Johannesburg – Here we go again.
For two months it will be raining T-shirts and food parcels.
The tar-less streets where the downtrodden live will soon be trodden by potbellies on designer sneakers, there to herd their voting cows home.
The local elections 2021 are upon us.
Heritage Month will be eclipsed, except insofar as it may be useful for electoral campaigning. In the next few weeks, we will be served the trance-inducing lullabies invoked from the fading memories of the umzabalazo heydays.
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Mixed with slogans misappropriated from a bygone era, these conscience-numbing serenades will be sprayed into the bewildered faces of the gullible and the desperate.
Before the arme skepsels work out what the hell has hit them, impressive motorcades will roll down the dusty streets, draped in party colours, adorned with loudhailers.
Here, there and everywhere, moments of exaggerated pomp and mindless ceremony will be artificially induced.
Thus will brains be anesthetised, consciences laundered and souls sent straight to la-la land until the voters wake up early in November, in time for another black Christmas. At this time, we are moving helplessly, like bugs attracted to light, towards the elections-train coming towards us at the speed of sound.
Five times already, the elections train has smashed our dreams to smithereens.
But we are not ordinary, we are our president’s fellow South Africans, we never lose hope, especially our hope in miracles and saviours.
For 27 years, we have held steadfastly onto our belief in saviour political parties and saviour political leaders. Saviour political parties are the parties which, in our wild dreams, will one day come marching into the country to deliver us from inequality, unemployment and poverty; for theirs is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever amen.
The ANC may be the founding saviour party of democratic South Africa, but our saviour party’s dreams have always been grander, those of our political parties, way more fantastic.
Check out the political manifestos that will soon be unleashed on us by political parties, and it will be clear that each party, in its own ways, wishes to empty us of all agency, so that we become mere “service delivery recipients”.
But over the past 27 years, service is the very thing the whole lot of them have failed to deliver.
At every opportunity, our political parties have showed us that they have priorities other than service to the voters.
The electoral system, which allows political parties to impose ward and PR (party representative) councillors on the voters, turns every election process into a feeding scheme for politicians.
Over the last five years, coalition governments became collision governments as the political parties started to jostle for the power and the glory of controlling the budget and the tender system. The voters’ creed on saviour politicians runs deep.
The saviour politician is the special man – yes it is always a man – for whom the nation has been waiting.
He who will be the embodiment of everything we wish we could be, and everything we wish we had. Our presidents so far, starting with Madiba, the “philosopher king” Zizi, phunyuka bemphete Nxamalala and now, Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa have each been projected as our saviour politicians.
Apart from saving us from one another, they were supposed to save us from apartheid, insularity, elitism and corruption, respectively.
But no one has or will save us from anything. As the cliché goes, we are the saviours we have been waiting for. We have no choice but to save ourselves.
If one did not know better, one would think that voters love to hear the monotonous sounds of promise regurgitation and recycling, every five years.
Indeed, it is sad that some desperate voters see the election campaign period as the only time when they can bargain with their rulers; the only time they might see the leaders of their parties in person, before the latter disappear into thin air, for the next five years.
The truth of the matter is that the relationship between our politicians and the voters is a relationship built on lying to one another. To get into power, politicians lie to voters and to survive, voters lie to the politicians to the point of voting for them, hoping for a miracle. But politicians should better beware.
One day, voters will snap out of the trance. Even now, as the destitute people bow, kneel and cower before political leaders while receiving keys to brand new plastic toilets and food parcels, the destitute probably fart silently, in sheer disgust, even as they feign absolute gratitude.
• Professor Maluleke is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship. Follow him on Twitter @ProfTinyiko
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