Ten ways international South Africans can sway the 2014 election

See thesouthafrican.com/news/elections-2014 for all The South African‘s coverage of the elections that could change everything. 

Though the ANC remains understandably silent on its election campaign while Marikana, crime statistics and the health and schools crisis monopolise national attention, South Africa will vote in national elections next year. With 8 months left to go until the poll, advisory consultancy Nomura has predicted a steep fall in ANC votes to 56.2% (from 65.9% in 2009). This fall is not fast enough for many in the South African diaspora, judging by social media. In the interim, opposition parties, according to the scant research that currently exists, benefit by every additional month the nation waits and makes up its mind.

Newcomers Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) are establishing themselves against the clock as the first new voice to the left of the ruling party since democracy; the policies and ideology of Agang, meanwhile, remain a mystery (although there is no question mark around Agang’s access to substantial funding). Meanwhile, the Democratic Alliance (DA) is manoeuvring smartly into the credibility gap left by a Zuma cabinet and a ministerial caste whose failures are seemingly unpunishable. Key portfolios like Basic Education, Health and Police remain in perpetual, systemic crisis.

Even the appointment of the highly respected Aaron Motsoaledi at the helm of South Africa’s health department may not be enough to transform public hospitals and clinics; it is an open secret that his effectiveness is limited by the number of senior managers who cannot be fired for political reasons. While the ANC’s failures in government continue to dominate the news (at the expense of its successes), a news ecology toxic to Luthuli House will prevail: opposition parties’ actual readiness for government will fade from scrutiny under the glare of ANC incompentence. ANC successes in turning around Home Affairs and in sowing the seeds of a turnaround in Health or in the stewardship of small but highly dynamic departments (like Derek Hanekom’s Science and Technology, or Fikile Mbalula’s Sport & Recreation) are also – some would say rightly – sidelined. The news cycle, from now until Election Day, is pre-electoral, and every grinding revelation in the cluster of scandal skews the debate that, in gentler circumstances, an electorate and its prospective rulers might hold.

Common sense would ask why a debate about catastrophic failures of government is not exactly what a ‘pre-electoral news cycle’ should be. Is is not redundant to ask whether mining labour relations and the police are in a shambles after Marikana? The answer, if South Africa is to be understood as a complex country that is the only one of its kind in the world, must be no: ‘a shambles’ is not a safe place to end the discussion. A shambles is something to be discarded and replaced by brand-new solutions, something we will gratefully forget as soon as possible once an alternative is found.

This sort of debate fuels the revolving doors of Cabinet and business, where continuity within departments are rare, and where any turnaround programme that extends longer than a ministerial term is highly likely to be shelved before term. Health and education are like this: having been in crisis for so long, these two behemoth departments are beset by a constantly replenished stream of bureaucrats and political appointees impatient to start over. Many an Eastern Cape ‘mud school’ could be roofed in its entirety by ‘clean slates’, as it were. No one can ignore the Marikanas, and their health and education equivalents, as symptomatic of broken systems. But we focus on symptoms at our peril, because government performance is not summed up by any given case, no matter how groundbreaking. The writer Jonny Steinberg said as much when he argued that South Africans, particularly outside the country, underestimate the ANC’s actual delivery of services.

Protest, even violent and wrenching protest such as our highways and public spaces have known, has yet to translate into an actual change of heart – or of vote. The majority of South Africans will not conclude from Marikana that the ANC must be replaced in their ward, only that a particular ANC candidate must be replaced by party nominee. The media’s role in all of this is a difficult one. The public has shown little appetite for systematic review of government performance beyond score-card style spreads which reduce vast and sprawling bureaucracies to a letter grade. Yet breaking news, with the occasional infographic for ballast, should not be conflated with electoral coverage. Electoral coverage, if it is to play its proper and central role in voter education, must counter political parties’ own canvassing with the facts. Many South Africans ought therefore to be looking greatly forward to our first election with Africa Check (africacheck.org), a fact-checking outfit that is already going to town on propagandists and slant artists of every stripe.

What can international South Africans do to make this election cleverer and more honest than any before?

1. Insist on informing yourself about the performance of all South Africa’s political parties in the provinces and municipalities where they govern.

Don’t rely on Nkandla as shorthand for the state of the Public Works Department, or allow yourself to think of the President only a blue-light brigade. We can afford that sort of easeful reading and rhetoric in other years, but not in 2014. Learn and celebrate what is working in the Rainbow Nation and come down even harder, but with precision, on what has failed.

2. Refuse to be caricatured as émigrés who criticise from a safe distance.

If you identify as, or are perceived as, a South African, it’s your country and how it fares in the world reflects on you, and you on it. You’re inextricably implicated, passport or not.

3. Excise the phrase ‘another Zimbabwe’ from your speech.

Zim is a different country from Mzansi, with a different, though interconnected, history. This magic phrase makes it impossible for anyone under 30 to take you seriously.

4. Read Africacheck.org.

Is SA’s education system the worst in Africa? Do strikes cost what people say they cost? These people sort fact from fiction.

5. Donate.

Donate to an opposition party if you would like to see the Rainbow Nation move towards a changeover of power at national level. Donate to Africacheck.org, which has no other funding. Pay for South Africa’s independent media through subscriptions and directly fund investigative journalism (or would you leave it to the SABC?). Or donate to the growing number of social justice and civil society organisations who shoulder the burden of providing what were once state social services. Lessening these organisations’ dependency on state funding will allow them greater freedom to act, to advocate and to critique.

6. Discuss South Africa without parking in the conceptual cul-de-sac of ‘failed state’, ‘kleptocracy’, etc.

Because these phrases let the utterer off the hook for any further engagement, they are a way for good men and women to give themselves permission to do nothing. To that extent, they become self-fulfilling.

7. Read history. Relearn it, if you think you know it.

South Africans over 30 must face the fact that almost all they learnt of history in apartheid schools, whatever their race group, was wrong. Archly Imperialist or Africanist readings of South Africa’s history – and it is one of the thorniest, most global, most entangled national histories around – both miss out more than half the story. The comments section of South African news sites are remarkably easy to divide into two ideological extremes of left and right, with a small middle ground. The most patriotic thing the South African diaspora can do is to develop that middle-ground through synthesising white and black histories and forging something in common, a new centrist perspective.

8. VOTE.

More details on this will emerge as the IEC scrambles to address the logistics of the expatriate vote in the wake of new legislature in the pipeline.

9. Talk.

Talk to your family and friends, as well as Saffas you meet and those back home.

10. Write.

Get commenting, get tweeting, and get engaged. Upwards of a million South Africans have emigrated, for upwards of a million reasons, since 1994: their opinions are a crucial counterpoint to what in-country Saffas think. The expatriate community, to a man, are living under other governments, and are very well-placed to offer comparison.

In short, whether you have the vote by Election Day, and whether you are reading this in Putney, Perth or Port Elizabeth, it’s your election.

Read more election coverage from The South African and comment on Facebook and Twitter (#TSAelections2014)

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