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The posters are up. The t-shirts are everywhere. The masses have been fed dry chicken even drier rolls. It is bonanza time for artists as they are being booked for stadium and hall performances. Unwanted visitors are rocking up at our doorsteps. Strangers are going to be stopping us in the streets and in malls to try and convince to buy their brand of baked beans.
Tis election season in South Africa. A weird time that mixes festivities with tension without skipping a beat.
We still do need to do better on the peaceful side of things though. There should be no need for the concerns that abound about possible violence, no matter how limited. Thirty years down the line we should be well-practiced in this democracy game.
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Be that as it may, we should be grateful that our country is not named Pakistan, Myanmar or Gabon. No leader is going to be jailed, rallies disrupted by armed forces or internet disrupted. We should be pleased that our electoral process is not as compromised as that of the country to our north where the population has come to accept that elections will be stolen and that the incumbent party will long be kept in power by a state apparatus that is as politicised and corrupt as they come.
The era of monopoly is over and it is happening in a smooth and orderly way. Touch wood.
Even Hlaudi Motsoeneng has come back to haunt us. He has been packing rallies in the Qwaqwa region of the Free State and cars emblazoned with his image are crisscrossing towns across the central province. There is now the very scary prospect that the craziness that South Africa came to know as a very dangerous joke at the helm f the SABC could be sitting on the benches of Parliament or the provincial legislature.
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Let’s start with the party of the guy who ran the country into the ground and now promises that second coming will be all glittery. If Jacob Zuma MK Party is elected all unemployed graduates will have sustainable job, new factories will be created monthly, black-owned industries that will employ locals will be created in rural areas, loadshedding will be permanently ended and land ownership will be transferred traditional leaders. All this will be happening while the new government wrecks the economy by nationalizing the minds and the banks.
Just as wild is the EFF’s plan to nationalise all mines by 2028, do the same to the banks, fight GBV by enacting forced sterilisation, introduce compulsory military conscription of up to a year for matriculants, boost the defence budget, multiply social grant payments and provide free higher education and cancel all student debt.
There are many other whacky promises and undertakings made by a plethora of players that we will be returning to as the election campaign progresses. The important for us is to enjoy and laugh at the madness that comes with being a democracy. Hundreds of millions of others around the world do not enjoy that privilege.
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“The EFF government will require all institutions of higher learning to teach 50% of all courses in a South African language besides English and Afrikaans by 2026. The EFF government will require 10% of all academic publications in the country to be written in a South African language besides English and Afrikaans by 2026. The EFF government will require each university to offer Swahili Studies as a degree by 2027,”the EFF says.
The ANC’s version of goodies is mainly a rehash of the things that it has been promising and not delivering but it always feels duty-bound to keep remind the people that only it can fix the mess that it created.
It is a weird proposition but clearly one that the party feels has worked for it in the past. So why not just keep repeating it.
