At the opening of East London’s new mega-mall last month, I couldn’t help noticing that few people paid much attention to a speech by the province’s finance MEC, Mcebisi Jonas. And it wasn’t because they were being rude as everybody had listened closely to the speech before, from the hugely respected BEE developer and home boy Sisa Ngebulana.

Jonas is no stranger to controversy and had the gall to start his speech by saying something along the lines of “When I was asked to speak at the opening, I didn’t want to…” (now that’s how you win friends and influence people). But as the decision-makers of the Eastern Cape, such as they, tucked into the canapes and chatted away in a desultory fashion throuhg the MEC’s address, it got me thinking about how South Africans view our leaders.

The record turn-out in the April national election and whopper of an endorsement for the ANC surpirsed many — myself included, especially here in the Eastern Cape. Sure, it’s the ANC’s historical heartland but the vast majority of Eastern Capers in townships and the rural areas have also been largely abandoned by their ANC leaders. Clinics, schools and housing are in a shocking state and the Bhisho’s bigwigs continue to mismanage, look after their buddies through dodgy tenders and siphon off taxpayers’ money. Hell, even the quality of the water in this poor benighted province is going to the dogs — and if you can’t even deliver clean water to your citizens, what can you do?

I personally thought Cope would do much better than it did in the national poll in the Eastern Cape though, all told, the party did well for its first time at the stumps and it is now the province’s official opposition. The DA lost ground as did the UDM and the PAC;  the ANC still has an overwhleming majortiy in the provincial legislature.

But then, there’s the 2011 local government elections to come and I wonder if that’s where we will see the real shift. The local East London paper, the Daily Dispatch, has been running a series of what they call “Dispatch Dialogues” over the past year and the ordinary folk who turn up, black, coloured and white, are gatvol of their local authorities and are demanding better services.

My feeling is that the vast majority of ordinary South Africans – and by that I mean the millions of people in the townships and rural areas – see the ANC national government as something far away, emblematic of their decades of struggle for democracy but essentially meaningless to their worlds. Voting for the country’s president is akin to voting for an Idols contestant, methinks.

Provincial government is one step closer but also difficult to access and to influence but when it come to your local municipality and ward councillors, that’s what people really care about. Bring on 2011, I say.

Popularity: 6% [?]

It was an unfuckinbelievable out there this week – the good, the bad and the laughable:

1. Some stories are so bizarre that a straight headline is quite literally  the most compelling: “King in Libya instead of facing murder charge” in the Daily Dispatch. And, yes, it was one of our many kings in the Eastern Cape. This one is an endelss source of hard news stories… murder, mayhem, smoking dube and wrecking Mercs.

2. Then across the pond, Libya’s Fearless Brother Leader had the erecting of his tent stopped by New York cops because he didn’t have a permit to erect a temporary shelter. Turned out it was on land leased from Donald Trump, who denied all knowledge of the deal. Read the story at Times Live here.

3. While we’re in the States, the Huffington Post had a funny story about a tell-all book published recently by one of George W Bush’s speech writers. There’s some hysterial aencdotes about the Republican hawks and twits here.

4. An audit of the SABC revealed a staggering pile of chicanery and mismanagement. Read the IOL story and weep.

5. On the flipside, many were surprised when John Hlophe failed to make the shortlist for the vacant constitutional judge positions. In response, Cope’s KZN wing said: “Another racist bites the dust” though I’m sure our sober judge is already plotting other routes of advancement.  Cope also called him a “jumbo embarrassment to the legal fraternity”. You got that right — a great big fat one. Read the News24 story here.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Five things you need to know about SA today

1. Uh-oh. That dreaded “deflation” word. Business Day reports that house prices have fallen back to levels last seen in December 2006, according to First National Bank’s house price index. Prices reached double-digit deflation last month, a drop of 10.2%. Read the full story here.

2. IOL reports that the police have promised suspended top cop Jackie Selebi copies of the spy recordings that got ANC president Jacob Zuma off the hook but the prosecution team has cried foul over this decision, saying that they have not heard the recordings. Read the full story here.

3. Cope has told Mosiuoa Lekota that he can’t go to Parliament, says The Times, so it looks like there’s a battle for power between the former defence minister and party head Mvume Dandala and its deputy, Mbhazima Shilowa. Click here to read the story.

4. You’ve got to hand it to Nando’s for genius marketing. A Julius Malema puppet, the star of a withdrawn Nando’s TV advert, is up for auction that the fast food franchise believes  will fetch “at least R5-million”. Says the company’s marketing head:

We do expect him to fetch a good price — he has become a celebrity overnight. And his whole wardrobe comes out of the Woolworths children’s section. He’s completely on trend.

Read the full story here at The Times.

