The ANC has set up a war room to counter negative media reports around the governing party in the lead-up to the May 29 general elections, as it hopes to garner up to 14-million votes to win an outright majority.
Speaking to the ANC national executive committee (NEC) in a virtual meeting, whose audio recording was leaked to Sunday World, President Cyril Ramaphosa is heard warning that any media taking potshots at the party would be fiercely confronted.
He suggested that since it attained more votes than any other party during the elections so far, the ANC deserved better coverage from the local media.
“Where there is negative reporting, we resolved that we are going to take that up. We want fair treatment and even more because we are the governing party and TV stations have no right to be negative towards us.”
He accused some media outlets of either not reporting on the ANC’s election campaign activities or just continuously branding the party in a negative way.
“We agreed as a national working committee (NWC) that there is going to be a team of comrades constantly watching that space all the time,” he said, referring to a decision of the party’s NWC.
Among Ramaphosa’s pet peeves was the continuous bombardment of the media space, with survey reports mostly predicting that the ANC would fall below 50% support.
To counter that, he urged party leaders to always speak with confidence and reject any talk of a coalition in the central government after the elections.
“We will be bombarded by all these negative surveys, and we must just exude confidence. None of us must speak about coalitions because we are not in this election for coalitions. We are in this election to win an outright victory. That is what encourages and invigorates our ground forces. They want confident leadership that is encouraging them,” he said.
He said he wanted the ANC’s campaign message to dominate the radio broadcasting space, including community radio stations.
“When we do that, our people listen and pay heed. We are not feeling the campaign, and we need to feel the presence of the campaign and engage so that people feel that there is an election campaign. It is us, the governing party, that must make the election campaign come alive, and others must be responding to us.”
ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula told the meeting that ministers had to activate their Twitter (X) accounts to support the ANC campaign and do retweets of the election messages so that the party can trend.
“All NEC members must activate social media accounts. Winning the digital campaign and social media space begins with leaders,” said Mbalula.
