At the risk of sounding snobbish, I think it was probably not a good idea for ANC presidential hopeful - and the country's deputy president - Cyril Ramaphosa to launch his "New Deal for Jobs, Growth and Transformation" at a community hall in Orlando East, Soweto.
It was a well-attended affair all right, but the noise inside the venue - as the man who would be South Africa's fifth president detailed his economic turnaround plan - suggested that the message did not resonate with many of those in attendance.
The chattering became so unbearably loud at one stage that Ramaphosa paused while reading his marathon speech to plead "Mamelani, mamelani - listen, listen".It is not that the poor and the working class are not interested in matters economic. After all, they are the ones who feel the burden of rising unemployment, poverty and inflation the most.
Ramaphosa himself pointed out that it is people in townships like Soweto, informal settlements and rural areas who stand to benefit most from a positive turnaround.
"It is in these areas that young and black entrepreneurs will emerge, new businesses will be established ... If this is not the face and the future of our economy, then our economy has no future," he said on Monday.
So why would a sizable chunk of the audience show so little interest, applauding only when he delved into ANC politics and attacked state capture and its beneficiaries?The problem was that, even though the event was held in Soweto, the whole pitch seemed aimed at Sandton.
Predictably, Ramaphosa's political adversaries in the ANC made a song and dance about the presence at the event of captains of industry such as Goldman Sachs's Colin Coleman, Investec's Stephen Koseff and FirstRand's Johan Burger. Their presence, Ramaphosa's critics claim, is proof that the billionaire is a "project" of "white monopoly capital".
In a normal democracy the presence of business people at a function where a presidential candidate outlines his economic plan is not frowned upon. But we are South Africans, we don't do normal. And we are in a leadership race in the ANC, a party where pretending to be anti-business tends to yield huge political profits.
Ramaphosa's campaign team denies that it specifically invited the business personalities to the event, saying that the ANC's Johannesburg regional structures were responsible for issuing the invitations and they sent them out to a "whole host of business people, both black and white".It did not help Ramaphosa's campaign, in the eyes of those ANC members who remain sceptical about his commitment to the ANC's "radical economic transformation" programme, that the business figures were made to sit at the front of the hall like they were VIP guests.
Ramaphosa needs to be commended for breaking with the party tradition that discourages candidates from spelling out their vision because a president is expected to merely "follow party policy". Both South Africa and the ANC would benefit immensely if candidates were allowed to present and debate ideas in public.
What was disappointing about Ramaphosa's New Deal speech was that it lacked details on how he proposed it all be done. It is premised on the need for government, business, labour and civil society to work together and enter a social compact of some sort. But isn't that what the National Development Plan, of which Ramaphosa is an architect, is supposed to be?..