5. And it’s off to the Dispatch for tales from the Far Side. A gang of hapless burglars were found skunk drunk in an Mthatha bottlestore after breaking into it and then parking off and laying into the beer. One beer was found wearing a balaclava.  Read the full story here.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Five things you need to know about SA today

1. This is top of the pops today! The Dispatch’s wayward Port Alfred correspondent Dave Macgregor, who has a special talent for ferreting out oddball people, has a story about a man in Hamburg (a little coastal resort between Port Alfred and East London) who is converting the farmers in the area into fine imported coffee that he serves up from a trailer. His children, Kei and Che, are making cookies to sell from the traveling business so that they can save up and buy a tractor. My favourite thing in the story is this nifty turn of phrase:

Investing R50 000 in state of the art roasters, a grinder and coffee machine, after four months in Hamburg, McConnell has already converted longtime chicory chuggers into caffeine junkies.

Chicory chuggers — I love that! Read the story here.

2. Cope’s Allan Boesak says that the ANC needs to give the DA and Helen Zille a chance in the Western Cape after promising last week to give her major uphill. Quite so, Reverend, who said the ANC’s response to losing the Western Cape to the DA smacks of a “child-like”  tantrum. Read the story here.

3. Unfortunately, the ANC is ignoring this call for constructive opposition politics, with ANC heavyweight and Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana calling Zille a “witch” while in Dutywa in the Transkei at the weekend. Read the story here. Honestly, someone as senior as the minister should not be going around trying to give Julius Malema a run for his money.

4. And while we’re on the DA, their former leader Tony Leon (writing in the Sunday Times at the weekend) about his hope that Jacob Zuma will usher out an era of frosty Mbeki politics in Parliament, suggested that the party’s parliamentary leader could be either Ryan Coetzee or Atholl Trollip. It will be interesting to see. Read the story here.

5.  Sasha-Lee Davids from Atlantis won Idols last night. If, like me, you can’t be bothered to follow the show but are curious about how she sang click here to go to KykNet, which has a range of Idols videos up from the finale. Be warned, thouhg, there’s lots of buffering and it’s a tad slow.

Popularity: 6% [?]

The ANC took a hit in its heartland, the Eastern Cape, and the party would be foolish not to take it very seriously. Five years ago the ANC got 79% of the votes in the province; this time it was 68%. That’s akin to the Republicans getting punched squarely in the nose by the Democrats in Texas! See the Daily Dispatch lead story here.

Not only is the Eastern Cape the historic home of many ANC leaders, it also constitutes the party’s biggest voting block, with the Amathole (King William’s Town, East London etc) and OR Tambo (Mthatha and surrounds) the biggest regional branches.

Even more interesting is the fact that at the Rhodes University polling station in Grahamstown, the ANC only got 18% of the national vote (and 16% provincially).

The DA cleaned up with the students, getting almost 50% of the national vote and 44% of the provincial vote. Cope got 24% of the national vote and 30% of provincial vote.

"Surprise!'

Read the full story

Popularity: 3% [?]

With 70% of the votes counted by Friday morning, we’ve got a pretty good idea of how things have played out in the election so how does this translate into seats in Parliament? News24  has done the calculations:

1. Of the 400 seats in Parliament, the ANC has netted 190 seats so far (they’re at 65% of the vote, below the two-third’s majority).

2. The DA has got 47 seats.

3. Cope has 22.

4. The  IFP has 11 seats, UDM 3 seats, FF+ 3 seats, the ID between 2 and 3, and the ACDP has got 2 seats so far.

5. It takes 44 600 votes to get one seat based on the fact that 17.9-million people voted. Read the full News24 story here.

Popularity: 2% [?]

There’s only one story today: the election results and how the online media is responding. Everybody’s got the story that by 8.30am this morning, the ANC had 63.7% (2 078 352 votes) – with the largest total of votes coming from the Eastern Cape (503 730) — the DA 19.5% (636,637 votes) and Cope only 7.7% (251 200 votes).

Most of the parties’ Facebook pages are silent and the IEC’s website is not loading, possibly because of the the number of hits on it.

It’s hard to beat the immediacy of TV and radio on this one but News24 seems to have the best online package of the big online media houses, with a cool little map of SA showing the results as they come in (the Western Cape is going to the DA, the rest are sticking with the ANC). Click here to go there.

My favourite story of the past two days, however, goes to the Daily Dispatch, which ran a reader competition of people’s memories of the 1994 election. I actually got a lump in my thoat when I read this one, about a reader’s memory of his grandfather voting for the first time.

The Dispatch’s election page is also much more lively than most, with an video interviews of young people talking about the election. Each video is embedded into a Google interactive map. Nice! Click here to interract.

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1. SA’s editors are steering clear of endorsing any particular party one day ahead of the election, with most saying that people should vote but must make up their own minds and that they don’t think they could influence voters if they tried. A bit of a cop out, methinks, but there you have it. Read a wrap-up of the editorial standpoints in this Business Day story.

