GHALEB CACHALIA: As election nears, SA’s parties opt not to be clever

With nine days left to polling day, these important elections are in full flight, with squeeze messages, rallies reflecting organisational bussing and feeding ability rather than the wherewithal to harness votes, lacklustre debates, racial salvos, the spectre of a spy who came in from the cold, and the promises of pie in the sky.

Inevitably, politics has been dumbed down, as baser instincts are tapped. Nationalisms are milked on racial grounds by the EFF; largely working-class coloured people are being pitted against black counterparts; tribal identities in KwaZulu-Natal are on the rise in the guise of the IFP or Jacob Zuma’s new party; whites who cling to the Freedom Front Plus espouse, along with many in the DA leadership, an identity that cuts across a base largely reliant on race and religion; and a motley bunch of new wannabes with varying levels of sophistication are all vying for office.

All in all, it comes down to “trust me, I’m a doctor”.

As Bernard Crick says in the opening of his remarkable 1962 treatise, In Defence of Politics: “Boredom with established truths is the great enemy of free men. So, there is some excuse in troubled times not to be clever and inventive in redefining things, or to pretend to academic unconcern or scientific detachment, but simply to try to make old platitudes pregnant.”

The players contesting the polls at the end of May clearly display an understanding of this — either by design or default. I suspect it’s the latter.

Alas, the voter must choose, for if they wish to be left alone, they will find themselves, as Crick succinctly says, “the unwitting ally of those to whom politics is a troubling obstacle to their well-meant intentions to leave nothing alone”. Indeed, the conundrum is summed up as: politics are the public actions of free men; freedom is the privacy of free men from public actions.

Where does that leave us?

Many who have hitherto travelled the road of hope with the ANC since 1994 are patently and understandably disillusioned by the party’s descent into venality, corruption and ineptitude — tied to hidebound and largely failed policies. The National Health Insurance Bill is a recent case in point of the government writing a cheque with its mouth that its nether regions can’t cash — the effects of which, on delivery, corruption and more, will be potentially disastrous for health economics for a long time.

Still, it seems as if the collective muscle of the ANC and its acolytes may well secure another five years of misrule against an uncertain global backdrop, to even more deleterious effect — which brings to mind Marx’s comment on Hegel’s remarks that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice: “He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

So where to place your cross? Not in the ANC’s box, clearly, but that doesn’t answer the question.

You will have three ballots — the national compensatory ballot (this is the same across the entire country and features only political parties contesting for seats in the National Assembly); the national regional ballot (this is specific to your voting region and includes candidates running for the National Assembly who represent your area — political parties and independent candidates for your region), and the provincial legislature ballot (unique to your province, which includes parties and independent candidates competing for seats in your provincial legislature).

Here, for what it’s worth, is how I will be voting: in the national compensatory ballot I will give one of the newbie parties a shot; in my national regional ballot, I will vote for the best independent candidate; and in the provincial legislature ballot, I will vote DA, motivated by its regional performance where it governs.

Disclaimer, in the words of Marx: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Sigh.

• Cachalia is a former DA MP and public enterprises spokesperson.