There’s been some magnificently dim-witted and confusing campaigning ahead of next week’s election, perhaps best exemplified by Thursday’s tweet from the ANC, claiming that “the mood at Phola Park in Ekurhuleni is electrifying ahead of President Ramaphosa’s address”; a triumphantly moronic choice of words in the very same week that the ANC and Ramaphosa literally failed to electrify the country.
The ANC, however, hasn’t had a monopoly on absurdity.
Consider, for example, king-for-hire Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo telling EFF supporters that Julius Malema has promised to buy him a luxury car.
Now, given that the EFF swore to us in September that all its money comes from membership fees, this announcement implies that Malema’s socialist revolutionaries have just the used the sweat of the proletariat to buy a Mercedes for an unelected aristocrat.
Of course, everybody buys votes, but if the king is telling the truth, I can’t think of another political party that has sold out its founding principles as hard as the EFF right now.
Not that others haven’t tried. Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA, for example, campaigning on a ticket of efficiency and delivery, managed to not put its name on the ballot paper, and then failed to get that spectacular cock-up reversed.
In Cape Town, likewise, I’m seeing posters for something called the African Restoration Alliance, founded last year by a certain Jerome Swartz, previously of the ACDP.
According to the ARA’s posters, the party plans to “Put SA First”. Which is weird, because when Swartz launched his party, he went to some lengths to explain that the ARA won’t put SA first.
“We are different,” he told IOL at the time, “because first of all, we are not going to concentrate on SA, we are an African Restoration project. We have international policies.”
There’s been an awful lot of nonsense spoken and written. But amid all the silliness and lies, there’s been a remarkable dose of clarity and even some political cunning from one unexpected quarter: the far right.
Sure. I mean, what better way to build your continental cred than by contesting local government elections in the country you’re not concentrating on?
Yes, there’s been an awful lot of nonsense spoken and written. But amid all the silliness and lies, there’s been a remarkable dose of clarity and even some political cunning from one unexpected quarter: the far right.
Ever since Constand Viljoen’s Freedom Front herded the last stragglers of the Afrikaner Eenheidsbeweging and Conservative Party into the Freedom Front Plus kraal, pundits have wondered where, exactly, white secessionists were hoping to build their Blankestan.
Most hoped that wherever it was, it would be very, very far away from them. The Conservative Party, after all, split away from the National Party in 1982 because its members thought that PW “Total Onslaught” Botha was too liberal.
But it was never clear if it would be on a farm in the old Northern Transvaal, a desert near Orania, or whether they’d opt for somewhere more exotic, perhaps following in the jackboot-steps of the Nazis who’d hightailed it to Argentina and Brazil in the late 1940s.
This week, however, all became clear. Thanks to the FF+ officially hooking up with the secessionist CapeXit group, we finally know that Der Heimat will be somewhere inside the bounds of the vast land mass known as the Cape Province between 1910 and 1994, or, as the FF+ calls it, “the good old days”.
I would like to extend warm congratulations to the good people of KZN, Gauteng, Free State, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and North West for dodging this potential musket ball, and formally ask them that, if everyone goes completely mad and everything gets unhinged and the Cape actually does secede, they grant me asylum.
And what of that political cunning I mentioned?
Well, I hate to give credit where it’s due in this case, but I have to admit that the CapeXit fantasists have shown a flash of true genius by embedding themselves in the FF+ rump.
In May, the group made the dramatic claim, widely reported in the media, that 800,000 people had registered on its website in support of Cape secession.
That absurdly huge figure was quickly debunked by disinformation researcher Jean le Roux, who revealed that the website used to register those alleged secessionists didn’t need genuine ID or phone numbers, meaning that a patient enough team of number-inputters could generate an almost infinite number of registrations.
Thanks to the FF+, however, CapeXit doesn’t need to resort to fraud to claim that it’s much bigger than it is: on Tuesday, it can legitimately co-opt every single vote gained by the FF+ and claim it as a vote for secession.
Of course, the FF+ won’t get close to 800,000 votes. But still, even half that number will represent a dazzling leap into the mainstream — or at least the less fetid corners of the swamp — for a group that might otherwise not have left frenzied WhatsApp groups.
But enough of this silliness. Let’s vote, and pray that the results are, at the very least, electrifying.
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