The party’s nervousness over the outcome of the August 3 local government elections is prompting it to come up with ever more desperate moves, writes S’thembiso Msomi

With just more than a week to go before election day, opposition parties might take some comfort from the Gauteng ANC's apparent desperation to have former president Thabo Mbeki campaigning for it.This can only mean that, despite its confident public pronouncements about the polls, the ANC is worried about the possible outcome in some of the metros in the country's richest province.Former president Kgalema Motlanthe set the cat among the pigeons two weekends ago when he suggested that Mbeki would soon come out of his self-imposed retirement from active party politics to campaign for an ANC victory.Since he was unceremoniously removed from office in September 2008, Mbeki has not canvassed votes for the party he has actively served for more than 50 years.Before the 2009 elections, Mbeki famously wrote to party president Jacob Zuma expressing his bemusement at a party leadership that fired him because it "had lost confidence in me" now considering him "such a dependable cadre as could be relied upon to promote the political fortunes of the very same movement, the ANC, which I betrayed ..."Since then the former ANC leader has stayed away from party matters, focusing mainly on the work of his foundation and several missions across the continent.Having him campaign for the ANC in these elections would have been a major coup for the party, especially in a province in which he remains highly popular, particularly among the emergent black middle class.It is no surprise, therefore, that ANC Gauteng leaders such as chairman Paul Mashatile and Johannesburg mayor Parks Tau would go out of their way to try to have Mbeki's name associated with the party's campaign.Gauteng looks likely to be the most contested province on August 3. Whereas the three metropolitan councils in the province - Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni - were once strongholds of the party, it is not beyond the realm of reality that, come August 4, the ANC might find itself without enough votes to form a government in at least one of them.It has been bleeding support in Gauteng since 2009 and its share of the vote has declined with every election since.This trend is partly linked to the internal ANC power struggle that resulted in Zuma defeating Mbeki as party leader in Polokwane.Black middle-class voters loyal to the ANC in the province had mostly backed Mbeki. Since his axing as the country's president, Mbeki has been careful not to harm the party's chances at the polls by making any negative pronouncements against it So, when he lost the leadership race and was eventually sacked as the country's president, this constituency felt particularly aggrieved.Some abandoned the party for the then newly formed COPE, others started looking at opposition parties such as the DA as alternatives. Still more decided to abstain from voting.As a result, the ANC's share of the vote in the 2009 general elections as well as the 2011 local government elections shrank, although not enough for it to lose control of the governments it ran.But then the advent of the EFF in 2014 gave it a new major headache. The new party, led by Julius Malema - the former leader of the ANC's Youth League - started eating into the other key ANC constituency: the black working class and the poor.Fighting the battle on both fronts means that the ANC can no longer take the support of either constituency for granted. To maintain control of all the metros, it needs to utilise every weapon at its disposal to win votes.Given that Mbeki remains popular with large sections of the black middle class despite having been out of active party politics for more than seven years now, the Gauteng ANC leaders would have liked to have him as an ace up their sleeve in their contest with their two biggest rivals, the DA and EFF.Just days after Motlanthe told journalists to expect Mbeki to be involved in the campaign, provincial party leaders wanted Mbeki to join them at a meeting with local government candidates of the party last weekend.They were also keen to have him join other party veterans at the Union Buildings on Monday at an event to celebrate Mandela Day.Both times he was a no-show.His office refuses to be dragged into the controversy surrounding his apparent "snubbing" of the party.It would not even say whether he had been formally invited to the two events.However, that Mbeki would not go back on his decision in 2009, 2011 and 2014 not to campaign should have been clear on the very day that Motlanthe announced that Mbeki would join the campaign.If indeed he had been keen, his office would have immediately confirmed the news.Instead, it chose silence, presumably because it wanted to avoid a situation where an office of a former president accuses another former president of a falsehood.Motlanthe's optimism that Mbeki would join the campaign was probably based on what the party's provincial leaders had told him - that they had approached Mbeki for help.But those ANC members who claim to be in regular contact with Mbeki say Motlanthe ought to have known that having Mbeki involved in a door-to-door campaign canvassing for votes for the ANC would have been impossible, "given his take on many of the issues the public is concerned about".One said: "What should Thabo Mbeki say when, in the course of campaigning, people ask him about Nkandla, for instance? Should he say it is a good thing?" What ought to worry them more is that they have had to resort to begging former leaders to come out campaigning Since his axing as the country's president, Mbeki has been careful not to harm the party's chances at the polls by making any negative pronouncements against it.In the run-up to the 2009 elections, for instance, COPE campaigners - who had broken away from the ANC in protest against his sacking - were frustrated by Mbeki's failure to boost their chances by publicly slamming the ANC.If he does criticise the ANC, he does so within the accepted parameters of what a loyal party member can or cannot say in public about the organisation.This, over the years, has given hope to, for instance, the Gauteng leadership that over time he would come round and use his popularity with some of their constituencies to help the party win votes.But the past two weeks have shown us that Mbeki would rather stay above party politics. The most he has been willing to do for his party is to not directly criticise it and to agree to tacitly endorse party deployees such as Tau without directly calling on voters to back the ANC at the polls.Mashatile has asked for a meeting with the former president and his wish is likely to be granted before election day. But would the provincial ANC leaders' appearance in pictures with Mbeki help sway the ANC's disaffected traditional middle-class voters to stay with the party?What ought to worry them more is that they have had to resort to begging former leaders to come out campaigning, and to devote much of their energy in fighting the DA over the right to use the Mandela name, to win over black middle-class voters.What this indicates is that on their own, they are unable to deliver an election message that would keep this constituency in the fold for much longer...