Ladies and gentlemen, we have begun our descent back to grinding normality. Please turn off all your hopes of a major electoral upset and make sure your stoicism is in the upright position as we prepare the cabin and your nerves for five more years in ANC-Land.
For some of our fellow passengers — those passionate supporters of opposition parties who have loudly and publicly insisted that the ANC is about to be dumped out of power — this announcement may cause some annoyance, a bit like hearing that your flight to Paris has been rerouted to Parys.
To be fair, not all of them believed they were going to Paris in the first place.
In many cases, the public optimism of opposition supporters is a performance of kinship rather than an expression of conviction.
When I see, for example, followers of Mmusi Maimane declare on social media that he is about to become the next president of the Republic, I understand that I’m seeing a sort of school war-cry being chanted, like when the Grade 8s are herded down to the field on a rainy Saturday morning to yell ‘Victory, victory is our cry!’ while their team gets trampled into the mud.
Still, I do think that there are a great many supporters of opposition parties who, like the passengers in my metaphorical airliner, have been borne aloft on great updrafts of hype and hope, and who might need to be brought back down carefully so that May 30 isn’t too rough a landing.
Put another way, it might be worth pulling all of ourselves away from the political sales pitches that have dominated the news cycle over the past few weeks, so that we can prepare ourselves for the likeliest outcomes, and privately hope for those that are the best, or, as is more likely, the least worst.
For starters, it might help to remove from the table the two outcomes that, despite vocal support, are the least likely: outright wins for either the EFF or the DA and its Moonshot Pact.
For many in the EFF, this will be a genuine shock.
Of course, they put on a great show of being hard, pragmatic revolutionaries, but this is still the same party whose election manifesto contains the immortal paragraph declaring that “only domestic vessels will be allowed to dock in our harbours” and that international vessels would therefore “offload their goods into our domestic fleet in the Ocean”.
In other words, this is a party whose trade policies have been formulated by a five-year-old playing with Lego in a bathtub (“Now you park there by the sponge because you’re not allowed to come here, and now I pick up the crate — beeeeep beeeeep…”) which means it’s liable to believe pretty much anything, including that 11% can become 50% simply by wishing it so.
The DA, for its part, prides itself on being rational, but there has been more than a whiff of magical thinking about its oft-stated plan to stop an ANC-EFF coalition.
It’s basic maths. Given that nobody in either the ANC or EFF is going to vote for the DA or its coalition partners, the only way to stop those two parties from gaining a majority is to outvote them and win the election.
This, of course, would require two miracles.
The first is that the DA would have to convince the gigantic bloc of alienated, reluctant voters — those who are registered but unlikely to vote — to turn up in such huge numbers that they more than double the size of the Moonshot Pact.
I suppose it’s possible in theory. I continue to wonder about the efficacy of Helen Zille tweeting last week that “reading for meaning is not South Africa’s strong suit” — essentially calling South Africans stupid just as the DA attempts to woo them in record numbers — but stranger things happen at sea, like EFF crane operators, tormented by seasickness, desperately trying to time the lulls between the vast swells smashing their ship up against the foreign one.
The second miracle, however, seems less likely, namely, where 10-million ANC and EFF voters, plus a few million others, shrug and accept a government whose third-largest partner, the Freedom Front Plus, not only contains the remnants of the Conservative Party (formed because it thought the apartheid regime was too liberal) but is also now flirting with Cape secession.
No, from two weeks out it looks as if there are only three possible outcomes: five more years of Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC; Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC plus some small, sharp-toothed, rapidly evolving coalition partners nipping around its feet; or, if the ANC drops more than 10 percentage points and Ramaphosa is recalled, Paul Mashatile’s ANC, with deputy president Julius Malema wearing him like a meat-suit.
I don’t want to tempt fate, but I still think the third option is the least likely, especially as always-on electricity massages away at the sharpest edges of SA’s resentment and frustration, and Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe demonstrates the kind of organisational skills that made Zuma such a beloved and respected administrator.
As for the first two, well, take your pick. If nothing else, they’ll give the opposition five years to figure itself out or split into new formations, while the rest of us politely call over a flight attendant to ask just where the hell it is we’re going.
