PROFESSOR SIPHAMANDLA ZONDI
Should the African National Congress (ANC) compete with the Democratic Alliance (DA) for publicity?
The question has been posed and answered in various ways in the past two to three weeks of the early days of the Government of National Unity (GNU).
The question is triggered by a news report alleging that the ANC was concerned that ANC ministers were being outshone by their DA counterparts in the battle to capture public opinion regarding their performance.
Of course, the ANC has formally rejected this and even played down the concerns about being outperformed by the DA ministers in media engagement and government communications.
The question of how different political parties approach political communication still remains a matter of curiosity. It is crucial because political and government communication (closely related) issues in the current political climate where perceptions of performance are as important as the actual performance itself.
Even the exit polls from May 29, 2024, like the opinion polls before elections, show that citizens respond to government, political parties and other public institutions on the basis of whether they perceive them to matter or not, on whether they regard them as worth their trust or not.
As it is in the whole world in the post-2009 world, South Africa now faces a huge problem of a decline in people's trust in public institutions generally and government in particular.
This loss of public trust is ascribed to various factors here and in the world, key among them is the sense that democracy is not managed in a manner that accrues development benefits.
People are not satisfied with beautiful democracy but want one that can bring food to the table, increase household incomes, and job opportunities and improve the quality of life where they live.
Democracies have performed well in offering rights and freedoms, beautiful constitutions and a generally positive outlook of society, but have struggled to produce impressive development outcomes.
This is why while there is massive expansion of democratic norms in the world, development has not followed. As a result, the levels of poverty and unemployment have grown, and socio-economic inequality has expanded.
South Africa's democracy is highly regarded in the world, praised for its most celebrated Constitution offering some of the rarest rights, values and principles, and exemplary in extending government duty towards citizens.
Development outcomes do not match the beauty of this democracy. While massive progress has been achieved towards universal access to basic services and capabilities since 1994, levels of poverty, hunger, unemployment, inequality and underdevelopment have grown to catastrophic levels.
This may explain the gradual decline of the electoral power of the erstwhile liberation movement, the ANC, over the past three national elections and three local government elections. The perception of its inability to use abundant state power to change lives for the better and the worsening living conditions for many partly explains its diminished voting base.
So, part of this can only be reversed by dramatically improving its actual performance and demonstrable development outcomes in line with the National Development Plan (NDP). Some of this also has to be about how it communicates its stature as a co-governing party within the GNU.
The DA is perceived by some as being more efficient in governance partly because it is efficient in communicating this so much that it becomes a perceived truth a growing number of citizens hold in their heads.
It is clear that it is using the GNU also to compensate for its lower number of ministers by escalating its government and political communication. Its ministers have been in the mass media and social media virtually every two days since the GNU was formed.
All their communication is about work on the ground, actual programmes and projects as getting things done. They may not succeed in changing people's lives, but they may succeed in changing people's perceptions of their ability to govern better than the ANC.
The ANC will under-estimate the power of this battle for the minds of citizens, the competition for a favourable public perception, the effort to wrestle the public opinion from others to its own peril.
It battles a lot of negative perceptions both from its failures, including the failure to communicate its efforts and successes consistently and persistently, as well as the communication of others about it. Its claim to be the leader of the GNU is subject to its conduct and whether it can show leadership on all fronts and at all levels.
It may discover that having more ministers than others may not translate to more voters in two years and five years' time. If it does not learn how to be agile, dynamic, active and consistent in its political and government communication, it renders itself irrelevant in the public imagination.
The making of public perception of who governs, who governs best, who can change people's lives is not automatic and completely objective, but it is the deliberate work of political parties in this GNU.
Professor Siphamandla Zondi is the Director of the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation.
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