Unpacking Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi’s unrealistic election promises: Ivo Vegter

The Gauteng premier’s fantastical election promises, including the purchase of private hospitals and free medical care, draw criticism for their impracticality and falsehoods. His vision of a futuristic Gauteng, complete with flying buses and high-speed trains, seems out of touch with the current realities of the province. Journalists like Ferial Haffajee are accused of favouring optimistic narratives over objective analysis, perpetuating the ANC’s grip on power despite its shortcomings and the country’s challenges.

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By Ivo Vegter*

Election-time promises are a dime a dozen, but who are futuristic pipe dreams really aimed at?

It feels like bullying to pick on Panyaza Lesufi, the premier of Gauteng. If you call him a wit, you’d be half-right.

But since he chose to be premier of the country’s richest province, he’s got it coming.

Lesufi is well-known for his fantastical flights of fancy.

In February, he announced that the Gauteng Provincial Government (GPG) had ‘signed an agreement that will see the Gauteng government buying back 18 private hospitals in the province’.

This makes no sense, as Wits School of Governance expert Professor Alex van den Heever told SABC News. The GPG never sold 18 private hospitals to ‘buy back’. It doesn’t have the money to buy them, or to maintain them if it did. If it did have the money, it ought to be spent on fixing the existing provincial hospitals. And neither the GPG nor the National Department of Health needs these private hospitals in order to implement the National Health Insurance scheme the ANC is peddling.

Outright lie

In April, Lesufi went further, telling a crowd at an ANC election campaign event: ‘After the 29th May 2024, you can go to any hospital of your choice, whether it’s a private hospital or it’s a public hospital or it’s a private clinic… and get the best experts to come and treat you. After treating you, the government will pay that bill free of charge for you. That is the National Health Insurance, (NHI). That’s what we are saying to our people “go and vote for the ANC” for.’

This is an outright lie. Even if President Cyril Ramaphosa signs the NHI Bill into law, its implementation will only begin in 2026, and it will take years before it is fully rolled out.

But Lesufi wasn’t done. On his social media feed on X, in between bragging about taking only one year to restore power to a township where a transformer failed, he posted a video.

‘Share our dream of better, beautiful and bolder Gauteng’, he wrote. ‘It’s possible! Our Gauteng! Our Future! No sunrise will find us where sunset left us. #GrowingGautengTogether.’

Read more: Ramaphosa confident that ANC government can tackle debt crisis ahead of crucial election

Flying buses

The video, which opens with his own grinning face alongside an ANC-coloured infinity logo representing the Gauteng of the future, is a computer-generated concoction that overlays fancy futuristic buildings and infrastructure over backgrounds of Gauteng landscapes.

There will be elevated high-speed trains in the sky, extravagant stadiums, gherkin-shaped skyscrapers to rival Dubai, wind turbines everywhere, holographic screens at every school desk, autonomous police surveillance drones, flying buses and cars (dodging the wind turbines), building-sized advertising screens, independent off-the-grid smart cities, alien-planet-style bio-domes, intelligent transportation…

Gauteng will be ‘a beacon of self-reliance’, ‘setting the standard for smart living’, in ‘a future that is both awe-inspiring and achievable’.

But seriously, folks, flying buses? Re-elect the ANC, and keep Lesufi in charge, and there will be flying buses and police surveillance drones everywhere.

One wonders if taxpayers got to pay for this ill-disguised campaign advert. One minute and forty seconds of computer-generated imagery can’t be that cheap.

Hooey

More importantly, it is such obvious hooey.

Persistent mocking has taught Cyril Ramaphosa to shut up about smart cities and bullet trains, because it is so outrageous to punt that kind of vision in a country that can hardly keep the lights on, where almost half the population are unemployed, and where more than half the population lives below the upper-bound poverty line.

Now Lesufi’s picked up Cyril’s dropped baton, promising us preposterous scenes stolen from sci-fi movies.

I wondered what his intended audience was. Who would be naïve enough to get so excited about Lesufi’s pipe dream that they forget all about the misery and unemployment and crime and traffic chaos and xenophobia and collapsing state-owned enterprises and decaying infrastructure and the sheer perseverance one needs to survive in Gauteng.

