The DA have asked for American intervention in South Africa's upcoming elections, but the ANC have already brokered half the deal the DA asked for
The drama surrounding the current election has achieved a bit of an hysterical pitch the last week.
The DA have been courting support from the Anglo-American establishment for years, from visits to Chatham House to special regional trade deals with the Western Cape, and their bold insistence on having a separate, Western-oriented foreign policy (visits to Ukraine, support for Israel, threatening to arrest Putin).
But now they have reached out to the United States for special electoral oversight.
Since this is largely a conservative readership, many readers may be at least peripherally acquainted with America’s poor record for electoral security, with many key cities being at least partially compromised. Some of you may also be aware of the rather egregious use of public violence and insecure means of voting, as well as unconstitutional last-minute voting reforms and mass internet censorship to swing six key districts in the 2020 election.
Nor would it be the first time - almost every election in the US has some form of rule-bending or outright fraud to swing key districts in their particularly complicated system.
But South Africa has a rather more difficult system to rig - given that we are a proportional representation system, there are fewer marginal constituencies that can be swung to produce more seats.
In a constituency or college system, like the UK or US, one might only need a few thousand votes in the right place to gain a new seat, whereas in South Africa, the number required to get a new seat is almost always the same, and requires a lot of effort to change.
To rig elections in a PR system is extremely difficult to organise, and almost impossible to hide - Michael Atkins, who has been combing through the voting records for the past 30 years, has made it clear to me that the cases of fraud are generally extremely small and isolated, though there is room for interference in local elections, as I have covered.
The usual shenanigans we run here in South Africa may be pretty rotten, but the ballot count is generally sound, with some marginal concerns here and there. What is generally a cause for concern in a given South African election is the use of superstition (the ancestors will curse you) bussing in supporters, or handing out food, drink and apparel.
But those tactics, while dirty, are almost universal practice across the spectrum, and is now thoroughly part of the game.
In the light of this, one would consider the DA’s emergency call to Secretary of State Antony Blinkin to be a touch hysterical - after all, the ANC is far from being organised enough or militant enough to pull of what Robert Mubabe did.
To rig a national election in South Africa, one would need coordinated behaviour across dozens of institutions with hundreds of branches, and even if it were declared invalid, such an action could not be stopped or overturned if it were initiated.
So what are they afraid of? Jacob Zuma, apparently.
From their March 7th letter to the American Secretary of State:
“Our requests to your government are as follows:
We will be requesting a formal meeting with your Embassy in South Africa in coming weeks, where we will provide more specific detail in respect of our requests.”
Now, it seems reasonable, if one takes the history of postcolonial elections in Africa in general, to be concerned about vote rigging to some extent, but these concerns are rather nebulous.
But the DA have taken the emergence of Jacob Zuma’s political party as a threat to democracy in itself. This hardly bears rebuttal, it is very stupid. If the voters want Zuma, it is democratic to give them just as much Zuma as they want.
Sure, Zuma will eat into the Zulu nationalist vote, thereby robbing the DA-aligned coalition of the possibility of taking KZN, and yes, he might awaken some dormant voters, increasing the black-nationalist portion of the electorate. But this is democracy - a system where the dumbest and most cynical votes are counted equal to the most intelligent and well-meaning.
Yes, Zuma is an enemy of Western interests in South Africa, but so is Ramaphosa, only Ramaphosa is more of a threat to minorities at home. However, in coalition, the ANC and MK could indeed forge a very nasty new national government.
It is not entirely clear what the DA are asking for here, and I am not entirely sure they know either - certainly the US has a reputation for dangerous political meddling, which almost universally results in mass violence. Going into business with them should be done eyes-open.
Where the DA’s requests get practical are either in the realm of electoral oversight (which is perfectly normal), and “disinformation” (which carries some serious baggage). What is particularly interesting about the letter is the euphemistic request for American-sponsored censorship and “voter education”.
The ANC has responded with an equally hysterical offering. They accuse the DA of seeking foreign intervention in our elections. Ramaphosa described them as an attempt to "mortgage our country to other powers." But the ANC has already invited the Americans to do exactly what the DA ask for.
As I covered in some depth, the IEC has already reached out to the West to monitor and censor public communication in the lead-up to the election. The Americans have engineered a rather comprehensive media control apparatus on a global scale, steered by a centralised editorial-policy committee for select news outlets, and an intelligence-community linked censorship and spying regime in the major tech companies. These tech companies have been invited to work together with Georg Soros’s Open Society Foundation and a bunch of barely-competent left-wing busybodies called Real411, on an official basis.
Something is missing here, and I am certainly not seeing it.
Why is the DA painting a target on their back by claiming ownership of this sort of thing when the ANC already has such a deal in place? And what could the DA be asking for, if they have no hope of winning the election?
After all, the DA and their coalition partners do not achieve more than 35% of the vote together in any recent poll. The black-nationalist bloc (ANC/EFF/MK) are guaranteed a supermajority, such that the ANC need not reach out to the DA for anything, and their loss of a voting majority will hardly mean they will leave government, since no other bloc has the capacity to achieve a majority.
The only option, it seems to me, is that the DA are looking for America’s blessing to go into government with the ANC, which of course their executive leadership almost unanimously supports, as a “least-worst option”, a “plan B”, a “final alternative” to the obviously doomed Multi-Party Charter.
To me, making a doomed Plan A is as good as a smokescreen.
But now we are headed into deep and unchartered waters - it is very difficult to guess at what is happening behind closed doors, and the precise method for achieving a good electoral foothold may remain opaque.
Certainly, the US can place a lot of pressure on South African institutions, but it might ultimately come down to a bidding war between the ANC and DA for America’s affections, in which the Biden administration wants little part.
The Democratic Party in America is highly sympathetic to the ANC’s policy framework, and only finds issue with the corruption and foreign policy stances, which can be changed or muted in exchange for support.
And if the Republicans come to power, all bets are off, as they may not have the bandwidth to deal with South Africa’s issues while dealing with a purge of subversives in the labyrinthine American civil service and three pivotal foreign conflict zones.
So America may do nothing, and the deal between the IEC and the left-wing tech cluster is likely to remain in place, with nothing much changing except perhaps a bit more attention from the goons at Real411 and some algorithmic deboosting on Google searches and Facebook posts - Twitter/X is not a turret in that castle, and will remain an open playground.
Ultimately, this letter will have done way more harm than good, as it will have made the DA look both desperate and dishonest, and emboldened the black nationalist bloc in their hatred and opposition to the few nonracialists left in the country who consider white people and other minorities to be a valid part of the democratic process.
And the ANC's deal with the tech giants will continue to go unnoticed - the DA cannot now cry foul that the ANC has put in place the precise policy they themselves asked for - not a single person would buy it.
