Herron says GOOD Party did not recruit influencers for November polls

Cape Town’s November local government elections are being fought on Facebook and TikTok as much as on the doorstep, and the parties are still working out what that means for the people they put on the ballot.

GOOD Party mayoral candidate Brett Herron said this week that his party has not gone looking for social media personalities to stand as candidates, and that anyone with an online following who wears a GOOD Party badge came to the party themselves and went through the same selection process as every other candidate.

As IOL reported on 17 September, Herron was responding to criticism online that parties are recruiting influencers to chase votes, a practice critics have described as clout chasing.

“They have come to us and they have made themselves available to be a ward councillor candidate or a candidate in an election, and they’ve gone through the same process that everybody else has gone through,” Herron said.

He said those candidates will go through the same training as everyone else, to prepare them for council work on behalf of the residents who elect them.

The names already on the ballot

The trend is not theoretical in Cape Town. Cedric Laguma, who runs the Facebook page Uncle Cedric’s House, is contesting Ward 111 for the Democratic Alliance.

Earlier in September the PMC named Ready D, the Cape DJ, broadcaster and founding member of Prophets of da City, whose real name is Deon Daniels, as its mayoral candidate. The same party named Bradley Bruintjies, a well-known social media personality and community figure from the Cape Flats known as Die Hoender Man, as a ward councillor candidate.

Those are real candidacies with real consequences. A ward councillor sits on the body that approves a municipal budget, decides where a sewer line is upgraded and answers for a refuse collection schedule that does not run. Whether a candidate arrived through a party branch meeting or through a Facebook page does not change what the job asks of them once they are in the chamber.

What Herron says is changing

Herron’s argument is that the digital shift is not only about how parties recruit. It is about what voters now expect from the people asking for their vote.

“Social media has changed how politicians engage with communities and how politicians are perceived by communities and voters,” he said.

He added that how a candidate conducts themselves online matters to the party, because that conduct can damage the party, the campaign and the candidate.

That is a live concern for every party in the country. A councillor’s Facebook post about a ratepayer, a viral clip of a ward meeting that goes wrong, or a comment made in a livestream all now travel further and faster than anything said at a public meeting in a church hall.

The rules that govern it

The Independent Electoral Commission runs the local government elections and registers parties and candidates under the Local Government: Municipal Electoral Act. The code of conduct in the Municipal Structures Act binds councillors once they are sworn in, and the Electoral Code of Conduct binds parties and candidates during the campaign period.

None of that legislation was written with an influencer in mind. It governs conduct, not follower counts, and it is enforced after the fact through the Electoral Court and, for sitting councillors, through the council’s own disciplinary process.

For voters in Cape Town, the practical question is simpler than the debate about clout chasing. The local government elections are expected in November, the IEC will publish the final candidate lists, and residents in every ward will be able to see exactly who is standing and for which party before they mark a ballot.

Source: IOL, Social media changing how politicians campaign, says Brett Herron