Pundits missed the seismic shift in voting as the EFF numbers surged

IN 2014 I took up my first invitation to be an analyst for a major television station on the 2014 national elections.

It was also my last ever stint as a TV analyst because of how absurd the televisions soundbyte format is to discuss long-ranging system social questions.

Behind the scenes, the TV station was also making decisions about how frequently to switch between the Oscar Pistorius trial and the national elections.

Because of the chase for ratings, I spent a long time idling in the make-up room with the make-up artist trading conspiracy theories around the Pistorius’ motives.

Now I had had to travel all the way up to Pretoria, along with a breastfeeding nine-month-old and an in-law to help me, and found myself idling over four days around the Independent Electoral Commission’s elections centre.

Well what the station felt was a lacklustre, uninteresting election, compared to the Oscar trial, happened to be the debut election of the Economic Freedom Fighters where they captured 1.1 million votes.

So now in the few moments we actually discussed the election, the most memorable moment was one in which I found myself sitting alongside a famous professor who barely looked my way.

The famous television anchor asked us some clichéd question along the lines of “what patterns do you see emerging here” and since I was sitting next to the big prof I thought well perhaps we might just get into some actual social analysis.

Because I was an undergraduate teacher, I had felt a palpable mood of discontent and intellectual restlessness among so-called “born frees” and there the big election count board was showing us that this party of young people was looking to grab a million votes.

So within my allocated byte-size minutes I tried to explain that what we were witnessing here was a generational shift in South Africa, that the real story here would be in 2019.

By pure demographic shifts, it was clear that the EFF was going to lead to a major contestation over the political hegemony within the next five years.

Without so much as turning my way, and without the slightest bit of hesitation, the big prof looked at the anchor and said “Oh that’s an exaggeration, it’s not going to happen. People are always predicting the demise of the ANC and it’s just exaggerated.”

And then poof, the time was up, and back to the Oscar trial we went.

The prof got it wrong not because he does not understand South African political culture broadly, but because he could not perceive that what seemed like a small shift on the margins, in the form of the EFF, was actually the front end of the generational replacement that is happening in the country.

The generation born in the late 70s, 80s and 90s is now the biggest influence on the political direction of this country.

It is people of the age range of Andile Mngxitama (Black First Land First), Julius Malema (EFF) or Mbali Ntuli (Democratic Alliance), Naledi Chirwa (EFF) and many others who will have the strongest bearing on the political culture of South Africa.

These are my peers and even though we ‘70s-90s’ don’t have control of the institutional mechanisms in the short term, the long game belongs to us.

I watch the about-to-retire generation in our institutions sitting on top of major contradictions as if they will always be in power.

Every institutional leader in South Africa must ask themselves, ‘am I confident that I will hand over a healthy institution to a future generation?’

More specifically in my own sector, higher education, do our administrators and leaders feel confident that their curriculums and the graduates that walk across the stage each year are going to be able to run the country and its economy when they are in retirement?

Our elders need to realise that their retirement future is in our hands.