RW Johnson: Maimane, Malema, Mashaba – career missteps from egos run riot

In this piece from the BizNews tribe's favourite columnist, political scientist RW Johnson dissects politicians' paradoxical relationship with polls, revealing their true attention despite claims of indifference. He critiques ANC's confidence amidst polls indicating uncertainty, explores DA's polling strategies, and critiques smaller parties' aspirations against harsh electoral realities, reflecting on African politics' pervasive egotism and its impact on governance and progress..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..By RW Johnson .___STEADY_PAYWALL___.Election time always affords one the sight of politicians interacting with the polls. Virtually all politicians like to denigrate the polls and often even insist that they never pay any attention to them. This is invariably a lie: politicians watch the polls like hawks and those parties that can afford it all run their own polls. One is forced to the conclusion that the reason for this pretended indifference is that very often the polls are telling the public things that politicians don't want to know. But more generally it brings up the question of political honesty. .Look at the present situation. ANC spokesmen from Ramaphosa on down all insist that the ANC is sure of winning another large majority and is thus not interested in coalitions. Yet judging from the polls, the only real question seems to be whether the ANC will manage to get to 40%. Thus far two polls have put it at under 40 and the rest very slightly over that mark. And the ANC runs its own polls so you can be sure that its leaders are looking at much the same numbers. .This is, of course, the first election in which the ANC machine is being steered by Fikile Mbalula. When he was appointed Secretary-General many commentators rushed to assure us that while Mbalula's ministerial career had revealed him to be a complete buffoon, he was an extremely adept party organiser and administrator. As yet there is little sign of this. At first he insisted that the R113 million bill the party faced for posters at a previous election was utterly fictitious and of course the ANC would pay no such amount. Then the bailiffs arrived at Luthuli House to enforce a court order that the party must pay. Shortly thereafter the party paid up, though it has refused to say where the money came from and, indeed, is trying to defeat the cause of financial transparency by trying to get donors to give just less than R100,000 each so that the source of such funds need not be revealed. Meanwhile one notes in that in several provinces the ANC still has no posters put up. Of course, it may be that no one wants to take the risk of printing such posters and then having the ANC refuse to pay the bill, but there's obviously a big question here for Mbalula to answer. How can the ANC be trusted to run the country if it can't even manage to get its posters put up in an election where its entire credibility is on the line ?.The key feature of the election so far has been the emergence of Zuma's MK party. The 82 year old Zuma claims that he needs to return to power because he can then "fix" all the things that aren't working properly in the country. After all, he adds, when he was President there was no load-shedding. This is the sort of thing which leads American voters to ask whether older candidates are ga-ga. There was, after all, persistent load-shedding throughout Zuma's nine years in power and Zuma showed absolutely no aptitude for fixing anything. Meanwhile his party hasn't bothered with a manifesto. It clearly feels that having Zuma at its head is enough. In other words the appeal is mainly tribalism though in South Africa that's a taboo concept and we all have to pretend that it doesn't exist, which it transparently does..The DA, of course, does its own polling and literally does so every day. This has led John Steenhuisen to boast that DA polls are showing the party at 25% or even in the high 20s. Yet at the same time Steenhuisen has angrily denounced smaller parties as "mercenaries" for daring to use their democratic right to run election campaigns in the Western Cape. In effect he is attempting to insist that the Western Cape belongs to the DA. This is unwise in many different ways. Nobody likes to think that they are "owned" by anyone else. And Steenhuisen is from Durban, after all. His attempt, during the 2021 municipal elections, to instruct the Cape Town city council to build housing on some of its golf courses was angrily rejected by locals and by the DA executive. He should have learned from that. .Steenhuisen's attack on the smaller parties betrays a concern that they are nibbling away at the DA vote and could cost the DA its majority in the Western Cape. But note that if Steenhuisen's boasts of a DA vote of over 25% were correct, that would mean the DA gaining somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 votes nationally, which would also imply considerable gains in the Western Cape. So if he believed what he said about the DA's polls, he wouldn't need to worry about the smaller parties..Steenhuisen's particular target was