When a gangster predicts the election result...two-and-half years in advance
In a previous post, I examined the crucial, controversial question as to whether South Africa’s 2024 elections had been ‘rigged’ or manipulated.
There does not appear to be evidence of blatant rigging, as alleged by some, but I provided a non-exhaustive list of fourteen reasons to be concerned that the results were manipulated in some way.
I recently stumbled across a 15th reason in this interview with gangster-politician Gayton McKenzie:
In the interview [full, original version here] conducted in January 2022, McKenzie confidently predicts that the ANC would get 41% in the national elections scheduled for 2024.
McKenzie is a criminal of many talents, but a poker face is not one of them and his absolute confidence is evident.
Given the deluge of pre-election ‘predictions’ of similarly low numbers that were published in the year before the elections, it may be easy to forget that in late 2021 the only credible national political polling company put the ANC’s support at slightly below 50% for local government elections. And the party was generally expected, based on past evidence, to perform worse at local than national level.
So McKenzie could not have been relying on public polling information. In the clip he explains his remarkable specificity and confidence by saying ‘I read a lot’. Well, I suspect I read a lot more than McKenzie on these subjects and there was nothing in early 2022 pointing to the ANC collapsing to 41% of the national vote.
Similar ‘predictions’ of the ANC’s collapse only emerged later in 2022, notably in the form of an article published in August by Daily Maverick. One of its editors, Ferial Haffajee, claimed that a recent IPSOS poll had found that ANC support had collapsed to 42%. The ANC’s collapse was foretold, said Haffajee:
But Haffajee was misrepresenting the facts. A cursory glance at the polling numbers showed that the 42% Haffajee was referring to, was of total respondents. But 21% of the respondents did not name a political party they would vote for, either because they said they would not vote (10%) or they refused to respond (7%) or they were not registered (4%). So the least controversial estimate of the ANC’s support, and typically the one that would be used to describe such results, would have been 53% (42 divided by 79). Leading to a dramatically different conclusion.1
It’s possible that Haffajee and all the Daily Maverick editors and proofreaders were so incompetent that they missed this glaring error but that seems unlikely. It was a major story. And Haffajee by that time was a very senior editor, having previously been editor-in-chief of the Mail and Guardian. So the more plausible conclusion is that it was a deliberate misrepresentation.
These facts simply add to the fourteen concerns I listed previously, suggesting that the 2024 election results were manipulated - potentially in a range of different ways - to achieve an outcome that had already been decided.
The fact, furthermore, that Gayton McKenzie secured a ministerial position despite having nowhere near enough votes to warrant it, merely adds to the suspicion that he had access to the people who were involved in these manipulations. And once again the name of Rob Hersov is the one that comes to mind. A good time to read what I have already written about him, if you haven’t already:
A similar point was made two weeks later by the executive director of the dubiously opaque ‘Inclusive Society Foundation’ which Haffajee described as a “an independent think-tank sympathetic to the ANC”. However, even then Haffajee presented this as merely a debate about how to interpret the numbers, rather than admitting she had misrepresented them.