Traps came out of the closet lately and pledged his vote to the ANC. I respect his open approach and would like to follow suit with my views.
There are three parties of national significance in the coming election. They are the ANC, Cope and the DA. I will be voting for the DA. Before you jump to conclusions about me voting to my demographic, please hear me out.
Why I will not vote ANC:
The ANC has had 14 years in power. Under their governance South Africa has slowly crumbled from an international success story and an African leader brimming with promise to a largely mismanaged and morally corrupt nation state. The ANC have slowly led us away from the glory days of Mandela and are constantly flirting with our freedom, our non-racial democracy and our hope for a better future. Under ANC rule, we have seen the slow decay of almost all things that are critical to the functioning of a modern state with perhaps the exception of our economy, which will now begin to erode on the back of global events.
Our health system has been in a rapid downward spiral. After massive mismanagement by Manto and a frankly criminal delay of ARV rollout, we virtually lead the world in HIV infection rates. Our health leaders under the ANC have embarrassed us so badly at international level that local and international NGOs have had to fill the gap to get things done and save face for us. Mbeki’s baffling HIV pseudo-science has made us the laughing stock of the world. The TAC was long the only voice of reason until Barbara Hogan finally came to office and seems to be making some long needed changes. Too little, too late. The ANC ignored their people and let them die. They will not get my vote for that reason.
Our criminal justice system is swamped and corrupt to the core. Prisoners escape regularly, crime is rampant and the police chief has been accused of being in bed with organised crime bosses. The ANC elite have disbanded the Scorpions against vociferous public opinion and can’t give a good reason. That’s because there is no good reason. They did it to save their behinds from being prosecuted.
We all know it. They know that we know it but they don’t care because they have no opposition.
Under the ANC, private armies of security guards have come do the work of the police. The state has failed to provide us with adequate safety and security. I will not vote for a police force run by a leader linked to organised crime and an ANC government that protects that structure and the allegedly corrupt people at the top of it. These are not small things. We can do better, much better.
Service delivery under the ANC has been mismanaged to the point where people are starting to protest regularly, openly and even violently. Corruption and BEE at every level has ensured that the money flows to companies owned by the ANC elite and their buddies. They provide sub-standard, slow and expensive services as a result and future generations will have to redo all they have sloppily thrown together to make a quick buck. Our electricity system and our water reticulation systems are in dire need. The corruption at municipal level is legendary. I can’t vote for a party that does not take service delivery seriously enough to actually deliver for their people. Rampant ANC cronyism makes me want to put my X elsewhere.
Our foreign policy is both naïve and detrimental to our international image. Under the ANC, we have descended from “the country that stood up and beat apartheid” to “the country that backs Mugabe through its inexplicable silence and accepts the million of refugees only to murder them”. Our stint on the UN Security Council has seen us block global action to help Zimbabweans throw off their repugnant regime, we blocked a motion on war-rape with a logic so convoluted that it staggers one to believe a grown person could have been involved in expressing it.
I can’t vote for a party that is incapable of compiling a strategically sound foreign policy in which it projects its power and authority in a mature and ethical way both regionally and internationally. The ANC seems incapable of this. I can’t vote for a party that found Mugabe’s elections free and fair. I can’t vote for a party whose delegates give standing ovations at SADC conferences to a murderous dictator that kills his own people.
I can’t vote for a party that squanders our money and spent R40-billion and counting on arms we don’t need. The ANC is wrapped in the corrupt tentacles of the deal and still can’t be bothered to explain to the electorate why it needed the damn things in the first place. Why should they? They win regardless due to a public still drunk on liberation. Not with my vote; not after what they have done to my country and its people. They were trusted to look after South Africa’s people and they have let us down time and time again.
BEE is a racially divisive, enrichment tool for the ANC elite. While we need the wealth of this country to be shared more evenly, this farce is not the way to do it. It is a simple matter of removing race from the equation and implementing policy to benefit the poor of our country of all colours. Fair, non-racial and equitable policy would take us to the next level in this fight and establish a moral basis of non-racial equity for all. But under the ANC, race rules as supreme as it always has here in South Africa. I want a non-racial leadership. I can’t vote for people who can’t see past race and the past. I can’t vote for the ANC.