2. Meanwhile on Facebook, the parties are up to some odd things. Jacob Zuma’s page has no update at all today, Helen Zille mentions a successful Middelburg rally in spite of  ANC disruptions on route and Mosiuoa Lekota says: “Do not kill this country for one man. Vote COPE.” My personal favourite of all the politicos on Facebook, Bantu Holomisa (because he’s clearly writing his own missives with no spindoctor in between), simply says: “Elections elections elections.” Nuff said, General.

3. Twitter is where the action is and looks like its going to revolutionise SA elections as never before have South African citizens been able to share the voting experience with each other in such a direct, lively fashion. Check out  the special Twitter newsfeed on Grub Street, updated every 30 minutes, here.

4. Speaking of new media, an audio clip of  ANC spokesman Jessie Duarte losing her cool and  laying into a Sunday Times journalist, whom she accused of being part of a “third force”, has spread like wildfire on the Net. The Times says almost 13 000 people had listened to the four-minute clip by last night and  Cope and the DA have even posted a link to the recording on their Twitter accounts. Read The Times story here, which also links to the clip.

4. Not to worry Jessie because on the stump, the ANC played its trump card at a massive rally at Ellis Park attended by a laughing, relaxed Nelson Mandela. Read The Times story here.

5.

Popularity: 2% [?]

1. The thot plickens! Bulelani Ngcuka, the former National Prosecuting Authority head, is now accused of calling the shots — with businessmen Saki Macozoma — at the Congress of the People, leading to the “imposition” of Bishop Mvume Dandala as Cope’s presidential candidate, says a Cope member who has defected back to the ANC.

This comes after revelations that ANC President Jacob Zuma’s legal team have phone recordings of Ngcuka, Macozoma and former president Thabo Mbeki that they have presented to the National Prosecuting Authority. Read the full story at The Times.

2. Meanwhile, Business Day reports that Mbeki denies he meddled in the investigation into Zuma. Read the full story here.

3. And the Mail & Guardian is reporting that the NPA’s leaders are divided on whether the corruption and racketeering charges against Zuma should be dropped. An announcement is due early next week.

4. The M&G is also reporting that Cope is accusing Mlungisi Hlongwane, the defector responsible for the allegation that Ngcuka and Macozoma are Cope’s puppet masters, was an ANC mole all along and blames him for the party’s late start to their election campaign. Read the story here.

5. Back at The Times, suspended police chief Jackie Selebi is denying knowledge of the tapped phone calls of Ngcuka, Mbeki, Macozoma and former Scorpions boss Leonard McCarthy. This after, says the paper, it has established that SAPS members were involved in the eavesdropping operation. Read the story here.

Shjoe! The war is getting dirty. They say a week in politics is a long time and next week’s going to be a cooker!

Popularity: 10% [?]

1. Business Day has a cooker of a story. The evidence ANC president Jacob Zuma’s legal team gave to the National Prosecuting Authority included taped conversation — allegedly gathered by state intelligence agencies — between former president Thabo Mbeki and former Scorpions head Leonard McCarthy. Says the newspaper:

The recorded conversations include a host of other prominent players in the Zuma drama, many now involved in one way or another with ANC rival the Congress of the People, including the former head of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), Bulelani Ngcuka, and businessmen Saki Macozoma and Mzi Khumalo.

Read the full story here.

2. Over at The Times, they’re reporting that the tapes included conversations between Ngcuka and McCarthy. Ngcuka is threatening to take “the legal route” and also that:

It is a matter of grave concern that in a democratic state — which has an entrenched bill of rights, which, among other [things], safeguards the rights of citizens to privacy — you could have surveillance by a state agency and the product of that surveillance be made available to the lawyers of an accused person in a criminal trial.

Oh, the tangled webs we weave. Remember, Ngcuka is accused by Zuma of conducting a vendetta against him while NPA head. Ngcuka also said incredibly indiscreet things about Zuma and his buddies at an off-the-record briefing with black editors. Then he went on to announce to the country that there was prima facie evidence to prosecute Zuma and he would not do so. Can’t Zuma and Ngcuka take it outside and sort out their differences once and for all? Read the full story at The Times here.

3. The Democratic Alliance won landslide victories in two by-elections held in Cape Town, including taking Mitchells Plain from the Independant Democrats. Read the story on News24 here.

4. Something is afoot at the SABC as Christine Qunta, it’s deputy chairman, has resigned. This comes only a week before the board appears before Parliament’s communications portfolio committee to account for various problems at the national broadcaster. Read the story at The Times here.

5. And ANC Youth League President Julius Malema is “actually standing up to reflect where we should go,” says TV personality and former Muvhango actor, Mpho Tsedu (who is clearly looking for a nice fat ANCYL salary). “If there are grey areas, he’s able to stand up and point to those grey areas,” he said. Sage words but what do they mean? Read the story at the Sowetan here.

Popularity: 12% [?]