Queuing to Cross

Crowded out by the publication of the UK budget, World Earth Day, the downwards revision of world growth by the IMF and an epic football game, the minor event that is the South African general elections took place yesterday.
Given that the outcome of the elections has always been an open secret – the ANC winning and Jacob Zuma becoming the next president of South Africa – clearly other things had to happen to make these elections newsworthy and exciting… and they did.

A few people had told me about their plans to get up at 5am on Wednesday, a public holiday (Election days are holidays to give everyone the chance to vote), to cast their vote early and avoid queues. Coming from a super-efficient country where the process of voting is a pleasant stroll to the local primary school on a Sunday afternoon and rarely takes more than five minutes, I did not quite understand the hype. Surely it couldn’t take so long to sign a form, make a cross and leave again? Having been here for almost four months, I really should have known better! If the cashier in the supermarket takes five minutes to process a payment, the super-official act of identifying a registered voter on a list was always going to take ages! And knowing this, I really should not have been surprised about the mile-long queues outside the voting station! Even those who arrived before stations officially opened at 6am had to wait a good hour or so before making that all important and completely meaningless cross! One hour!!! Throughout the day as more people went to vote, the queues got longer and longer and newspapers today published photos of hundreds of people beautifully lined up, patiently waiting for their turn to tick.

But clearly this could have been predicted, so to add excitement, the Elections Committee decided not to print enough ballots to make sure that some stations would run out! Logically, voting came to a complete stand-still and lots of people had not managed to cast their vote by 9pm, which is when the whole process should have been officially over. Masses of people were still waiting outside the polling stations and something that came close to a state of national emergency had to be declared with all the important people making rushed decisions about how to proceed. Issues about safety and security arrangements came up a lot as agencies were only hired til 9pm and it seemed to be a huge problem to extent the contract without seven rounds of prior consultations! In the end, they must have managed to sort things out somehow as voting carried on til the early hours of the morning.

Once polling stations were closed, there was no more room for surprises: The ANC is on it’s way to getting the 2/3 majority that it needs to change the constitution and South Africa will soon have a president, who thinks that showering is an effective way to prevent HIV infections and has failed to set clear moral examples about work and family ethics.

The only encouraging thing about these elections are … the queues! If thousands of people spend hours in the cold and dark just to participate in the elections, this has got to be a good sign for any young democracy!


Three weeks later…

Adapting to the slow moving life in Africa, three weeks later this blog post has still not been posted, but South Africa has a new president! The ANC won the elections just short of a 2/3 majority and Jacob Zuma – or J-Z as the radio stations like to call him – has been inaugurated in a ceremony that may not have been as impressive as Baracks, but was certainly quite a spectacle by South African standards! The amount of policemen in the streets increased rapidly, roads were closed down and almost every day before the inauguration, helicopters were patrolling over Pretoria practising some fancy military manoeuvres in honour of J-Z!

The magical day came with a lot of showers … maybe this is God’s way of showing his disapproval of the new President as the cartoon version of Zuma always has a shower on his head because of his claim that unprotected sex with an HIV infected women did not affect him as he had a shower straight afterwards!

By now Zuma has had his first full day in office after swearing in over fifty new Ministers. Our iconic Minister of Finance and my big boss Trevor Manuel has been summoned to work for the Presidency and Treasury is now being taken over by someone from Revenue Services. Everyone is nervous how this change and the creation of a new department for Economic Development will affect our work… surprisingly there are no news about it so far and returning to the slow African lifestyle, I do not expect any in the next days, weeks, months …