The more I read the survey results for our 2009 elections the more I lose trust in their predictions. They're daily looking more and more like the ancient practice of reading the bird entrails to predict the future. Their limitations lie in their inability to comprehend the culture of those they interview. Let me make a short narrative to assist my point.
Yesterday, my friend and I went to his home at Gugulethu Cape Town. Around the corner from his mother's place we met up with a coeval he had not met in a long time. "I hear this place is now COPE-ing? Is that right?" Asked my friend, slightly in jest and definitely serious. "No; what do you mean?" Answered the guy sizing my friend up, to see which side he was on. The area, notoriously known as Kakyard Street, is known to be originally a Black conscious stronghold, but had, like most black townships, been voting ANC in the past elections.
"I'm COPE-ing chap!" Said my friend. "And so was impressed when I read this place was COPE-ing big time last weekend with Terror." Then and only then his friend came out more and went on. "Our problem here is zezikoli [an untranslatable word whose meaning runs from the unemployed to a rogue]." I was slightly put off by what he said but in few seconds was able to understand what he meant.
My friend's mother stays with relatives, her sister, who has two grownup daughters that are 28 and 23 years old. At the back flats stays my friend's unemployed brother, who is 38 years old. Naturally the talk gravitated toward the elections and my friend's mother made it clear that though she's seeing a lot of things she does not like in the ANC it is still her only hope. She went ahead to narrate to us how all her life she'd been treated as a domestic servant, and how the ANC gave her dignity back. All of us were touched by her loyalty and respected her decision. This is how she explained herself:
"I'll vote for what I know not untested promises. Yenzani nina umhlambi nakuhamba nisibonise indlela entsha nathi.[Do you thing as you're doing, perhaps later on you'll convince us of the new way.] I can see Vathiswa and her varsity friends, who are good kids, following this COPE thing, and think there must be something to it; unlike Madoda and his, who spent most of their time in the back flat smoking dagga, only to come out more convinced that they are ANC members, as if that's all there's to it.] I almost said that was what was to it; the black townships have been severed into two, along the lines of progressive vs. conservative, traditional, and, sadly, regressive.
Coming back to my point: The crucial error of our opinion surveys is that they do not consider carefully the variants present to the situation on the ground. Culturally, for instance, black people will never give you insight to their true thoughts unless they trust you completely (remember my friend's coeval). You'll not get a straight answer until you first declare your cards. The best you'll get is the answer they think you are looking for, not what they are actually thinking. All answers are laden with searching undertones and psychological assessment. These elections in our country cut too close to the bone; dividing sibling from sibling, and are thus too sensitive to discuss even among family members. A stranger stands basically no chance of getting to the real truth of the matter. Politics in our culture is the personal, and associated with too many things close to understanding of personal identity.
The ANC will still remain a legend even after these elections - albeit a wounded one with definitely under 60% of the vote. But it'll never again command unchallengeable support. From now on its future is one of decline. Too many people see its new wasting maladies, eating through its moral fibre, even if others do not yet have energy or the desire to go against it. Most people are playing the wait and see approach; which means anything can happen in the secrecy of the ballot box. There's something in the formation of COPE that has stirred the South African political mind into deeper reflection. The issue is not whether COPE was necessary, but if its leadership will gain trust from the majority.
South African politics is at a stage of identifying and isolating the maladies of its political structure. The formation of COPE identified with this nascent force but later got stuck in means and innovative ways of providing cures. Despite the vainglorious arguments of those in the ANC in political power now, the cause of the organisation's maladies did not just lie with one man, Thabo Mbeki. Hence his removal from the leadership solved nothing. Instead it brought into focus the real cause, which is the decaying structure of the ANC as a liberation movement.
Everyone knows what's rotten with the South African state, even those who allow wrong and vested habits to get in the way of their reason. Sometimes we see and acknowledge the truth, but our passions drive us to follow worst course. Unfortunately for us all, we now seem to be under the power of the men of passion and very little reason. Hence the ripe madness from the catalogue of fools. The rest of us seem to see nothing save the wreckage upon the spreading waters. The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.
Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a Cape Town based freelance writer. He is editor of COPE's website for the Cape Town Metro - www.copetown.org/
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