DUBLIN — The election is over and the results are in. In this week’s episode, Alec Hogg and I discuss those results in detail. We look at the percentages and vote tallies, breaking down just what it all means for the DA, the ANC, and the EFF. We consider the market reaction to the news of the ANC’s victory and what the results may mean for Ramaphosa’s policy initiatives. We also ask why the DA made such a poor showing and what the EFF’s gains mean for the future. It’s a comprehensive wrap-up of #Elections 2019 and a look at what the future may hold. – Felicity Duncan
Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of The Editor’s desk here on Biznews Radio. I’m Felicity Duncan and with me is Alec Hogg. Now obviously, the big story this week – the thing that completely dominated everything that we did on Biznews and everything everybody else is doing, was the election.
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And I wanted to start off by talking about something that I think is very, very important. Now, obviously everybody’s been discussing the ANC reduced mandate and all the rest of it. But one thing that really struck me, is if you look at the number… Looking, compared to 2014. In 2014, the ANC got about 11.4 million votes and this year they were down to 10 million. Similarly, if you look at the DA. They got 4 million votes in 2014. Now they’re down to 3.6 million, right? So, while the percentages have shifted, what we’re really looking is about 2 million votes for the two leading parties have just evaporated. Part of that obviously, is people staying home. And part of that is people switching to other parties and now that to me is very striking and it shows a massive enthusiasm gap for this election. You know, people went out and voted but they weren’t excited about it this year.
You’re so right. And in fact, I was just reading this morning. Gareth van Onselen, who is an excellent political analyst with the Institute for Race Relations: he said that that is the feature of this election that the turnout was significantly lower. Nobody anticipated a 7%-point drop in the turnout. We went from around 72% percent to 66 %and South Africa being a young democracy, it is one that we’ve been used to very high turnouts. Many people never got the chance to vote before. This is the 6th time now and perhaps the whole enthusiasm/opportunity that didn’t exist in the past/the novelty of it is wearing off and we’re becoming just like any other democracy. There were a lot of interesting features to me. That was clearly, a very big one. Another big one was obviously the swing of – and it worked out exactly, ironically – 19 MP’S more for the EFF, 19 less for the ANC – and then on the other side of the political spectrum 5 MP’s less for the Democratic Alliance six 6MP’s more for the Freedom Front.
I was looking through the data/the information per province this morning. Something came up that I still don’t understand. But there were 650,000 more votes in the national election than in the provincial elections. Now. I’ve got to double-check and triple-check my figures because that’s a huge difference. It could be partly because of special votes. It could be because of votes from overseas but it would also suggest that a lot of people went in there and really couldn’t be bothered with having a provincial vote and they just wanted to vote in the national election. And there you see the reason why the ANC got about well half a million more votes – in fact, I think was 650,000 more votes at the national level than they got at the provincial levels. As I say, I wouldn’t put my head on a block because I’ve only I double-checked it but I need to triple and quadruple-check those numbers because it does seem very strange.
You know, you see a lot in a lot of places. It makes me actually think a lot about the U.S. elections where the turnout for the presidential election – the big, every four years national presidential election – is high and then the intermittent turnout for the House of Representatives and the Senate, which happens every two years and that off year it’s always much lower. And you often see this, that people tend to get much more excited about national scope elections and elections that are going to affect top leadership than they do about these – call them mid-level elections – and part of that I think is because there’s so much news coverage at the national level that sometimes the provincial level gets a bit neglected.
You know, I could count on one hand the number of stories that I saw talking about Limpopo Province provincial elections or something like that, whereas everybody was really focused on the national election and I’ve seen some studies that say that sometimes the media coverage can account for that enthusiasm gap and also an information gap. People don’t necessarily know the provincial level candidates the way that they ‘know’ the national level candidates. But it’s really interesting if that’s starting to happen more and more in South African politics because I think you know historically, South African politics has been a very local affair – very embedded in the community – and it’s interesting if that is changing into this more distant kind of media-driven politics that you see in most developed democracies.
And hard-boiled as well – those who go to the polls are members of parties or associate themselves with the parties. And really, I remember it being described to me once by a member of the ANC – a very senior ANC member. He said, “We’re like members of a football club. Your football club’s not always doing well but you’re never going to switch to go and support another football club.” So, as a result, the number of votes that we get or the percentage share that we get of the votes depends on how many of our supporters actually bother to pitch up on the day. And this is not good news for the ANC, which has got a very deep historical background. The international trend of lower percentage polls would presume that they would be a loser as you go forward because I guess the lower the poll, the less of the supporters of the biggest football club are actually going to be pitching up for the game.