Consider this: the ANC elite are by far the largest recipients of BEE-generated wealth and are simultaneously responsible for deciding when it should end. It is hardly surprising then that every survey shows how black ownership on the JSE is limp, how the poor stay poor and do not benefit from BEE and how the elite are sitting on so many boards they do not have the time in the year to attend all the meetings. BEE works for a few massively wealthy individuals. It is not a vehicle for addressing the inequality of our society. It never has been.
After 14 years, however, the policy is still unchanged and firmly in place. BEE is clearly not working unless you are in the top echelons of the ANC in which case it is a top performer. Under the ANC little will change; yet it now must change. I can’t vote for people who enrich themselves by exploiting the suffering of others who stay poor.
Education is in the same decay spiral as the rest of the portfolios of government. We are short of teachers, the ones we have are often poorly trained and our schools are simply not improving. Big alarm bells should be ringing here. The people who were poorly educated during the last 14 years will leave a legacy for the next 50. The ANC seems incapable of decisive and radical action on this issue. I can’t vote for a party that spends R40-billion on arms and R300-million on a private presidential jet instead of improving our schooling and thereby our collective future. The ANC have let our children down. I will not vote for them.
Regarding the economy, the ANC has managed to put in a good performance. It stands alone as the only government portfolio not in a total mess. One hit is simply not enough to draw my vote. Of course, our draconian labour laws, stifling legislative compliance for small business and inexplicable lingering foreign exchange controls are all working hard to undermine this area of competence and keep us average. Our economic growth was also achieved during a period of unprecedented global boom. Hard times are here. Watch this space, especially under a leftist government faction.
I can’t vote for a party that drives its fat, smug members around at high speed to the detriment of normal people. I can’t vote for a party that offers people of the calibre of Jacob Zuma, Carl Niehaus and Julius Malema as their best and loudest voices. In good conscience and in the name of all things fair, ethical, progressive and democratic I simply can’t vote for the ANC. They had their chance and the results are less than satisfactory. They don’t deserve our votes any more. We need to give another party a chance to do better.
So let’s look at Cope:
Cope is comprised of ex-members of the ANC that figured they would soon be out of a job and jumped ship to start a new party. Many of them are personally responsible for the mess outlined above. I don’t believe Cope has the degree of separation required to be believable in what they promise. Cope, therefore, does not get my vote while there is a better option.
From a strategic perspective, if the ANC and Cope were the only two parties available, I would vote Cope. I would do this not because I believe them to be any more capable or less corrupt than the ANC; they virtually are the ANC. I would vote for Cope because both the ANC and Cope would perform better in power if they have a serious opposition. With 75% of the vote assured in every election, the ANC has very little incentive to perform.
It really shows. Let’s change that.
Remove that certainty and the same fatties who have been fleecing us without bothering to talk to us for the last 14 years realise they may be out of a lucrative job with BEE-ensured retirement billions slipping away with it. That means they will have to show something to their electorate. That can only be good.
Why I will vote DA:
Finally we have the DA for whom I will be casting my vote. The DA has long been the object of ANC propaganda. Not being able to find any real dirt, the only way the ANC has been able to discredit the DA is by literally calling it names. That’s not very mature but when you review ANC performance at all levels and its sense of entitlement, it is somewhat expected.
They refer to “GodZille” because they can’t say “Zille, who was responsible for arm’s deal corruption”. They labelled Leon as a white male hankering after the days of apartheid because everything he said in Parliament was incisive and exposed ANC irregularities and questioned their hegemony. Of course he was cheeky and disruptive. He had to be.
The ANC tried to manufacture dirt on Zille, so desperate were they for something to point a finger at. Dirt, they found has a way of sticking to its source when the whole Erasmus debacle was exposed.
I will be voting DA primarily because of what they have done with the little power they have. They are a constant voice of reason, a voice of maturity in a sea of carnage. They have condemned Mugabe from the outset. Helen Zille, world mayor of the year, has massive international respect. She has turned Cape Town around.
