JUSTICE MALALA: ANC is the gift that just won’t stop giving

The DA should be rejoicing right now. With just under six weeks to go before the elections, the party should be sniffing around the ANC with its eyes firmly set on finally vanquishing its nemesis of 25 years.

Someone should be putting the champagne on ice.

The ANC is the gift that just won’t stop giving: if it’s not scandals about its secretary-general, Ace Magashule, looting the Free State government, then it’s the party’s horrifically compromised parliamentary lists. At this rate ANC elections chief Fikile Mbalula must go to bed every night thinking: "Tomorrow is another scandal."

Yet the DA is not putting the champagne on ice.

In fact, if you follow these things, the DA is limping along, hoping to, at best, replicate its showing in the 2014 election or suffer no setbacks to its 2009 national election result.

The latest Ipsos poll from February-March puts the DA at about 18% of the vote if there is a medium-sized turnout. This would be a terrible showing for a party that started the democratic era with a 1.7% outing in 1994, and grew that to an impressive 22.2% in the 2014 national and provincial elections. An 18% showing would be even more tragic if one considers that the party’s haul in the 2016 local elections was an impressive 27% of total votes cast nationally.

What has happened to the DA’s impressive growth trajectory of the past 25 years? Why isn’t it attracting new and old voters? Granted, it gained the majority of its initial voters in 1999 and 2004 from the imploding National Party and the subsequent hapless leadership of Marthinus van Schalkwyk of the New National Party and his embrace of the ANC. But still, there was something there, wasn’t there? It was called growth.

Not only are the polls showing a "no-growth" DA, but possibly a declining party. Even, mind you, with the gift of an incoherent, divided, corrupt ANC whose only assets are individuals like President Cyril Ramaphosa and a handful of others.

Many liberal ANC members who were ‘gatvol’ with the Zuma years will gladly vote for Cyril’s ANC"

The DA is being buffeted from two sides. It is losing conservative white Afrikaans voters — inherited largely from the Nats who loved the "Fight Back" messages of Tony Leon’s DA — and it is losing liberal black voters who were disillusioned with the ANC’s corruption and rank incompetence in the Zuma years.

Last week the DA was celebrating that it won two wards in Mogale City. The victory was pyrrhic. In Ward 18 the DA was 20 percentage points down to 69% while in Ward 21 it was 18 percentage points down to 71% — all of these losses showing up on the Freedom Front Plus tally.

Dawie Scholtz, one of the most perspicacious analysts of these trends, tweeted: "The DA has a very serious FF Plus problem with Afrikaans voters up north … The only question is how widespread it will be. And how deep it will be."

This trend will be felt by the DA in Limpopo and North West, where it had hoped for growth. Instead, it is the EFF of Julius Malema that is forging ahead there while the FF Plus has adopted the Leon-era slogan. "Slaan Terug!" (hit back), its posters shout.

On the other hand, the DA has the Ramaphosa problem it has sat with since December 2017. Even with the scandals swirling around the ANC and Ramaphosa himself, the Ramaphoria effect is still significant. Anecdotally, many of the black and white middle classes, who were gatvol with the Zuma years and went with the DA in 2016, will joyfully vote for Ramaphosa’s ANC now.

The DA’s problem is that it no longer has an identity. Its leaders sound increasingly like ANC leaders. Where ANC leaders who have brought the economy to its knees say they will reform, DA leaders just say: "Try me, I am not as bad as he is."

What is the DA? SA’s unemployment, corruption, inequality, education, race and other problems won’t be solved by being mealy-mouthed on policy and shying away from tough choices. The DA has lately joined the ANC in this department.

On May 8 it will be punished for it.