And as a consequence of that relative to the others, the more aggressive members or activist members of smaller parties. But what is also very interesting here. was the way that the EFF came a lot lower than what was widely anticipated. There was a view that the EFF would get 14% and the DA would get 23 percent. Pretty much all of the polls were looking at that – ANC just below 60. One of the polls had them at 53%. And those were the two for the opposition parties. But as it happens, both the opposition parties scored less. Of course, there was a benefit for the Freedom Front which also shows a little bit of haemorrhaging there by the Democratic Alliance where the Freedom Front – and it scored well right around the country – looking at the different provinces, particularly well in Gauteng and in the North West Province but also solid throughout the country, The Freedom Front as a percentage of the overall. Whereas you’d get some of the other parties like the IFP.
It got almost all its votes KZN and very little elsewhere in the country. So, it’s an interesting dynamic that’s now at play within South Africa for so many different reasons but I liked what President Cyril Ramaphosa had to say – that we should be celebrating, that it was free and fair, that it was peaceful, and in a global context this is still quite a good thing and quite unusual for a developing country that you don’t have lots of chaos, antagonism, and anger being expressed on the day of voting so well done to South Africans for coming out perhaps not in as full of force as they were five years ago but still two-thirds of eligible voters going along and casting their vote is a big number.
You know, it’s interesting you say that because I thought actually, the polls did a pretty good job. Most of the ones (at least the polls that I looked at) gave a range. So, they gave a confidence interval… it’s going to be somewhere between this and this, and most of them had a 10-15% range I would say, for the EFF and then, like an 18-23% range for the DA and they did fall within those categories. So, it wasn’t a big shock. Some polls – the Brexit poll comes to mind or Trump’s election. Those were really a surprise. To me, I actually thought the polls were surprisingly good at getting the midpoint estimates close, pretty close.
But you’re right. The EFF perhaps didn’t have as good an election as they could have but it was a very good election for them. They made big strides both nationally and at the provincial level. Gauteng comes to mind where the EFF gained a lot of seats. But to me it looked like not a great election for the DA. They saw their vote share decline. They saw the number of people who voted for them decline. And of course, the Gauteng result was not at all what they were hoping for. They just seem to me to be struggling a bit to clearly define what they stand for. Having looked at where their votes fell out, people seemed to have chosen to go – as you rightly point out – a lot of people going with the Freedom Front, which is a much more aggressive about its positions as opposed to the DA which can sometimes just be like a little bit wishy-washy I don’t know. What do you think?
When you drive around… Certainly in Johannesburg, I didn’t have the opportunity sadly to look in other parts of the country but the DA posters were very much project-fear driven. ‘Stop the ANC and EFF. Stop the two-thirds majority’ was the message. ‘Don’t vote for Ramaphosa because then you’re voting for the ANC party.’ It was a negative campaign rather than what really got me excited about the DA a few years ago was when I had the chance to watch Mmusi Maimane in an event where…it was at the depths of the Zupta despair where he gave a message of hope and when he gets on the stage and he talks hope, he talks positive. He talks about the future. He is a dynamic leader. When he gets on there and starts pointing out things like ‘white privilege and BEE and stop the ANC because they’re going to make it even worse than it is’, it’s a bit like he’s playing trying to play two horses or trying to ride two horses at the same time.
My sense of this is that when it comes to the crunch as human beings, although we are hardwired to go with the negative because that’s existential – it’s baked into us from hundreds of thousands of years ago. We are however, always inclined towards hope. You look at Kennedy. You look at Obama. There are many instances like that where if you can appeal to people’s hope and promise and a turnaround in the future – and that’s exactly what Ramaphosa did – I remember him. I can’t remember what conversation it was in but because he’s had so many of them. But he did refer to being a peddler of hope, which is of course, a quote from Napoleon who said that 200 years ago. That’s what Ramaphosa did. He said, “We can fix this thing. We’re going to fix this thing. We’re going to put the bad people in jail. We are going to be drawing money into the country. I’m giving you hope for employment etc.”