You can read the details here and here but all you really have to do is go to Cape Town to see what a great job they are doing there. Crime down 90% in the city centre since 2000. Unemployment down, debt down, improvements everywhere. Housing supply rates doubled, electrification in areas the ANC previously ignored.
So I am thinking let’s give them a shot. They deserve it. If they suck, we can always vote the ANC back in next time. It’s called democracy. Why win the right to vote and never use it to its potential?
And what if the DA is good or even great? What if they start to fix things in South Africa? What if they extend the Cape Town model to the whole country? What if they are actually able to improve service delivery, improve health and education and make us proud in the UN instead of the current lot that make us cringe?
They are the only serious party who can stand tall and say they had nothing to do with the arms deal, the HIV debacle and the Zimbabwe travesty. Their policies are centrist, pragmatic and make sense. They are policies that the developed world can engage with. They have the degree of separation required to form a fresh government. They may have a white leader but are fundamentally non-racial in philosophy regardless of what the ANC would have you believe.
The DA will not abandon transformation but will approach it in a fair and sustainable manner without enriching their leaders. They have shown what they can do. They have experience. They can point to a good track record and they have a leader who could reclaim our tattered international credibility and rebuild it.
I know the DA will not win this election. If conditions prevail, however, where Cope takes enough votes from the ANC, the DA will become the most powerful coalition partner available. In this role, they can amplify their influence and affect policy disproportionate to their size. Discount the DA at your peril. They may also win a province or two and show us more of what they can do at provincial level.
I will vote DA because they ultimately have the best chance of making South Africa into a leading nation with policy that unites and does not divide. That is a nation I want to be part of. That is a nation I could be proud of. I was proud in 1994. That pride has been repeatedly dented and battered by the ANC but I live in hope that it can be reclaimed. The ANC in government has been a monumental disappointment.
That is why I will vote DA in 2009.
Grant,
Throwing insults by calling people who vote for the ANC is not a way to win an argument. Words like: mindless; immaturity and insecurity of the South African voters does not persuade voters away from supporting the ANC.
ANC supporters are more critical and effective in criticisizing the ANC govt than the DA. Compare Traps’s critisisms of the ANC to your worship of the DA. You are not critical about the fact that the DA and its supporters lack ambition to govern South Africa. I can only expect big things from the candidates who are prepared to govern and implement their programs.So far, the DA has not bothered to have presence and campaign in areas where the ANC gets its 2/3 support and address the concerns shared by those voters.
Why stand for elections with the intention of not winning? Why is Helen Zille a Western Cape primier candidate and not the the presidential candidate? Why do all the supporters of DA accept that the ANC will win the elections?
Your answers to these questions (together with the DA) is to call voters mindless, immature and insecure. It is not persuasive to voters. Parties must address voters needs and not the weaknesses of other parties. If the DA can win the elections, the weaknesses of the ANC will still be there but poverty, unemployment and economic hardships will still remain. Why vote for an organisation that does not speak to the voters’ concerns but insults them?
I think all you have to look at is the state of our country when Madiba left power and the state of our country now. The leadership of our nation has steadily let all the standards slip to a level that is unacceptable. We need a change, change is good! Change will bring new ideas into the stagnant cistern that is our struggling democracy. We should no longer look to the past to find faults at which to point fingers but rather focus on the problems of now.
For me the party that seems to be the most focused on improving our country for our entire rainbow nation is the DA.
Our government sadly seems too focused on fighting a battle, not to better the lives of its people but rather to overcome an opponent and therefore I feel my vote is in vain. Whatever party I vote for on the day I will be inadvertently taking a side in a battle that has kept our nation from reaching its full potential on an international level since its founding.
We are all one nation now and should stop bickering and blaming white people or black people for our nation’s problems. Rather let’s get the best people we can, into positions where they can make the changes we all so desperately need. For this however we need trustworthy, honest people, which seem to be in short supply in South African politics.
