Contrasting images - an election comes and goes

Having been awake for over 24 hours I finally slipped into a delirious sleep this morning at 5:30, at my bed and breakfast in Soweto chosen for its proximity to my operational area during the election. I figured the 40 minute drive home as dawn broke would be one journey too many after the rigours of overseeing 40 voting stations and driving the last party agent home. Now, with the vote tally showing a clear ANC victory nationally, the DA retaining the Western Cape and missing out on the possibility of a coalition in Gauteng, I can reflect on some of the images imprinted on my brain from an election of enormous contrasts.

To start with, Vardo's Place, located in the Mapethla district of Soweto which is one of the poorer parts of this sprawling township.  The property would not be out of place in one of Joburg's posher suburbs, such is its opulence, scale and attention to detail. A bed and breakfast, it's been operating for around 20 years and got a boost during the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Township tourism is on many tourists' to do list and the owners of Vardo's have capitalised on it. But it sits among tiny, by comparison, "matchbox" houses in which the majority of Sowetans live. For me, it was the perfect place to spend the night.

Just around the corner lives Tsholo Motaung with her grandmother in a two-roomed house. I have known Tsholo for eight years, having volunteered to mentor her through the Student Sponsorship Programme which identifies talented black youngsters and pairs them off with an adult mentor. She was orphaned as a young girl but had the opportunity to go to school at convents where she received a better education than most schools in Soweto offer. This took her on to a Higher Diploma in Banking at the University of Johannesburg and now, aged 25, she is working in Capitec Bank at Park Station on a decent salary. She voted DA in the last election and this one and represents what Jacob Zuma would call a "clever black" - one who finds Nkandla and all associated with it repulsive and sees the DA as the best way out. Her grandmother, aged 82, meanwhile remains a staunch ANC supporter. In a way, these two ladies standing together represent the past and the future of our country.

They symbolise the ANC's good story of the past 20 years, but also where they have gone wrong. I heard on the radio that 70% of ANC voters do not work - comprising the unemployed, the elderly and those on benefits. As a state dependent, gran owes the ANC her living. As a young graduate making her way in the world, Tsholo is taking responsibility for her own future, is fed up with ANC corruption and cronyism and dismisses the empty rhetoric of Julius Malema and the EFF. She is the future of South Africa and the DA.

The last thing I did before turning in was collect our activist Bethwell from the Nancefield Hostel voting station and drive him home. This was the scene of some of the most viscous conflict in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the hostel occupied mainly by migrant Inkatha-supporting Zulus while the surrounding residents are predominantly Xhosa, Sotho and Tswana ANC die-hards. It showed up in the vote tally, with the IFP and breakaway NFP together beating the ANC comfortably here and across the road where a voting station was set up beside a squatter camp. Both places are vile, stinking and a health hazard, and have been ignored by successive ANC administrations. Is this because their voters do not live here?

Earlier I had dropped off two other activists at another nearby squatter camp. I could not help being amazed that these two well spoken, clean and stylishly dressed young women live in such squalor. It's one of South Africa's many paradoxes, similar to what I experienced a few weeks ago in Snake Park - people here take pride in themselves, however deprived their circumstances. It's what keeps tens of thousands of people in Alexandra - they call it home, and attempts to move them have been met with strong resistance. Surely, though, living in a foul squatter camp with no running water, sewerage, electricity and rats running everywhere cannot be someone's first choice of where to live! Something many observers of South Africa's poor and deprived have written about is their graceful acceptance of their fate, their patience and tolerance, their essential conservatism and respect for their elders and betters. This is another reason the ANC continuously confounds us by winning sweeping majorities in every election since 1994.