That was his message and he got a lot of people as I say from my calculations – 650,000 people who didn’t vote for the ANC at a provincial level but did vote for them at national level. He got them to come onboard and you can see that there was a distinct difference in his message to the message of the opposition parties, which on the one hand were the DA (which was one of Project Fear) and on the other hand with the EFF (which is full of bile and hate and anger) which almost allows me to believe that… I mean it sounds ridiculous but they might have peaked in this election. They could have actually got to… This could be it for them. Many people are poor in South Africa, but they’re not stupid and they know that economic policies of the type that are being propagated by the EFF have led to Zimbabwe. Forget about
Venezuela and Cuba, etc. They know right on their doorstep and they know Zimbabwean and they know that those economic policies don’t work, so poor people are not stupid. And it’s almost like you need to have this. And it’s almost like you need to have this agitation. You need to have this this this disruptive force but there is also a highly conservative streak in the South African population. And if Ramaphosa can get it right again…if he can even deliver half of the promise that he has suggested, the people who support the club will come back to the game next time round and next time round you might see the ANC being rewarded whereas in this election they certainly were punished for the previous president. It’s an interesting point and I guess one has to reflect and everyone’s got their opinion and that’s mine. But looking at the numbers, there definitely was a sizeable number of people who voted Ramaphosa and rather than… And that’s reflected directly on what happened – the difference between the provincial vote and the national vote.
Absolutely, and I think that the market response to the election results very clearly says you know you guys did the right thing. This is the international markets talking to us. South Africa, you did the right thing. We’re going to give you the benefit of the doubt. Bond yields on South African government debt are down. We saw the Rand perform pretty well. Even stock markets ticked up a little when it looked like the ANC was going to take lead. It’s all very encouraging and says ‘look, you did the right thing. We believe that the ANC is going to turn things around, that we’re going to see the right policies come into place, that Ramaphosa is going to make good on the promises that he’s made and here’s the breathing room you need to implement on the vision that Cyril Ramaphosa offered.
It’s exciting isn’t it? And that is the kind of country I love living in, a country that looks into the future, that is in a turnaround, that is in a building phase, that is sorting out the muck of the past rather than in many parts of the world where there’s this anger with the status quo. But it’s through destruction that things are changing, and not through construction and there’s a there’s a certain calmness about Ramaphosa that continues to impress me. He just doesn’t lose it and it goes back to the core of one’s being. You never get anything done if you’re agitated and angry but you can get stuff done when you’re calm and peaceful and you thinking with a cool mind. And South Africa now has a president whose thinking with a cool mind. I saw for instance, Paul O’ Sullivan – in the run up to the election – publish those adverts about the ANC saying ‘don’t vote for the ANC because you’re voting for a corrupt party’.
And when I spoke to Paul, I said, “You know Paul, you know Ramaphosa well. Don’t you think he’ll be a little upset that you’re doing this? I mean he’s a guy you’ve known for many years and I guess in a way you could say (I don’t know if you’re a friend but you certainly know him well enough not to want to get on the wrong side or to antagonize him). And he said to me, “There’s no way Cyril would take this personally.” That is the way he’s made. It is it is his belief that Ramaphosa has this cool head, looks at things in a rational manner, and from all of his action from the reading of the Anthony Butler biography which as you know, I’m busy doing an audio book, of which you get to learn it quite well when you have to go through all your fluffs and redo them. All of that is telling me that this is a guy for the right time and the DA – particularly on social media have been trying so hard.
When you mention anything about the Ramaphosa to put a pike in it… Helen Zille’s son – a guy called Jacques Maree – for instance, picked up on one of the pieces we had last week and he started spouting quite angry stuff on social media around this. And my response to him after thinking about it for a while was, “Okay, now I get it.” His argument was “Well you don’t really know what you’re talking about”, which is pretty true when it comes to politics. I don’t. But what the ANC are going to do is they are putting Ramaphosa up there and they’re going to get rid of him straight after the election. Well, my response to him was, “Well, that’s it. That’s a good opinion. So, go for it. Go onto the bond markets. Go short on South Africa. Because you’re the one who’s going to make all the money while the rest of the world who thinks differently are gonna be losing.
If you’re right you’ll make billions. Of course, that’s when the argument then peters out because everybody’s got an opinion. But when you have to put money behind your opinion you start looking at it in a very different sense and in the cold light of day the global markets which are millions of people who are playing and putting out cold hard cash down are saying, “This guy’s the right guy at the right time for the country. We believe that there’s a very good chance that he’s going to get it right. That’s why we’re buying South African bonds and the South African Rand.