Read more: Lack of pre-election load-shedding raises South Africans’ suspicions

Happy thoughts

Then it clicked. That video was aimed at Ferial Haffajee. You see, journalists like her don’t like to be depressed. They like uplifting, happy thoughts.

Haffajee recently posted an ANC election advert, in which Cyril Ramaphosa relates how wonderful South Africa is, how much progress the ANC has made, and how much more the ANC and South Africans will do, ‘together’.

Her journalistic instinct wasn’t to criticise the ad for its misleading focus on the progress of the ANC’s first 15 years in power while ignoring the ANC’s later 15 years, which were marked by corruption, stagnation, collapsing infrastructure, pervasive service delivery failures, and rising unemployment.

No, you see, that stuff is depressing. Instead, she commented: ‘Very nice ad over here by the ANC – not so divisive and negative. The governing party too often makes a balls-up of governance, but this is a better political ad than the other hot 🥵 mess that just made me depressed 😔.’

The ‘other hot mess’, of course, was the now infamous Democratic Alliance advert which used the symbolism of a burning South African flag to illustrate what a coalition involving the ANC, the Economic Freedom Fighters and Jacob Zuma’s MK Party would do to the country, before ending with the flag restored, under the tagline: ‘Unite to rescue South Africa’.

Haffajee can’t bear to hear the cold, hard truth about the state of the country from the DA, and prefers the happy bromides and promises the ruling ANC peddles, because they’re less depressing.

‘Treasonous’

That Cyril Ramaphosa would misinterpret the DA advertisement as a ‘despicable’ and ‘treasonous’ form of disrespect to the flag, claiming that the DA ‘seeks to destroy our country’, was not surprising. He’s a politician. Politicians lie. You can hardly expect him to admit the ANC is burning the country to the ground.

Journalists of Haffajee’s ilk (she is far from alone) not only go along with this sort of dishonest partisan politicking, but often start it.

They’re all in a line, defending the ANC in which they long ago invested all their emotional capital. They’ll be critical of what the ANC has become, but only because they want to see the ANC restored to its former glory as the party of Nelson Mandela, the party of their youth, on which they hung all their hopes for a bright, socialist future.

They might accept criticism of the ANC, but not of the ideology that the ANC represents. Criticism from outside their left-wing bubble is not to be tolerated. It is to be viciously attacked as ‘anti-transformation’, ‘antediluvian’, ‘treasonous’, ‘counter-revolutionary’, ‘racist’, and now, ‘depressing’.

Perhaps the notion of changing horses mid-stream is too much for their fragile egos. Perhaps the pain of disillusionment is best blunted by denial. They’re all for a multi-party democracy, but not if it means letting competing ideologies win.

This is why not only the DA’s political opponents, but also supposedly non-partisan journalists persist in deliberately misinterpreting the DA’s messaging.

They don’t want the DA to replace the ANC. They want their beloved ANC to renew itself. They want it to stop breaking promises and deliver on them.

Failing that, they want another, better left-wing party, that will implement the socialist programme they were promised, except without the stagnation and corruption.

The blinkered naïveté of these people is staggering.

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Starry-eyed dreams

Journalists like Haffajee are evidently too fragile to cope with the reality of South Africa’s perilous position. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they continue to dream that South African greatness is possible with the ANC at the helm.

No matter how low South Africa sinks – no matter how many more millions fall victim to crime, and unemployment, and poverty, and hunger, and miseducation, and premature deaths – nothing will convince them to even treat the opposition fairly, let alone conduct an objective analysis which concludes that South Africa would be better off if the DA ran the government.

Lesufi’s preposterous sky-trains and flying buses are aimed squarely at the sort of people who only want to hear happy, optimistic stories that deny the dire state of the country. It is aimed at people who would rather cling to starry-eyed dreams of ANC greatness than face the reality that the ANC will not save this country and is running it into the ground. This is not only because it is rotten itself, but because it is on the wrong ideological track.

By refusing to face reality, these journalists are lying to their readers, and to the people of South Africa. They bear a lot of responsibility for the terrible state of South Africa, and for the prospect of its further degeneration under continued ANC rule.