an entre che quatre, which was four beats of her feet and she managed three.  The audience booed them off the stage, and that was really the end of her ballet career.  I’m afraid that although Nkosi Mangosuthu Buthelezi may not be a ballet dancer, it’s time to get off stage.

ALEC HOGG:  It’s disappointing to see an old champion like him, an old warhorse fading away as he has done.

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  Fading away.

ALEC HOGG:  What about COPE? 

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  It’s a complete and utter train smash.  I don’t believe there’s a future.  When you see people like Mbhazima Shilowa and Terror Lekota actually spending so much time in litigating against each other when they’ve gotten all those votes from people, that says ‘guys, if you can’t get on together, how on earth are you going to represent us in National Government’.  The answer is you aren’t.

ALEC HOGG:  So no comeback there, but if they hired an advisor, what would you say?

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  I would tell Lekota to go and get a real job.  I really would.  It’s a spent force because the credibility is gone.  It’s case of ‘you can’t manage your own internal fratricidal warfare.  How are you going to manage anything on our part?  You’re not’.

ALEC HOGG:  Much of the new boys’ attention has been on EFF, but there’s a new party in KZN – the NFP.  What’s your take there?  Is that a potential threat to the ANC in the future?

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  I don’t think it’s a threat to the ANC, but certainly that young woman heading the breakaway from the IFP, has huge potential.  She’s very popular.  She’s very dynamic.  She’s very charismatic.  She is the antithesis of Buthelezi, so I would say there’s massive hope that perhaps in the 2019 elections (not speaking as an analyst, but purely as an opinion) that they have a chance at coming in again as the official opposition in KZN.

ALEC HOGG:  So she has the charisma to do it.  Just to close off with, the Afrikaner party – Freedom Front Plus…

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  They need a lot of prayer.  I don’t mean them in particular, but Afrikaners.  I don’t mean to be insulting, but when I watched Dan Roodt’s Vront Nasionaal for example, desperately trying on Twitter to rally people in the face of this impending threat from the EFF, the one problem among the Afrikaners is this chronic unrelenting broedertwis – this conflict between brothers.  They cannot get along with each other.  Look at the fights going on between the Mulders and Dan Roodt etcetera.  If they can’t settle that at some round table convention or some type of court, the Afrikaner is not going to have a voice in politics.

ALEC HOGG:  Well, not in the way it is at the moment.  They probably all voted for the DA anyway, if you take that population group.  Clive, it’s always fascinating to engage with you.  If we put it all together, the ANC maybe had everything against it in this election.  This could be the lowest point, unless they start shooting themselves in the feet even more into the future.

CLIVE SIMPKINS:  Well, Malusi Gigaba just said in a press conference ‘you, the media, were against us and we beat you’.  They’re not fighting the media.  They’re fighting their own internal image, and that’s something they need to work on.

ALEC HOGG:  That was Clive Simpkins, Marketing and Communications Strategist.  Well, if you want to read his thoughts on it go and have a look at biznews.com.

 

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