Yawn-fest — political parties bore voters with dull election slogans, poles show

Slogans and posters are meant to be a call to action. Amid fears of falling interest in politics – particularly at local level – they are supposed to intrigue, to entice and persuade you to turn up at the polls to make your cross next to their names. 

There are more parties than ever – 620, according to the IEC – with almost 137,000 candidates vying for just more than 10,500 council seats.

There are more voters than ever. The IEC, which seems to be doing a professional job, registered more than 754,000 new voters, 46% of whom are under 29 years – supposedly the group least interested in voting. The largest age category was also a reactively young 30 through 39, and 55% of registered voters are female.

So there is the brief for the slogan writers and the poster designers: get your faithful to the polls and attract new and younger voters and women; especially since polling shows rising disinterest among the young and unemployed.

This is a seminally important election as parties tussle for representation in the midst of a realignment of the body politic – with a corruption-wounded ANC limping and seemingly too disorganised even to correctly field candidates – until the Constitutional Court controversially came to its aid.

It’s a chance to attract voters to help clean up the mess – or to make it worse, depending on your personal political hue. Empirically, only 39 of our 257 municipalities (15%) had clean audits in the latest Auditor-General report, and not one of the eight major metros (including Johannesburg, Cape Town and eThekwini) received a clean audit.

All of which presents a massive opportunity. Coalitions will be the name of the game. They will form and fall, but it’s a chance to win seats and to influence and turn around vitally important but failing local governments. 

Tired and bland

You really need to bring your A game to your campaigning and your slogan and posters – thousands of which, costing millions, vie for space on every available pole and which, as usual, will litter the landscape for months after the election.

Let’s remind ourselves of some great international slogans. Britain’s Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, brought the Conservatives back to power with the 1978 “Labour isn’t working”. Bill Clinton won in 1992 with “It’s the economy, stupid” and Herbert Hoover in 1928: “A chicken in every pot.”

It’s not so hard.

So, what have the brilliant minds of the parties, their candidates and the agencies they employ produced?

How about “It’s time” or “It’s our time”. That’s the Freedom Front Plus slogan, on a horrible green background that seems to want to fold itself away in embarrassment with the first drop of rain. That’s sure to get you rushing to the polls?

Let’s try the ANC. They riff off their hardly believable or delivered “A better life for all”, and add gobbledegook like “2026: The Year of Decisive Action to Fix Local Government, Create Jobs and Transform the Economy”. They have abjectly failed to do a single syllable of that in the past 32 years – so why would we believe them now?

The DA, on 12 October, launched their final campaign slogan: “Stop the chaos. Start service delivery.” Kind of a call to action, albeit somewhat impersonal – despite Helen Zille’s energetic Joburg campaigning.

Then there is the EFF out there proclaiming “Victory or Death”. It’s a bizarre statement. What defines victory? The latest eNCA MarkData poll shows the party at 11.9% nationally and 6.5% in Cape Town, so will they all die in a kind of a Julius Malema/Jim Jones Kool Aid fest if they fail to get less than that?

The rest are mainly too bland to mention, except for a standout winner, ActionSA’s “Gatvol? Let us fix it”. Not sure I’d vote for Mr Mashaba, but it’s colloquial, a strong call to action and it has personality. It’s a shining star in a sea of bland mediocrity. DM