This obsession with COPE is really funny. The only thing COPE has proven over the past three months is that they can’t. Consider: this Wednesday past, COPE contested by-elections in the townships around Port Elizabeth. This was supposed to be their stronghold. They launched their manifesto there, and persuaded 8 ANC councillors to resign their R300k-a-year jobs and stand under the COPE banner. They got smashed, polling only 18% – and this was in their strongholds! Imagine what will happen in KZN, Limpopo, Mpumalanga. My prediction: COPE will get no more than 7% on 22 April. Oh, and I also vote DA, because it’s proven that it can govern, and the candidates refelects our country’s demographics better than any other party.
Lyndall YES YES YES – Proven success not so ?
” is the ANC deliberately keeping the population ignorant (and voting for them)”" AFRICAN SOLUTION
I was interested in COPE until I read this article !
http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71619?oid=120161&sn=Detail
COPE has a duty to the electorate to state unambiguously its position on a post-election coalition with the ANC.
Voters have a right to know whether they are voting for an alternative to the ANC or simply a vehicle that will deliver their vote to the ANC.
My challenge to Dandala [[he left the door open]]
and the COPE leadership is this:
Come out and tell the voting public where you stand. Will you go into a coalition with the ANC or not?
If COPE forms a coalition with the ANC it will betray every COPE voter who thought they were going to get an alternative to the ANC.
This is what the Independent Democrats did when it went into a coalition with the ANC in the City of Cape Town. “”
The voters never forgave them.
A viable opposition party must offer a clear alternative, rooted in a sound political philosophy and vision of the future.
The Village Prince
All the things you list were done with taxpayers money not with ANC money. The trouble is that they could have done twice as much if they were not so inefficient and so corrupt, and riddled with cronyism and deployments of unqualified cadres to priority jobs.
Phillipa
I did not say people are ignorant. I said that the ANC thinks that keeping people ignorant gets them votes. However I am not sure the policy works as well as the ANC wants – which is why the voter turn out was low.
Perry
Cope must first break the monopoly of the ANC?
Cope is a breakaway group of the ANC.
As Helen Zille has pointed out, Cope is more likely to go into coaltion with the ANC than with any other party/[parties.
Grant
I will be voting ANC becouse I am a worker and seems I could be for the rest of the my life so DA laws on workers makes ANC permanent choice Zuma or not
@ Bonginkosi
In your eagerness to malign the DA and white people you overlook:
1.Tik not a new problem and affects mainly the coloured population on the Cape Flats. It is not a symptom of DA / white neglect. A tragedy and Zille was arrested last year when she supported anti drug initiatives in the area. She attracted criticism from the ANC. No ANC leader has ever become personally involved in this way.
2.Nyanga may be the murder capital of SA but this is a function of runaway urbanisation and illegal immigration which the ANC provincial and national government have done nothing to manage or control.
3. The housing problem is largely a function of poor ANC Provincial government who are the responsible party not the DA city Government. ANC provincial governemnt has made every effort to undermine the DA city managers
4. The Nyanga potholes are a disgrace but what did the previous ANC administration do to sort this out. The DA are working hard to sort out these problems but there is a huge backlog exacerbated by prior ANC incompetence.
5. The drainage problem is a function of the aforementioned uncontrolled influx and the residents have consistently ignored pleas not to build below flood levels. No amount of drainage can deal with homes built in riverbeds.
I live in an “historically white area” and we have seen a marked decline in the standards of maintainance. We accept this as a function of a more equitable distribution of service delivery.
@ Bonginkosi
I very much doubt that unemployment in Cape Town is the worst in South Africa. What about the Eastern Cape and KZN. In any event the unemployment in the clothing and textile industry is a direct result of the ANCs unflexible labour policies and far more competitive Chinese imports.
Phillipa – “So are you saying that Apartheid was an international success story? i’d advise you go back to your history teacher and demand your money back because s/he miseducated you.”
Phillipa, I would like to point out that at no point did I mention apartheid being a success story. Thats your take and your fuzzy logic somehow deduced that.
I maintain that in 1994 we stood on the verge of great things that have not been achieved. The reason they have not been achieved is due to an inept and corrupt ANC.I think it is time to give someone more ethical a chance to govern…thats all. At least we could then compare, not so?
