Is it 2024 yet? I can feel mounting tension about the 2024 national elections loading daily as a brutal election season has started to load our courtrooms, Parliament, security agencies and state-owned enterprises.
The complexity of South Africa is found in the triune expression of our parliamentary representation. We have a liberation movement that is weakened by corruption and wilting under the weight of the demands of accountable governance.
Its main opposition party is largely born out of the privileged classes and, based on some of the leadership figures, are beneficiaries of historical apartheid policies.
Considerable numbers of centre-right social democrats and conservatives – individuals and parties – are moving towards this group, with key transformation-thinking blacks leaving the party.
The third grouping to this complex triune is a mixture of parties who seek to feed off the losses of the ANC by offering voters a more radicalised version of fixing the multiple failures of the ANC at liberating the economy and land to serve the cause of solving poverty.
If one analyses the 10 largest parties in our democracy and the votes garnered in the last election, and if the ANC is the centre of our political firmament with 10 million votes garnered in 2019, the right-of-centre groupings, led by the DA, have six political parties with about 4.7 million total votes.
The parties to the centre left of the ANC, led by the EFF, have about 2 million votes cast in their favour. Our proportional representation system gives parties additional seats based on the percentage of the ballots they receive.
The 2019 ballots provide us with some useful election insights for 2024. One is that the overwhelming majority of South Africans value the freedom and post-apartheid dispensation we are in.
This is clear by the continued large percentage of voters that vote for the centre position, held by the ANC.
The second is that a greater proportion of voters are gathered around a centre-right position than a centre-left position. With the ANC being traditionally centre/centre-right, some 15 million voters voted this way.
Only about 2 million voters voted centre-left. There are factions in the ANC that want a centre-left ANC to emerge. The ANC always portrays itself as centre-left at its congresses, but in government it is conservatively centre-right.
With a conservative older population, drastic urban and rural poverty and an increasingly desperate youth population, the centre-left appeal will grow in the 2024 elections among first-time youth voters. Foisting old and damaged leaders on to the 2024 election stage will continue to fuel attraction for the populism of the left.
But that attraction is hampered by the disinterest of the centre-left voter in believing that voting can effect any change. If the centre/centre-right groupings want power in 2024, they need much more than decent liberal policies and Struggle credentials to get a bigger chunk of the 27 million votes.
They need to visibly reject any apartheid privilege or Struggle credentials, sit in the streets of this country and listen to its people, its poor people, the victims of crime, the unemployed, the patients in state hospitals, the families of murdered individuals, and go to its schools where children can’t learn and listen to the informal trading sector. They must define a new centre for South African politics.
The centre-right is just bad at listening to people whose voting patterns show that they value freedom and are done with apartheid but want progressive policies, personal protection and prosperity for all.
Now is the time to do both the maths and the human touch. It is safe to say that the Struggle pedigrees as an automatic passport to political office have expired. South Africans want full freedoms, advanced social protections and full social justice, a growing economy and the rule of law. Is it 2024 yet?
* Lorenzo A Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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