THE LOWLY NEWSPAPERMAN: Daily issues beat nostalgia this election, but the ANC hasn’t read the room

Draw a line, a squiggle, a wormy pattern or whatever. Draw it across continents and economic geographies. In this dramatic 2026 election season across the globe – in South Africa, Brazil, Serbia, the US, Israel, Spain, Bangladesh and Britain and other jurisdictions – the language has echoed similar sentiments. Citizens have been saying that “this is the most consequential election” in our history or in recent times, a defining moment for democracy and a milestone in their nation’s history.The ones that have passed have certainly been consequential: the rise of the rabid right in the UK, the fall of the autocratic Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the survival of democratic norms and civility in Brazil and the demonstration of people power in Bangladesh and Serbia. South Africa joins in the action next week, just a day after another consequential election that has huge implications for this country. On Tuesday, a day before South Africans stream to the polls for the local government elections, Americans will decide whether to let Donald Trump continue running amok at breakneck speed, undoing that country’s constitutional democracy. Although a Democratic Party victory in one or both houses won’t stop the Trump administration’s white supremacist obsession with South Africa, it contains some of his more impulsive instincts on the domestic and foreign fronts.ANC supporters during an ANC election campaign in Meadowlands, Soweto, on 25 October 2025, in the run-up to that year’s municipal elections. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sharon Seretlo) The tone and contents of the campaigns leading up to the November poll is significant for symbolic and concrete reasons. Since the 2009 general election the ANC’s standing as the driver of South Africa’s democratic journey has been gradually eroded, with the apogee being the 2024 loss of an absolute majority. The ANC’s loss of its self-proclaimed status of “leader of society” happened in an election in which Jacob Zuma, its own former president, claimed that the party he was leading was the authentic ANC and several other parties were laying equal claim to being even better custodians of the constitutional project. With that year being the 30th anniversary of democracy, the party based much of its appeal on nostalgia. It tugged at the heartstrings about the journey to democracy and the strides made since then. As the results showed, that messaging bombed very badly.Not having learnt the lessons of 2024, the ANC is still tugging at those heartstrings. It is still telling the same story of the triumph over apartheid, the remarkable successes of the mid-1990s Reconstruction and Development Programme, the stabilisation of the bankrupt fiscus and achievement of a 5% growth rate, the building of a functioning state, the creation of a social welfare net and all the other early gains of the democratic era. This is not only the same old story but it is also a highly insensitive one, given the equally remarkable reversals of those very gains in the past 17 years. The ANC just hasn’t read the room. It has failed to see that this was the election where past glories would take a back seat to lived realities. This election is the first truly issues-based election and, unfortunately for South Africa’s biggest party, it has been found wanting.Schoolchildren drink water from a broken underground pipe amid the water shortage in Bronkhorstspruit. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)It can’t dodge the issuesWhile the ANC tried really hard to change the subject, the issues just did not go away. Communities made noise, protested (often violently) and turned on their elected representatives with intense venom. When changing the subject didn’t work the party tried to direct attention to the work it was doing to correct the mess that it blames on the Zuma years – yes, the period that the man from Nkandla was the president of the very same party. Just blame those guys. We are the fixers and we are also the only people who can get this right. And still, the story doesn’t sustain. They have tried to point fingers at other parties (mainly the DA) for “opportunistically” exploiting the living conditions. To no avail. Another trick has been to highlight racial disparities in Cape Town and point to the wall that the city is building along the N2 to protect motorists who have fallen victim to crime on that unavoidable route as proof that the DA wants to hide rather than solve black poverty. No traction.The ANC’s problem is that the issues are real and they are massive. They are everyday issues that cannot be dodged. Let’s start with the one that is euphemistically called service delivery failure. In the lived realities of municipalities this means no water or power for days, weeks, months and in some cases years. It means sewage running down the streets and roads that cannot be navigated (by foot or car) because of cavernous potholes and overwhelmed stormwater drains that turn streets into rivers during heavy rains. There are street lights that ceased to work ages ago, creating a haven for criminality.For many residents it means refuse not collected, resulting in open spaces being used as dumping sites, with all the attendant health risks. In this, the fourth decade of democracy, it means a resort to glorified bucket toilets because there is no sanitation in some settlements. Remember that indignity that apartheid inflicted on poor black people? We call these service delivery failures but they are in fact the stark conditions in which people live.A resident walks through the streets of Ditsobotla, North West, as an ANC campaign poster stuck to an electricity pole hangs high above heaps of waste and deteriorating infrastructure. (Photo: Reitumetse Pilane) One credit to our governors is that this reality is lived by all economic classes, to varying degrees. From the informal settlements to the suburbs, the grievances are tailored to the experience. Call them the equal opportunity non-deliverers if you want.This does not happen by accident. It is the product of the other issues that are topmost in people’s minds: corruption, lack of accountability and general poor governance. These are issues that are brought to the fore time and time again in the Auditor-General’s reports, media coverage and civil society activism. People know these are the causal factors in their lived realities. Throw into this cocktail of failures tepid economic growth and a 33% unemployment rate, runaway crime and substance abuse, uncontrolled migration and housing backlogs. It is not hard to fathom how South Africa’s erstwhile political hegemon is having a hard time facing up to the issues and preferring to change the subject.This is what consequential meansThe voters who will turn up on Wednesday will be jolly and enthusiastic. As has become the great custom in our elections. Queues will be lit with lighthearted banter among individuals who have no clue for whom the person they are chatting with will be making their crosses. But inside they will be brimming with frustration and anger at those they blame for their conditions.Some will choose to maintain the status quo, believing that giving the incumbents one last chance is the best option for stability and predictability over the next five years. They are the ones that the ANC hopes will help it maintain a modicum of control or influence in the metros that polls are predicting will swing away from it. Those are the loyalists who the party hopes will defy their lived realities and place nostalgia over issues. There are still millions of such voters but they are dwindling fast, as the outcome of next week’s elections will show.But it is those brimming with frustration and anger who are set to have the loudest say. They are by no means homogenous in their outlook and intentions. They will range from extreme right to extreme left and from populist to moderate. The common theme among them, however, is that the issues will be uppermost in their minds as they make their crosses. Then there are those who will simply stay away, not believing in trusting anyone who promises them a better future. Most of us who believe strongly in the power of the ballot deride them as ignorant, but in their minds it is their response to the issues that face them.When the dust settles on these elections and the coalitions are constituted, the big takeaway for all parties and citizens will be that November 2026 was seismic for many reasons but the main one was that issues firmly took centre stage. And that is what makes these elections so consequential. DM