Predictions will flourish until ANC wins the elections

It is political silly season again when analysts, commentators, researchers and other know-it-all types tell us that the ANC is headed for a humiliating defeat at the coming polls. This seems to have become the pattern in the last three elections.

If these prophets spoke the truth, the ANC would have long been dead and we all can see that it is not even wounded. In fact, judging by its ever increasing support, it is has been resurrected three times.

It is curious that people who foretell how the ANC is going to perform in the elections are not legendary freedom fighters who have been mistreated for insisting on the right of the African majority to vote. Few of the self-proclaimed analysts and commentators were beaten for singing freedom songs, placed in solitary confinement in prison for spreading the message of the ANC or working underground.

In fact, almost none of them were detained, exiled or imprisoned for making the ANC an intuitive part of the people’s political consciousness. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that for many voters, supporters and followers of the ANC, the organization is more than carrying an official membership card.

In fact, for many people the ANC will remain the party to vote for as long as their skins are black. Some disgruntled people may launch new parties, others bang their heads against the wall and analysts get more political science degrees from Wits, Harvard or Yale, it would seem that the majority of voters just love the ANC.

As long as Nelson Mandela is alive, not only does the ANC live but the struggle for transformation will also survive. The ordinary folks of this country know the debt that they owe to the ANC which they see as the custodian of their hopes and aspirations.

Still, they may not have PhDs but they understand the reasons why leaders like Terror Lekota and Sam Shilowa, for instance, have left the party. It is now no secret that they have no justification for disaffection except that they refuse to accept the democratic election results of Polokwane which brought in a regime change.

The point here, if any, is that nothing is going to be gained by propagating the view that the newly launched Congress of the People is on the ascendancy while the ANC is going down. The only yardstick that the voters, mostly disadvantaged Africans, use to determine “freedom” is taps, water, houses, electricity, jobs, clinics, schools, feeding schemes and, of course, social grants.

To them, these are the hallmarks of a “better quality of life for all”.

People on the ground may have come out in protest against service delivery and attacked some councillors who, inevitably, come from the ruling party itself.

But it soon comes to be known that these protests are orchestrated by people who belong to the ruling party itself who are vying for position, power and access to state resources.

Of course, it is no point denying that the ANC is fraught with internal wrangling that has distracted it from focusing on delivering on the promises that it has made to the people.

But to talk, again, about its impending death is just a waste of time and energy. The majority people of this country know that they have undergone terrific changes over the last 15 years, however slow, because of the ANC. Much has been given to the ANC since its inception in 1912 and much is expected from it by the time it celebrates its 100th birthday. Those who talk about its death are just out of touch with the society they live in.

The ANC is gunning for a two-thirds majority this time and it may just confound the analysts and get it!!!