Election posters on Johannesburg’s lampposts have become one of the clearest windows into how the parties contesting November’s local government elections frame their own records in power and their rivals’ failures in office. With the vote approaching, each party’s compressed messaging rewards close reading for what it reveals about how they understand their mandates, their governance claims and their accountability to voters.
The stakes of these messages are considerable. While some political commentators still treat manifestos as the best tool for understanding a party or candidate’s plans in depth, others argue that these lengthy documents have little influence on most voters. Far more people heading to the polls are likely to engage with posters instead. The scale involved is significant: in the last municipal election, the ANC reportedly printed 100,000 posters for Cape Town alone, a major electioneering cost for the governing party. Although the focus here is on the Johannesburg metro, a recent trip through the North West province and Limpopo showed posters distributed in smaller towns as well, including Northam, Brits and Bojating.
Posters are a unique opportunity to connect with voters, and choices around language and graphics are constrained by how quickly readers pass by, whether on foot, by car or by taxi. That means short messages and clear, recognisable images. What follows analyses two posters per party, in order of prominence after the last municipal election.
The ANC’s most common poster simply reads “Vote ANC”, repeated twice, with the party’s logo at the centre of the design. The phrase is an imperative sentence, issuing a command in which the audience is the implied subject being told how to vote. The arrangement is visually striking in the party’s recognisable green and yellow, and the design appears to rely on the party’s name and its history in office, including a logo featuring symbols tied to the armed struggle and unity against oppression. The poster is notably generic: it makes no reference to Joburg, the party’s mayoral candidate or its policies.
A second ANC poster features President Cyril Ramaphosa with the words “Let’s continue building better communities together”. The designers chose the sitting head of state rather than a mayoral candidate, again centring the party’s history and a prominent national figure. Ramaphosa is shown smiling at the camera in a suit, a contrast with the party’s manifesto launch posters, where he appeared in a collared shirt in party colours. The text engages the audience more as an invitation than an order, with “let’s” and “together” framing an inclusive “us” of party and voters. “Continue” assumes the ANC and its voters have already contributed to building better communities, a claim on the party’s governing record. As with the first poster, there is no reference to Joburg.
The DA’s posters both mention “work”. One reads “Zille works for Joburg” beside a photograph of Helen Zille with her fist in the air. Unlike the ANC, the DA centres its mayoral candidate in both image and text. The present tense implies she is already working, and the word is ambiguous: it could mean she is labouring hard, or that she is the right candidate for mayor. The raised fist is a common symbol of triumph over adversity, used by many movements including Black Consciousness, feminist and workers’ rights campaigns to represent resistance, solidarity and defiance against injustice. On this poster it could symbolise victory and power, evoke struggle for a party with no anti-apartheid history, or even cast the ANC as the “unjust authority” against which Zille is protesting. The fist reaches toward the top of the poster over a waving South African flag, a symbol of unity and nationalism.
The DA’s other common poster reads “Get Joburg working for all”. Again, “working” could refer to employment, or more likely to city services functioning well. It assumes Joburg is not currently working, most probably in reference to the service delivery issues that have been the subject of Zille’s viral antics in the run-up to the elections. The poster is simplified, with little imagery beyond the DA’s royal blue and the national flag. Nowhere has the party chosen to reference its previous governance of the city under Herman Mashaba.
By contrast, ActionSA’s posters read “Gatvol? Let us fix it” on bright green. This engages readers differently, first with a question and then with a colloquialism and conversational tone. Unlike the ANC’s inclusive “us”, this “us” is exclusive, referring to the party, and in a sense asks voters’ permission to assist them. The text again assumes something is “broken” and needs fixing, though it does not explicitly mention Joburg. Another ActionSA poster uses an image of national leader Herman Mashaba with “Mashaba for mayor” and the sub-heading “Let’s do it again”, referring to his earlier term as Joburg mayor as a DA member. What “it” is that might be worth doing again is left deliberately vague.
The EFF’s simple poster reads “Vote EFF” on its trademark red background, featuring national leader Julius Malema and noting the 4 November election date. Below, in smaller font, is the phrase “Victory or death”, which echoes military battle cries going back to ancient Greece and Rome and the American Revolution. Given how often the EFF positions itself as “revolutionary”, this is perhaps unsurprising. A less prominent poster features EFF mayoral candidate Tlaleng Mofokeng, labelled “Johannesburg metro” above and “Mayoral candidate Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng” below. She is quite well-known, and the text emphasises that she is a doctor.
BOSA has the most linguistically and visually complex poster, featuring both national leader Mmusi Maimane and mayoral candidate Nobuntu Hlazo-Webster. At the top, “They broke Joburg” appears in green on yellow, ostensibly referring to the ANC and accusing it of breaking the city under its leadership. Beneath, “They will sell Joburg” in white on blue refers to the DA, perhaps its economic policies. Then “We will build Joburg” in white on black refers to BOSA and its full name, Build One South Africa. A simpler version reads “Build Joburg” followed by “Vote Nobuntu” with an image of the mayoral candidate, again invoking the party’s name and the positive connotations of building. The construction also functions as an imperative, this time a command not to vote but to build. BOSA focuses on Joburg and uses the candidate’s first name, possibly to signal familiarity and make the connection feel more personal.
A final note on translation. The DA’s seemingly bilingual posters often appear together on the street. The Afrikaans version of “Get Joburg working for all” reads “Kry Joburg aan die werk vir almal”, which sounds somewhat clumsy, possibly a sign of directly translating the English construction. A more fluent rendering might have been “Laat Joburg vir almal werk”. The other poster reads “Zille werk vir almal in Joburg”, literally “Zille works for everyone in Joburg”. The addition of “for everyone” in the Afrikaans, absent from the English, departs from word-for-word translation. It is unclear why it matters, except perhaps as a signal that the DA also works for Afrikaans-speaking voters in particular.
Whether these compressed appeals to record and repair will hold up against the fuller scrutiny of manifestos and debates is a question the November ballot will answer.
Lee-Anne Gaertner is a writer and editor who works at the intersection of human rights and communications at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies based at Wits University.