Only a few days left until you have to make the difficult decision about who to vote for. Though I might be jumping the gun here, as a lot of people are probably still deciding whether they’re going to bother to vote at all. But assuming you do turn up at the voting station to partake in that triumph of hope over reality that South African democracy has become, how will you decide which crappy politician to give your precious imprimatur to?
Well, you could do worse than checking out the news show Politically Aweh on a social media platform close to you. I had the extremely fun experience of being in the front row for its live journalism show at the Homecoming Centre in Cape Town last week, which was a beautiful mashup of stand-up comedy, news anchor repartee, and what I can only call civil society therapy.
Poll Dancing is billed as a show that will help you make a more informed choice when you arrive at the ballot box. Because unless you strongly identify with a particular political party, it’s difficult choosing who to vote for. Politically Aweh’s main message, delivered by host Kagiso “KG” Mokgadi, couldn’t have been more South African. To paraphrase: “All the options are kak. You just have to choose the least kak.” A clarion call for democracy indeed.
KG also pointed out that the elections seem to present us with a dizzying array of potential voting choices, but it’s an illusion. “With politicians like the ones that we have in the country, we are truly spoilt for choice, and that explains why we have 500 politicians contesting for the local elections. But when we asked the voters to name a single politician that they felt is doing a good job, it felt like testimonies at the Madlanga commission.”
KG was joined by co-hosts Zoë Human and Stephen Horn and included media figures and comedians (so hard to tell the difference between the two nowadays, I’m happy to say) like Dan Corder of Three Beanies Network (payoff line: “South Africa is a Movie. Welcome to the Watch Party”), comedians Lindy Johnson and Dillan Oliphant, and the Daily Maverick’s Naledi Mashishi.
The show covers an enormous amount of territory, ranging from current affairs (“Elon Musk has just launched a flying car. Incels now have an airforce, ladies and gentlemen”) to the more local marquee issues. ANC corruption, for example, and the party’s failure to deliver basic services, with the very South African point of view that while minor corruption was once tolerated, the current scale of graft is now unsustainable. KG riffed: “If the school costs R10m to build, and you charge us R13m, it’s fine. As long as you build the fucking school! The ANC doesn’t build the fucking school! They charge the entire 13, and then they go, ‘We need more money’.”
‘The Kim Kardashian of politics’
The DA seems to be even more hated than the ANC, if audience response is anything to go by. Which it’s not, I hasten to add, given this was presumably an audience self-selected to be critical. Still, there’s probably an interesting observation to be made about how citizens potentially get more value out of criticising a party that is, to use KG’s formulation, less kak than many of the others, and potentially receptive to calls for change. Maybe the DA should take it as a backhanded compliment.
Helen Zille was referred to as the “Kim Kardashian of politics”. “When men take her on, their careers plummet. When men take the DA’s Helen Zille on, they don’t last too long. Tony Leon, Mmusi Maimane, John Steenhuisen.”
And then there’s the huge problem caused by the DA’s failures around Airbnb and affordable housing and its apparent belief that we need Airbnbs to maintain our tourism industry.
Corder made the point that “people don’t come to Cape Town because there are a lot of Airbnbs. They come to Cape Town for Camps Bay and Table Mountain, and they came before [Airbnb] and they will come after. Now maybe you believe the DA, whose former head of policy strategy, Gwen Ngwenya, then joined Airbnb as their head of Africa and the Middle East. I wouldn’t.”
Ultimately, the event was inspiring in a weirdly South African way. There were quite a few technical issues at the beginning, with the production team messing up the synchronisation between video clips and teleprompter. But KG managed to make this part of the act, complaining: “Colleagues, we rehearsed this. That’s why we give the jobs to Zimbabweans. We’re gonna need a Zimbabwean here. Somebody from Malawi. Something.”
I think the team should write these glitches into the show. Rather than being an irritant, this became an invitation to the good-natured audience to experience the tech struggles as an allegory for what it’s like to live in South Africa, and for how humour is the essential ingredient to moving forward.
