The political pitch honest parties would make

As the local government elections loom on the horizon, we publish some manifestos and pitches from the various parties – well, the manifestos and pitches they’d make if they were being honest.

At least local government elections aren’t as tense as national government elections, when you’ve got to agonise about whether you can afford to give the incumbents your vote in the hope that the new leadership is better than the old leadership, or to vote for one of the opposition parties, all of whom one dislikes. So go out and vote (presumably you’re registered) for one of the following:

ANC

Yes, yes, we’ve been in power nationally for more than a quarter-century now and have been unable to fulfil most of the promises we made back in 1994 (though we had the best slogan: “A better life for all” – and no one will let us forget it), 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019… Ag, who’s counting? We leave that to the IEC. Please don’t worry about the fact that IEC isn’t really the proper acronym any more, because the entity is now the Electoral Commission of South Africa (Ecsa? Eczema?) and the “Independent” part has been dropped. Don’t let that bother you. The acronym is still IEC, to reassure you that nothing has changed, and for historical reasons – which are the reasons most of you vote for the ANC anyway.

So, nationally, we remind you, we’re hanging on to the top position. We’d like to do that in local governments (municipalities to you) as well, despite the fact that only about 10%, if that, of the municipalities run by our party are in fact functional. Forget about the roads we promised to fix, the villages we promised to electrify, the toilets we said we’d build at schools, but didn’t… In fact, forget about all that. Forget about the past entirely. Let us look to the future.

In Johannesburg, we’re promising to provide 150,000 jobs – or is that job “opportunities”? We’ll check with the Expanded Public Works Programme, if it’s still operational (NB: ask Pravin Gordhan). Admittedly, we’re promising those 150,000 jobs now, when we could’ve actioned that a while ago because we’ve been in power (if not in control) in Johannesburg metro for years – well, we wanted to keep that as an election surprise.

Oh, and we’ve got some deal afoot with Eskom or someone to do a direct deal for power in the city. Not quite sure what that’s all about, and the experts say it won’t make any difference (the phrase they used was “bugger all”) to load shedding, but, hey, we can’t get those shedding schedules right

anyway, so what does it matter? We’ve got to show some sign that we’re doing something, right? We’ve got to be busy on that front – especially because our new mayor is the former financial guy, and financial guys must make financial plans, come hell or high water. Anyway, load shedding always gets your attention, and now we’ve got it.

Vote ANC!

DA

The Democratic Alliance would like to inform you that we plan to win in Cape Town, where we have a new mayoral candidate who should do very well because he’s not Helen Zille and he’s not Patty de Lille. Okay, that also means he’s a white man, and we did make some vague commitment to move away from covert white supremacy, but, hey, you can’t have everything, can you?

He’s the best man for the job, now that Phumzile van Damme has been edged out and Natasha Mazzone is losing her marbles and other tetherings to reality every so often, taking any criticism as though it were a physical assault by a team of murderous ninjas. (It’s the Zille model: she has lost it completely, and yet she’s our federal chairwomanperson – or whatever it’s called.)

Our mayoral candidate Whatsisname is, at any rate, a jolly good fellow, a technocrat to the core – or do we mean accountant? We can, at least, do some deals with property developers keen to ruin what remains of our coastline, get some money in and balance the books. That’s what matters in the best-run metro in the country – balanced books.

And our policies are also very balanced. We balance the need for homeless people to find somewhere to sleep with the need of our posh suburban constituents not to see any ragged, dirty people sleeping on the streets.

We balance the needs of the overcrowded townships around Cape Town with the needs of tourists not to see all that suffering, so we’re thinking about a Trump wall between the townships and the rest of the city. Wish us luck; we will soon be crowdfunding that.

Otherwise, vote DA in the City of Cape Town – the rest of the country is going to the dogs anyway.

EFF

Our main electoral pitch is that we’re not the ANC, which is corrupt and inefficient, although we do look a lot like an external faction of the ANC and we are, in fact, pretty corrupt. At least we’re not inefficient, because we haven’t been in power anywhere so we haven’t been tested on our efficiency.

Maybe in this coming election we can show, if we win sufficient seats in the metros and so forth, that we can be as inefficient as all the other parties, especially the ANC, which, we remind you, we are not.

We are also not the DA, which is basically the National Party of 1948 resurrected. Okay, the DA’s forerunners were opposed to the NP, but that was just for show – deep down, they wanted to exploit the workers as much as the NP, but they wanted to do it their way. That is, they wanted to exploit with kindness.

We are also not the IFP, which can be seen by the fact that we wear red overalls when we’re out performing, sorry, campaigning, and the IFP wears feathers and skins and stuff. So we’re pretty modern.

The other difference is that our king, Juju Malema, is not called a king. He’s a commander-in-chief, and we’re pretending to be an army. We’re not sure what we’re an army of, unless it’s an army of opportunists and confused ideologues, but Juju is at least a commander-in-chief of something, and that makes him happy.

Do not concern yourself with our stated ideology, which is lifted directly from the South African Communist Party circa 1952, because we can change our minds about anything at any time. Remember when Jacob Zuma was a “constitutional delinquent”? Well, at the moment we rather like him, because it suits us to cosy up to the old chap and annoy Cyril Ramaphosa, who is obviously the devil incarnate and, besides, we’re all constitutional delinquents now.

Vote EFF – or just EFF off.

ActionSA

Hi, we’re Herman Mashaba’s personal party. If you hate politicians, you can still love this politician. He’s not really a politician, in fact – he’s mostly in sales. And what we’re selling is … er, non-political politics.

Mr Mashaba did zip for Joburg when he was mayor, but rest assured that this time round he’ll seriously promise to do something more than zip. He’ll do his best to persecute the illegal (and some legal) immigrants – and we know that makes you feel proud to be South African.

Vote ActionSA, or action your vote SA, or … something like that.

IFP, ACDP, ATM etc

Huh? There’s an election? DM168

Shaun de Waal is a writer and editor.

Please note, this article uses satire.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for R25 at Pick n Pay, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores. For your nearest stockist, please click here.