Eusebius McKaiser in his book Could I Vote DA? criticises the DA for their arrogance in saying they can't understand the irrationality of people who loyally go on voting ANC when faced with so many apparent reasons to vote against them. We need to empathise with their life experience, he says. But what distinguishes a DA supporter from an ANC supporter living side by side in a squatter camp when their life experience, on the surface at least, is so similar? I need to go back there and find out. Why, in front of a row of four houses in Dube, a comparatively up-market part of Soweto and home to the famous Wandie's restaurant, is one electricity box labelled with DA stickers while three have ANC posters on them? The house behind the DA one is occupied by the chairperson of Ward 36, Maureen, who has been a stalwart DA supporter for over a decade. Getting to understand this is key to the DA getting enough black votes to seriously challenge the ANC at the polls.

I am sure one of the answers is that the majority of black South Africans still identify with the struggle against apartheid, giving them a shared history that acts as a warm cloak, an embrace with familiarity, loyalty and fealty which the DA and other pretenders to their affections can not shake off. This is why the Know your DA campaign had limited success. What it perhaps did achieve was to educate DA activists and supporters about the party they had already chosen to support. I doubt it converted non-supporters. By trying to say, we are like you, we opposed apartheid, is more likely to result in you wondering why I am not on your side, rather than persuading you to come over to my side.

I think the psychology was all wrong. It used historical references in a very factual account, to try to wrest people from a very emotional attachment. To become equally or more emotional about something else, allowing release from the bonds of the known into the new and unknown, requires either the overturning of the known by a convincing historical revisionism or a more emotionally powerful alternative. It's like falling out of love with someone while simultaneously falling in love with someone else. The someone else has to be more compelling than the current offering. As we cannot re-write history, we either have to wait until ANC loyalists die off, or provide them with a more emotional attraction. Trouble is, as brand positioning guru Jack Trout said, "once the mind is made up it's nearly impossible to change it." Only a minority will be convinced by a rational alternative. This is the DA's dilemma - by focusing more on our policies, as many commentators urged us to do, we would only be beating the same old rational drum, or thudding on a closed door to mix my metaphors.

I voted at Maurice Isaacson High School at around 5:30 yesterday afternoon. Apart from the fact that is fell within the area I was patrolling, I also could not help but succumb to its significance as the place where the students began marching on the fateful morning of June 16 1976. This is, of course, another centripetal force in the ANC voter's firmament, in fact one of the most important, particularly for that generation. It exerts a strong pull factor, and how could it be otherwise? The DA's mythology bears no resemblance to the ANC's and it's counter-productive, insensitive and even offensive to try to purloin it and somehow distort history. To say we were part of the struggle might be true in a limited sense but it's inauthentic to most ANC voters, most of whom still see the DA as a party of whites and minorities, and whites were overwhelming seen as party of the former oppressor group. The ANC has cleverly been able to frighten voters that the DA will bring back apartheid, however absurd that suggestion is.

Did the campaign message conveyed most strongly by Mmusi Maimane that we supported the ANC of Mandela and Mbeki but not Zuma's work? If the results are anything to go by, the majority of ANC voters either love Zuma or if they have misgivings about him like the ANC as a collective more and thus stick with it. The Gauteng vote shows the biggest swing against the ANC (currently sitting at 52%) and the DA moving up to around 32% so perhaps the message is working. But e-tolls and the large EFF poll (touching 10%) also contributed to ANC losses. I think we ran a slick campaign in Gauteng, with Mmusi very much at the forefront, and a 40% gain compared to 2009 is impressive. We have pretty much mopped up the minor parties so our future lies in winning over more ANC voters. Estimates are we won 700 000 black voters, representing around 6% of the total compared to 0.8% five years ago. We must be doing something right, but we are not there yet.

Lots of navel-gazing in store for us over the coming weeks and months. But here is an interesting comparison (with 96% of the votes counted):

2009 election

•  ANC 11 650 748 126 65.90% 
•  DA 2 945 829 32 16.66% 

2014 election

•  ANC 11 436 921 249 62.15% 
•  DA 4 091 584 89 22.23% 

The ANC lost over 200 000 votes, while the DA gained over 1,1 million. And today there are over 2 million more registered voters, though the turnout was around 3% lower.

Oh, and I guess I should be pleased - today is my birthday and it looks like I will be going to Parliament! On Saturday we have a big party at home for 60 people to celebrate.