Tag: politics

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Generalissimo Lesufi

ANTHONY BUTLER: AmaWinde just not the same as amaPanyaza

Gauteng premier looks much more presidential and ready for a military green bean coup

 First published in Business Day

23 FEBRUARY 2024

A lot of unfair criticism has been levelled at Panyaza Lesufi this week. On Monday the visionary Gauteng premier delivered a majestic state of the province address, radiating the quiet authority one associates with a president.

However, his detractors complain that his promises of new housing, private hospitals and job creation are unrealistic. Some even liken him to the inmate of a psychological facility, who suffers from the delusion that he has just seized power through a military coup.

This latter complaint derives in part from the presence at the venue of 7,000 “crime prevention wardens” — popularly known as amaPanyaza — resplendent in quasi-military green uniforms and dubbed “military veterans” by the caudillo. Counter-revolutionary forces may have robbed these recruits of automatic rifles, but Lesufi can now provide them with air support from “the Gauteng Air Wing unit”.

While this policing model reminds some critics of the Ciskei Defence Force of the 1980s, there is merit to Lesufi’s proposals. After all, there are high levels of violent and property crime in Gauteng — only some of it committed by ANC politicians — and the national police service has failed to curtail it.

Lesufi came under fire from EFF Gauteng deputy chairperson Phillip Makwala, who memorably described the wardens as “green beans”. But EFF commissars in red uniforms and berets can scarcely complain about the militarisation of society.

Criticism from the DA is also hard to take, not least because Western Cape premier Alan Winde also deploys thousands of law enforcement officers to crime hotspots, where they are backed up by data analytics, policing control centres and surveillance technology. Worse still, the amaWinde are now reportedly working hand in glove with the military wing of the DA, known as Fidelity ADT.

But despite these superficial parallels between parties there are three reasons to be uniquely fearful of Lesufi’s militarised policing initiatives. First, the premier has been talking absolute nonsense about every sector of provincial government. Statistical analysis suggests a low probability that he is right about policing.

Second, initiatives in the Western Cape are backed by broad agreement between the provincial government and the City of Cape Town, where mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has taken the lead in the devolution of policing. In addition to law enforcement officers jointly funded with the province, Cape Town has 600 metro police officers, 690 traffic officers and specialised units for tactical response, environmental enforcement, gang and drug matters and metal theft, among others.

The city has invested in body cameras, dash cams, drones and an emergency police incident control centre. The fact that city and province are governed by the same party has proved a great boon to co-operation and co-ordination.

The situation is quite different in Gauteng, where Johannesburg public safety MMC Mgcini Tshwaku — an EFF cadre — accused Lesufi of trying to take credit for a CCTV initiative that originated in the city. Although it is difficult to get at the truth, both province and city have evidently made deals with a private company, VumaCam, which can monitor crime hotspots across the province.

While the EFF and ANC are pretending to fight — who will vote for the EFF if they know it is just a provincial ANC faction? — this problem may be resolved in a post-election sharing of the tenders (technically known as a “provincial coalition government”).

The third key point of difference is that it is not easy to imagine Winde or Hill-Lewis dressed up in a military uniform — at least not in public. As for Lesufi, nobody would be surprised if he arrived at the next state of the province event perched on the turret of a battle tank.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

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Why manifestos matter

ANTHONY BUTLER: Promises, promises: it’s party manifesto season again

Three reasons to read manifestos — but cautiously and in full recognition of their limitations

26 JANUARY 2024

First published in Business Day

As SA enters party manifesto season, many of the journalists and academics who are paid to study politics have been wondering whether they really need to read them.       

After all, only a tiny minority of citizens ever leaf through the pages of a manifesto. Party platforms tend to be long on good intentions but short on detail. Because they are the outcome of internal party compromises, they contain promises that the party does not intend to keep and goals it does not know how to realise.

Campaigning politicians understandably tell electors what they want to hear. They run into trouble pretty quickly when they write down what they really think. In one famous cautionary tale from 1983, the endearing but shambolic leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Michael Foot, decided to incorporate the actual policy resolutions adopted at the party’s national conference into the manifesto.

These included unilateral nuclear disarmament, higher taxes, withdrawal from the European Community and widespread nationalisation. One of the party’s MPs described the manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history”. This judgment proved correct on election day.

For its part, the ANC has a dangerous habit of setting out some concrete goals. Its 2019 manifesto, for example, promised that freight would be shifted from road to rail, clean water would reach all citizens, local government finances would be transformed and “decisive action” would be taken against corruption. In the light of what actually transpired we can expect clear targets to be replaced by vague generalities this year.

Rise Mzansi has already got our manifesto season off to a hilarious start. There is much to admire about the new movement and its leader. But the party for some reason insists that its manifesto was written by the people themselves — “an outcome of almost a year of listening and discussion with hundreds of communities across our land”. It is not clear who is expected to believe this claim.

Despite their limitations, we should nonetheless read manifestos. First, citizens view an election win as a “mandate” for implementing a manifesto. While this claim is problematic — voters can choose only one party and they may not agree with all of its policies — this is a key element of democracy.

Second, manifestos are important benchmarks for accountability. Given citizens’ short attention spans and politicians’ unreliable memories, a party platform is essential for assessing if a party has done what it promised — or anywhere close. Door-to-door campaigning and targeted social media communications now allow differentiated campaign messages — or lies — to be disseminated to individual voters.

There is a shift under way in democratic societies towards strategic deception. The traditional media can no longer perform their traditional role as gatekeeper of the truth because of the volume of information on social media platforms and a decline in citizens’ deference to expert and media authority. A manifesto document is now the only place in which the party’s values and central policy can be explored by all citizens together.

Third, there is evidence that the stability of coalitions is related to the policy congruence of the parties that make it up. In the possible absence of a majority victor this May, party manifestos — once they are appropriately interpreted — are an important tool for predicting the likelihood of enduring coalitions.

We evidently need to read manifestos cautiously and in full recognition of their limitations. Some parties do not seem to believe what they say — who believes the DA’s policies on social grants and public health, for example? Other parties offer no indication whatsoever that they know how to accomplish their supposed goals (the EFF?).

However, citizens remain capable of making a judgment about the credibility of such parties’ manifesto pledges.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.