With an era-defining election just 96 days away, South Africa’s political parties will be springing into action, or lurching into action, or tripping and falling into action, or simply subsiding off the couch and rolling face-first into the action.
Yes, the next 13-and-a-bit weeks are going to fly by. But how, exactly, will parties both new and established use their time? Well wonder no more because here is your exclusive peak at their electioneering schedules!
uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP)
The main focus of the next 96 days will be discrediting the Independent Electoral Commission so that when the votes are counted Jacob Zuma can once more play the victim. Ordinarily this would be tricky. The IEC has a relatively good reputation for running free and fair elections, and Zuma has recently lost his main spin doctor, Mzwanele Manyi, who has joined the much healthier cash flow of the EFF. Still, anyone who votes for Jacob Zuma in 2024 will believe literally anything, so perhaps slagging off the IEC and claiming he was robbed won’t be so hard after all.
RISE Mzansi
Having done the hard work of listening to the concerns of a wide variety of South Africans, Songezo Zibi’s new party now has at least six weeks to redesign the party’s gorgeously terrible posters from scratch. You know the ones, with the tasteful, modern feel that must have looked amazing on the designer’s computer screen and which, when you drive past them, look like ads for a two-day academic symposium on Swedish architecture and absolutely, definitely not election posters.
(Credit where credit is due, though: I don’t know how the party has resisted reworking the old anti-littering campaign, with RISE throwing the ANC in a bin under the legend “Zap it — Zibi can.”)
COPE
If COPE starts going door-to-door this weekend, and visits one potential voter every day, it can be done campaigning by Wednesday next week. This will be good news for the struggling party since it needs the rest of the time available to get back to its traditional focus: fist fights over which of its six members is currently the party’s leader.
Patriotic Alliance (PA)
As mayor of Beaufort West, Gayton McKenzie promised to turn the Karoo town into “another Dubai”. To everyone’s intense surprise, he didn’t turn Beaufort West into another Dubai, but as the old saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed, move up into national politics. Over the next 96 days McKenzie will be more determined than ever to convince us that he can turn South Africa into Dubai: a monument to unsustainable consumption, corruption and anti-democratic oligarchy towering over a wasteland. Exciting times!
A tough 13 weeks lie ahead for the 70,000 people who voted for GOOD in 2019, as they wrestle with two difficult choices: give Patricia De Lille another term as a de facto ANC cabinet minister, or admit you’ve been had and find someone else to vote for?
Pan Africanist Congress (PAC)
Demonstrating its traditional seriousness and aversion to hyperbole, the PAC will be taking nothing for granted over the next 96 days, least of all surviving them. Still, if all its members take their pills and wear their pressure socks, they should at least get close.
GOOD
A tough 13 weeks lie ahead for the 70,000 people who voted for GOOD in 2019, as they wrestle with two difficult choices: give Patricia de Lille another term as a de facto ANC cabinet minister, or admit you’ve been had and find someone else to vote for?
Freedom Front Plus (FF+)
This party doesn’t think in terms of days or weeks (in the FF+, time is calculated in gallons of diesel for the generators in the bunker complex) but you can be sure that the FF+ finished all its preparations at least a year ago: the cash is buried, the iodine tablets and air filters are stacked, and the tripwires are set.
African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP)
Many complex questions confront Kenneth Meshoe’s party, not least whether it should campaign at all. After all, if God wanted the ACDP to get more votes, wouldn’t He just magic them into being? And if He doesn’t want the ACDP to get more votes, why not? Does He perhaps just want Meshoe to keep getting paid an MP’s salary forever without having to make any important decisions about anything? Ah, the mysteries of faith ...
Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)
Disciplined as always, the EFF will spend the next 13 weeks doing the two things that will be the pillars of its administration should it ever take power: tweeting and hiring busses. Of course there will be variations on this — sometimes it will hire buses and then tweet about them, or tweet from inside the busses — but mostly the party will be focused on securing economic freedom for bus owners in their lifetime.
Democratic Alliance (DA)
Given that Mmusi Maimane was fired after the DA lost five seats in the 2019 election, the party will be using the time before May 29 to calculate how many seats, exactly, it can lose before John Steenhuisen has to report to Helen Zille’s office, hand in his Head Prefect’s badge and step tearfully into the Lindiwe Mazibuko Memorial Chute.
ANC
Last, and without a doubt least, the ANC will spend the next 96 days doing what it was always done when facing hard realities rushing towards it: nothing. It will gaze stupidly at its approaching death with the same slow-blinking, glazed expression it’s had these last 20 years, convincing itself that if it ignores the crisis, it will go away.
Yes, these 96 days are going to fly by ...
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