The ANC’s problem isn’t communication — it’s contempt

Judging by how the 2026 local government elections have gone, the ANC has a mountain to climb if it wants to remain a significant societal and political force in 2029, never mind regain majority-party status.

One of its most urgent tasks is to rethink how it communicates and engages with the people whose votes it wants. If the recent campaign is anything to go by, that may be one of the hardest climbs of all.

At times during this year’s election campaign, it looked as if the ANC had given up trying to persuade voters, or perhaps had run out of anything persuasive to say.

From ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula’s early August plea for South Africans to “give us one more chance”, which seemed awkwardly wrapped around a reference to rapper Notorious B.I.G., the campaign felt directionless.

It was made worse by a series of avoidable own goals that exposed both an abandonment of communications discipline and a complete lack of political management.

In August, Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero called a resident old and told him, “o bua masepa [you are talking shit]”. He apologised, but the damage was done.

In September, Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina shouted, “Jou ma se poes” at a disabled resident who confronted her during what was ostensibly a public meeting. She apologised six days later, but the damage was also done.

In October, ANC national chair Gwede Mantashe was asked about sex-for-jobs allegations against a North West councillor. His response included crude references to female genitalia and a dismissal of the issue as not being the ANC’s problem. Calls for an apology followed. None came in any meaningful sense.

What links these incidents is not simply their offensiveness. It is that they all happened during the final stretch of an election campaign, precisely when parties should be trying their hardest to win people over.

But the problem is not the apologies. It’s that the remarks were made at all.

They communicate something deeper: that the ANC does not take criticism well, that it is defensive when challenged, and that it often treats people who question it with contempt rather than respect. That is not how confident, people-centred political parties behave.

A strategic function

Communications is not just about speeches and social media. It is campaigns, rallies, door-to-door visits, political education, media relations and, most importantly, understanding lived experience. It is a strategic function. 

Done properly, it helps shape how people understand both a movement and its purpose.

I come from a political generation that understood that; I was a proud Young Lion of the 1980s, when we didn’t see communications as a separate pillar of the Struggle – it linked everything else together.

Whether it was armed propaganda, Radio Freedom, Sechaba, Mayibuye, international solidarity work, slogans, songs, funerals or rallies, communication was treated as central to organisation. It helped create a common identity and a shared understanding of what the Struggle was about.

And it was no accident that MK’s first acts of sabotage in 1961 were accompanied by leaflets announcing its launch.

The ANC once understood that political communication was too important to be left to chance.

An unlikely trio

So what should it be looking at now? Here, I need to draw on a curious combination of Mao Zedong, Alistair Campbell and Amilcar Cabral.

One of the first organisational lessons I learned in Communist Party structures was a simple maxim: unite the many, attack the few. The idea comes from Mao’s conception of politics as involving supporters, a persuadable middle and hardened opponents. 

The first task is to strengthen your supporters through consistent mobilisation and involvement. The second, and most important, is to win over the middle. These are the people who are not committed to you but are not permanently against you either.

They decide elections. You persuade them through engagement, example and practical results. You certainly do not persuade them by insulting or hurling profanities at them.

The third task is to isolate those opponents who cannot be persuaded by cutting them off from the middle.

The point is straightforward: most political work should be aimed at winning over people who are still deciding. The ANC increasingly appears to be doing the opposite.

Of course, communication is not only about language. It is also about performance.

A simple principle

Which brings me to Alastair Campbell, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s press secretary.

For all his flaws, and there were a multitude, Campbell helped define modern political communication around a simple principle: good policy and good practice are the best communications policy.

People ultimately judge governments on what they experience. Do the taps work? Are basic services improving? Are jobs being created? Are poor communities seeing any material improvement in their lives?

Communication can amplify achievement, but it cannot compensate for persistent failure.

And where performance is improving, political parties have to explain clearly why.

They have to connect service delivery, values and political choices in a way people understand.

The ANC’s problem is not simply that some of its leaders speak badly. It is that the language often reinforces what many South Africans already experience.

When sewage runs in the streets, electricity is unreliable and water systems collapse, voters become less willing to dismiss insults as isolated incidents. They begin to see a pattern.

Too often the ANC’s response to criticism has been to attack the critics rather than address the criticism. 

Journalists are accused of having agendas. Publishers are accused of conspiracies. Unfavourable coverage is dismissed as disinformation. Yet little effort is made either to prove those claims or to demonstrate that the criticism itself is wrong.

More often than not, the behaviour continues.

‘Tell no lies’

That brings me to Amilcar Cabral, the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean anti-colonial leader. One of the first political quotations many ANC activists encounter is Cabral’s instruction to revolutionaries: “Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories.”

The fuller quote is even more demanding: “Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.”

At its heart is a simple principle: respect people enough to tell them the truth.

To be fair, there have been moments when the ANC has acknowledged its problems.

Mbalula has admitted that corruption and tender politics have damaged the movement. He has argued that renewal must be judged by conduct rather than slogans.

But there is still a gap between acknowledging general problems and accepting accountability for specific failures. And against Cabral’s standard, the communications record certainly remains mixed.

So where does this leave the ANC on the road to its Valley of a Thousand Hills in 2029?

If putting Mao, Campbell and Cabral into the same article sounds like an ideological hotch-potch, remember that we are applying them to a movement that has long been one itself. Yet all three arrive at much the same conclusion. People judge you by your conduct. By your results. And by whether you are honest with them.

A losing strategy

No communications strategy can survive sustained arrogance, poor performance or disrespect for the people you claim to represent. When your daily experience is one of failing services and declining confidence, the last thing you want from a politician is to be told that you are “speaking shit”, or to be sworn at for raising a grievance.

The insult is simply the part that goes viral.

What lies beneath it is more damaging: a culture that too often treats criticism as hostility and voters as a problem to be managed rather than people to be convinced.

I was a Young Lion in an organisation that would have regarded that as a dereliction.

We understood that communication was not something you did after the real work. It was how the real work reached people.

But that machinery has largely fallen silent. What has replaced it is a politics of reaction, apology and hope that the news cycle moves on. And the price is already being paid at the ballot box.

So what strategic choices need to be made if the ANC is to get its “masepa” together? Consider four basic principles: 

1. Treat leaders who abuse residents as an organisational discipline problem, not a public-relations problem. 

2. Treat criticism from voters and journalists as feedback rather than an attack. 

3. Make performance the message. 

4. Return to the organiser’s oldest rule: unite the many, attack the few.

Right now, the ANC has been attacking the many. And it’s the few – a growing few – who are enjoying the view on the road to 2029. DM