Songezo Zibi's Rise Mzansi. Zibi is, indeed, an impressive and thoughtful man but he has taken an unwise risk by arguing for expropriation of the land. For, like so many African intellectuals, he assumes the land issue is crucial. But it's not. The polls show that only 2% of voters think land reform is an important issue – and almost no one wants to be a farmer. This is entirely understandable. Farming is difficult, requires considerable expertise and capital and at the end of it you're still completely vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather. And, as we know, the failure rate of new farmers is around 90%. What is important is that most South Africans live in cities and that currently the country's farmers manage to feed the cities and still have a surplus to export. If you want more land the best thing would be to bring the well-watered and under-used land of the Eastern Cape into commercial use. .Julius Malema is, of course, another who shares the delusions about land reform as an issue but he has come up with another way of scaring voters away: his demand that Floyd Shivambu should become Finance Minister. Shivambu has just authored a long and bitter attack on South Africa's most successful entrepreneurs, the Oppenheimers, and he still has some tricky questions to answer about he and his family benefited from the collapse of the VBS bank. There was never any doubt that the idea of an ANC-EFF coalition would produce runaway capital flight and a collapse of the Rand but Malema has effectively doubled down on that. From the point of view of investors, putting Shivambu in charge of Finance is akin to putting Dracula in charge of blood donations. .The ANC has also made enormous efforts to put NHI at the forefront of its campaign, ignoring both the opposition of the doctors and the tidal wave of litigation they would face the minute Ramaphosa signs off on the NHI bill. Yet the polls show that less than 3% of voters regard NHI as a priority and a clear majority thinks that the ANC simply lacks the capacity to implement such a scheme. When you look at the way the government has managed the public hospitals to date this is not terribly surprising. Yet the Health Minister happily concedes that taxes will have to increase to pay for the extra R800 billion a year that NHI would cost. Higher taxes would never be popular anyway, but just imagine how unpopular such tax increases would be if they were levied to pay for a scheme which the electorate has already decided is most unlikely to work..Finally, of course, all the smaller parties claim the polls are at fault because they don't show any of them gaining very much. Mainly they are delusional. Mmusi Maimane thinks that his Build One South Africa party could get 2 million votes, something no new party has ever done. GOOD's posters tell us that "Auntie Pat" wants to "Stop the Suffering" but there is no hint as to how this is to be achieved. GOOD is clearly running on empty and certainly can't stop any suffering. Gayton Mackenzie, like Auntie Pat, already talks about becoming premier of the Western Cape, though this will certainly not happen. Action SA, whose support to date has been exclusively in Gauteng, has equally unlikely national ambitions. The joker in the pack might be Rise Mzansi, partly because they've had the good luck of being attacked by Steenhuisen. .One is left marveling at the pervasive egotism of African politics. Both in Libya and now in Sudan we have seen protracted civil wars, with enormous suffering and fatalities, caused by two rival warlords who could easily have negotiated a peaceful outcome had they cared about the public interest. More than sixty years after independence the Congo is still racked by endless wars for much the same reason. .Here in South Africa we have, at least until now, avoided civil wars but Mmusi Maimane, Patricia de Lille and Herman Mashaba could all have settled for leading positions in a DA shadow cabinet or in local or provincial government – but instead chose to found their mainly no-hoper parties. Their egos have led them to a road to nowhere. Similarly, Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma would now occupy leading positions in the ANC had they been willing to play a team game. One looks back to the way someone like Colin Eglin gave up a comfortable position in the United Party to serve many years in the wilderness with the Progs. He later served as leader of the Progs, was forced to step down for Van Zyl Slabbert, but later served again as leader before again serving under Tony Leon. The point was that Eglin was committed to certain liberal principles and thus to his party. He had a healthy ego but always subordinated it to those principles. That sort of dedication seems old fashioned now but we are the poorer without it. .Read also:.RW Johnson: Amandla – meet Zuma's Russian-funded media business🔒 RW Johnson: SA's true GNU may soon arrive 30 years late, better than neverBNC#6: RW Johnson Q&A – Explosive political insights: ANC's future hangs in the balance

RW Johnson: Maimane, Malema, Mashaba – career missteps from egos run riot

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