To Bonginkosi and others who ply us with lists of what the ANC has done – At no point did I say that the ANC has done nothing at all. I am maintaining that to toss people a dry crust from the bakery window when the place is brimming with freshly baked bread is a travesty. The ANC voter, previously starving, seems happy with the crust however. I know there is bread in there and I want more than crust. We need a baker to open the doors and Zuma ain’t the guy for the job.
Time is all that is required to prove that point.
@Grant
I dare say you are not a good reader at all. It makes me ashamed to think the two of us are both electrical engineers. I have not come out in support of the ANC at all in my submissions; maybe you assume it because I am Black!!!!!
The only thing I questioned was the supposed ‘track record’ of the DA that you had read of in Wikipedia!! The postings in Wikipedia are ridiculous; they have been know to be EXTREMELY partisan in recent posting.
GIVE ME FACTS. I live in Cape Town, you live up north. Do not assume anything you do not know. Please, brother, as a scientific person you should at least have some healthy for scepticism. Test all your theories before you committ.
Don’t be naive boet. GROW UP.
Grant this is an exceptional article and, like a couple of others have mentioned, I really hope you are motivated to make it more widely read. Have it translated into other SA languages and get it out there.
Commentators on this post who say that South Africa is still largely gripped by a racist mindset are validated by the many other commentators whose comments take a racial slant. Sadly such commentators often appear to have an uncritical faith in the ANC as a government despite their obvious failings in government as listed by @Grant.
The ANC’s biggest failing as far as I am concerned is their resurrection of racist legislation in the form of AA and BEE. Racism of any kind at any level from the individual to the government is absolute poison to the healthy development of any society and we South Africans, of all the peoples in the world, should know that, but, sadly the ANC seems to be of the opinion that tempered racism delivered in an attempt to counter the ravages wrought by previous racsim is okay. Racism is poison who ever administers it.
I will NOT vote DA bcs they only one visionery leader = Zille…
and I will NOT vote ANC bcs they are pushing the selfish individual…
the only option left is COPE forever and ever…..
PLz ppl dont waste your vote by voting for parties not mentioned above..
Thank you Grant..for every single reason ..for every single logical conclusion , that you have so clearly stated…I too will be voting for the DA. Heaven forbid..that we as a nation -accept incompetence,corruption,nepotism and criminal acts amongst our politicians – as being acceptable. I believe..Only by striving for better ..do we have a hope to improve ourselves..to accept all the above in our peers – is to condone it..and there is nothing ,to be proud, in that. That is why I will vote DA.
Yho yho yho!!!Gotta love SA.
Anyway, got the same problem. DA doesn’t reach out to me and tell me how they plan to do stuff. I’ve lived in Cape Town for 8years and sadly i see a great imbalance to this service delivery. Take a walk down Page street or Nyanga at night and tell me if anything has changed in the past 12 years.
the other sad thing is that certain crime doesn’t get reported to avert a decline in tourism. Constantia is now the house-robbery capital. i perceive the same problems now as under Nomaindia Mfeketo.
And this argument that COPE is ex ANC can be countered that DA consists of large numbers of NP peeps. it doens’t hold water.
but interesting post, especially the comments.
Keep it up and convince me why i should vote DA. Sad that the only face of the DA (at least in the media) is Helen. Who will they deploy when they win?
Enkosi
i will not vote for anc because of “apartheid in reverse policies-AA & BEE” & Shabir Shaiks release from prison.
The election is now past. Unfortunately, Cope is defunct because it is plagued by the same mistakes the ANC has made. However, the article is a masterpiece and as a retired electronics engineer, I am proud of its impeccable logic, clear thinking and excellent formulation. All of those, who violently disagreed showing a mindless support of an ANC government and worship of its leaders will eat their words ones the chickens come home to roost, i.e. when in a few years the tragically failed education, health, water and electricity resource management, environmental degradation due to relentless new mining permits, etc. will emerge to show dire and unfixable results impossible to deny.