Eusebius McKaiser | Don’t fall for cheap ANC elections tricks

The ANC is hoping to fool you into thinking that there is a clear distinction between party and state in SA. That, in fact, is not the case, even though we wish it would be so.

Recognising the ANC’s attempted trickery, on the eve of the municipal elections, is crucial to ensure we hold the ANC-led state, and the local municipalities they run, maximally accountable for both technocratic and ethical failures.

It is laughable hearing ANC politicians expressing anger at Eskom for the rolling blackouts we are experiencing.

On Eskom’s addiction to energy insecurity, the party’s deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte was fuming when she told media the other day, “Where we are now on the Eskom issue? We are demanding an answer. We want to know what is going on with Eskom. Why is it that we can’t get a solid answer? Why is this thing not able to be resolved?

“We want [a] clear, unequivocal straightforward answer from minister [Pravin] Gordhan and the CEO [Andre de Ruyter]. We can’t go on like this. Every day we now have a message that says there will be load-shedding. It sounds like it’s never going to end. As a society, we have lives to live, businesses to run, children to feed and all manner of things. Our people need proper answers.”

This is consistent with the party’s spokesperson, Pule Mabe, saying the other day that the party wants “unequivocal answers” on the state of power supply. He added, “The mixed messages and lack of public transparency and accountability witnessed are a source of grave concern and suspicion. It is also a direct affront to the ANC's commitment in our manifesto to ensure safe and reliable electricity supply to our communities.”

So, what is going on here? The ANC wants to trick you into thinking that the party and the state are not identical. They want you to believe that Luthuli House can hold the ANC-led government accountable. They want you to believe that there is no fusion of party and state in SA. This, of course, is a lie.

It is a lie designed to make you tempted to vote for an ANC that is talking up accountability in the days before the election, but the morning after the last ballot has been counted, they will be back to not giving a damn about the needs of citizens, back to using the state as the party’s playground, with no regard for the constitutional duty to keep party and state separate.

We know this because they have shown their true selves to us repeatedly. At some point, fellow South Africans, we should surely take the ANC seriously when it shows us who and what it truly is?

It has been embarrassing watching the ANC’s election campaign. If the party had run our municipalities properly, then the strategy would simply have been to remind us of the objective facts about the state of our municipalities. If those objective facts were glowing, the sell would be an easy one because we would all acknowledge brilliantly run local municipalities across the length and breadth of the country. But the ANC could not use this election strategy because it has a piss-poor record when it comes to cities and towns in this country.

I recently spent a few days in Makhanda in the Eastern Cape. This city used to be a pride and joy of the province, with some of the best schools in the country, a high court that has led us on some brilliant administrative and constitutional law issues, a university that offers a world class liberal arts education in particular, historic churches and other sites of attraction to lure curious visitors, and one of the biggest annual arts festivals in the world.

Makhanda is now a shadow of its former self. Potholes are everywhere and are so big that you cannot avoid them all but must choose which ones are the least destructive to your vehicle. My sister aptly remarked that when one drives around in Makhanda you are forced to drive like a drunk person because of the potholes. Water supply is insecure, and residents were recently at the mercy of Gift of the Givers trying to counter the ailing water infrastructure and helping with shortages at the local Settler’s Hospital.

Unemployment in this town is so visible that it does not take an economist to know that at least 70% of working- age residents of the city are not in work.

I felt deeply saddened. Yet, Makhanda is neither the worst case-study nor the only one. And this story of maladministration is not restricted to the Eastern Cape.

The Makana municipality, within which Makhanda is situated, should have been taken over by the provincial government but they keep fighting the legal victories of organised residents who have proven factually that the local councillors are corrupt and poorly skilled.

And that is why the tricks of Duarte, Pule and other ANC leaders must be laughed at, described for what they are, and rudely dismissed. ANC-run municipalities have not delivered a “better life for all”.

Elections must be about examining the record, and on that basis alone the ANC ought to be punished next week, failing which we must ask whether as voters we are suffering from a political version of battered spouse syndrome.

Given that it cannot ask you to examine their records (because then you would have to vote them out everywhere), the ANC’s campaign strategy has been a combination of making minor concessions about failures and promising it will use technical accountability tools to ensure that councillors are held accountable going forward. Both pillars of the ANC’s campaign must be booed.

First, the concessions have been too small to be honest and accurate about the ANC’s role in the making of the municipality ruins. The party is a central figure in the many years of state capture across all spheres of government. You cannot, for example, understand either our energy insecurity nor water supply problems fully unless you understand how cadre deployment and patronage networks, in part, got us to where we are with our water and electricity crises. So, when the president, and others, gently say “mistakes have been made” that is the understatement of the century! It is right up there with a serial killer sheepishly telling a judicial officer, “Mistakes have been made”. The ANC has landed our country in existential crises that are unforgiving and the minor, understated concessions are disingenuous.

Second, where the heck was accountability over the past couple of decades? Nothing stopped you before from dismissing criminal and unethical cadres. Nothing stopped you before from regularly releasing accurate data about municipalities, every other quarter, or more transparently letting us all see the flow of certain processes like the inner workings of tender boards.

The ANC has the audacity to think we have amnesia about the years gone past. We don’t.

We know that accountability and ANC are not friends but enemies. There is too much of a credibility deficit that has built up over the years for any thinking voter to genuinely believe that this government will “renew” itself over the next couple of days.

There is no reason to believe that the ANC takes the separation of party and state seriously or that the party can hold its government accountable.

I still have no idea who I will vote for this year. What I do know is that the case for voting ANC has not been successfully made by ANC politicians. Don’t fall for their cheap tricks. Examine their records.

McKaiser is a Sunday Times Daily and TimesLIVE contributor and analyst