Manifestos are sold as blueprints for better municipalities, but too often they are little more than packaged political fantasies. The promises are extravagant, the language reassuring, and the accountability absent, leaving voters to discover the difference after election day.
By Themba Khumalo
Let us talk about the most elaborate piece of fiction produced in this country with a straight face: the election manifesto.
Forget sitcoms, forget stand-up specials — nothing, and I mean nothing, delivers laughter and rage in equal measure quite like political parties promising to fix everything wrong with municipalities in glossy, multi-page pamphlets that nobody reads past the foreword.
One is overwhelmed by laughter at the sheer absurdity of the promises, only to find that the laughter quickly gives way to rage when one considers the consequences of believing them, because an election manifesto is funny as fiction but infuriating as public policy.
Every election cycle, like clockwork, we get buried under an avalanche of these things. They are as thick as a phone book, yet as thin as the substance inside them, with grand promises stacked on grander promises, all delivered with the confident swagger of someone who has never once been asked how they plan to pay for any of it.
Execution strategy? Do not be silly. That is a problem for the future — a version of themselves that, funnily enough, never seems to materialise once the votes are counted.
The manifesto is where political parties are temporarily released from the irritating prison of reality. In these documents, potholes vanish, rubbish gets collected, water flows from taps, electricity behaves itself, roads are repaired, corruption apparently takes a sabbatical, and municipal finances recover with the miraculous speed of a politician approaching a microphone. Everything is possible because, at the moment of writing, no one has yet been asked for anything.
And here is the real punchline: those who actually win — who get handed the keys, the budget, the mandate — cannot even be bothered to fake it properly. You would think basic self-respect would compel them to limp across the finish line with at least a chunk of what they promised, but no. We are talking about a quarter of a per cent, if that: a rounding error masquerading as delivery, a faint trace of effort left behind after the grand promises have disappeared.
It is not underperformance at this point: it is performance art — the art of doing sod all while looking terribly busy doing it.
What makes the whole thing even more deliciously cynical is what happens to the manifesto after the votes have been counted. The manifesto is treated as though it has a shelf life that expires the moment the votes are counted. Once it has served its purpose, it gets locked away in a dark room, forgotten like a used condom after it has done its job. The document that was once waved around as a solemn covenant with the people suddenly becomes about as relevant as last year’s campaign T-shirt.
Nobody seems embarrassed by this, which may be the most extraordinary part. There is no awkward press conference in which the victorious party says, “Well, we promised the moon and managed to misplace the ladder.”
There is no collective blush when the grand promises collide with the potholes, power cuts, overflowing bins and municipal dysfunction that were supposedly going to disappear. Instead, there are new speeches, new slogans and a fresh crop of explanations, each delivered with the serene confidence of people who have never been introduced to their own previous promises.
The launch events, though, are something else altogether, and my word, the energy in those halls could power a planet we have not even discovered yet. Banners and fanfare accompany men and women in party regalia pointing at things with the conviction of prophets, as though they were unveiling the cure for the common cold rather than a document destined to gather dust. The lights are bright, the smiles are brighter, and the promises are positively incandescent.
There is always somebody holding the manifesto aloft as though the biblical Moses has just come down from the mountain with the latest edition. The applause swells, the cameras click, party faithful nod gravely, and somewhere in the room a person who has spent years waiting for a functioning municipality is expected to believe that this particular collection of adjectives and aspirations will finally deliver one, only for the cameras to pack up and the political circus to move on, leaving the manifesto to face the much less glamorous business of being forgotten.
That is the tragedy nobody wants to say out loud: they know, they absolutely know, that the electorate is not going to sit down and read this thing line by line. Nobody is cross-referencing page 34 against what actually happens in year three. Nobody is standing at a broken municipal tap with a dog-eared copy of the manifesto, asking which paragraph promised to fix it. So why bother writing anything real? Just throw in the buzzwords, sprinkle some hope, and call it a manifesto.
And do not even get me started on the language. These snake-oil merchants have mastered the art of saying precisely nothing while sounding as though they have said everything. “Inclusive growth.” “Transformative change.” “A brighter tomorrow.”
One almost expects a manifesto to promise that every pothole will be filled with dignity and every burst sewer pipe will be repaired through the power of inclusive transformation.
Every single manifesto is the same tired soup, just reheated with a different garnish depending on which party is slapping its logo on the cover. Strip away the branding, and you could swap the documents between rival parties; nobody would notice the difference for a good ten pages. The vocabulary is so predictable that you could probably write an entire manifesto by throwing political buzzwords into a hat and pulling them out one at a time.
The genius of the exercise is that the language is deliberately elastic. “We will explore” can mean absolutely anything. “We remain committed” requires no evidence of commitment whatsoever. ‘”We will work towards” is political Esperanto for “do not hold your breath.”
And when the promised miracle fails to arrive, there is always another phrase waiting in the wings, preferably one involving challenges, processes, stakeholders and the regrettable realities inherited from somebody else.
I will be honest: my patience for this charade is thinner than the paper these manifestos are printed on. There is a very real, very tempting urge to take the whole stack of them and put them to a use far more fitting than the one intended, because years and years of being served the same reheated menu, dressed up as a five-course feast, have left us with little more than stale bread and empty plates.
The real insult is not that politicians make promises. Politics has always involved promises, and nobody expects a party manifesto to read like a funeral programme. At least a funeral programme tells you what is coming next — from the opening hymn to the graveside — and, remarkably, the people organising the funeral usually manage to follow the programme. The insult is the sheer audacity of the political performance: the expectation that voters will applaud the poetry before anyone has bothered to explain the plumbing.
A manifesto should at least have the decency to survive contact with reality. It should tell us what will be done, how it will be done and, preferably, by whom. Instead, we are handed political fan fiction in full colour, complete with dramatic cover photographs and a supporting cast of promises that disappear faster than campaign workers after the votes have been counted.
So here is my request, radical as it may sound: stop writing fiction and start writing plans. Show your working. Tell us the how, not just the what. Tell us what it will cost, who will deliver it, when it will happen and what you intend to do when it does not.
Because until then, do not call it a manifesto — call it what it is: a fairy tale with a ballot box attached.