JABULANI SIKHAKHANE: There’s nothing relatable about the president’s Tintswalo in present-day SA

Testimonials are a powerful tool for enlivening speeches and making a speaker’s messages resonate with their audience. But they can backfire too — as President Cyril Ramaphosa’s use of “Tintswalo” as a case study during the state of the nation address (Sona) on February 8 showed.

This isn’t the first time Ramaphosa’s testimonials have run into problems. In his 2022 Sona he referred to two people who saved their R350 special grants to start micro businesses. 

The lesson Ramaphosa and his team refuse to learn is that you must choose wisely. Former US president Barack Obama’s choice of testimonial during the 2008 US presidential election gave pointers. 

Ramaphosa used a fictional character, Tintswalo, to tell the story of a generation of South Africans born at the dawn of democracy in 1994, whose circumstances at birth would — absent the public policy initiatives introduced by successive ANC governments — have meant they would have found it difficult to rise above the socioeconomic station of their parents.  

These initiatives include free healthcare for pregnant mothers and children under six, state housing with basic water and electricity, no-fee schools where government provides free meals, and child support grants. The effect of all this, Ramaphosa said, was that Tintswalo completed matric and, with state assistance graduated from a technical vocational education & training (TVET) college. Then the government’s employment equity laws helped her enter the world of work. 

Ramaphosa’s testimonial elicited derision from some, including a woman named Tintswalo, who said on X that she was an unemployed pharmacist. Instead of a Tintswalo who symbolised the success of successive ANC social policies and their transformative impact, Ramaphosa’s Tintswalo quickly became a symbol of the party’s failures.

The reasons this happened are well known.  The country’s public healthcare and education systems are crumbling; the school feeding scheme has become a milch cow for crooks, who before the disclosure requirements of the new political party funding legislation would have generously shared their loot with the governing party.

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme has been dogged by corruption allegations, while most TVET colleges are a fine mess. Given the state of the economy over the past decade, the collapse in municipal services and spike in electricity tariffs accompanied by unreliable electricity supplies, Ramaphosa’s Tintswalo simply can’t be living “a better life”.  

So instead of becoming a testimonial to the achievements of his party since 1994 — which was Ramaphosa’s intent — Tintswalo has been weaponised against the governing party.

The president should have chosen more wisely. His team should have found a real case — a flesh-and-blood person willing to testify how their life had changed for the better. Ideally, they would have been in the audience in the assembly so Ramaphosa could pause and point to her.  

Peer testimony adds a personal and therefore relatable experience because it can convey the feelings and the insights of someone whose voice an audience regards as genuine. This is where Obama’s example comes in. For his 2008 victory speech he used the case of Ann Nixon Cooper, a 106-year-old woman who was born just after slavery officially ended. Cooper died in 2009, before her biography, A Century and Some Change: My Life Before the President Called My Name, was published. 

Cooper’s story was not only relatable for the African-American audience Obama was presumably targeting with the reference, but was easily verifiable for the rest of America. The latter matters a lot in a fractious society such as SA, where the governing party is desperately trying to cling to power. 

Ramaphosa’s team should also have supported his testimonial with data. How many black South Africans were born at the dawn of democracy, and where they are today? He should have relied on independent research to counter opposing narratives about what has happened since 1994.

The contestation isn’t about whether there have been changes since 1994, but the fact that some citizens feel their socioeconomic circumstances have worsened, especially since 2008, the period during which the country’s economic growth hasn’t kept pace with population growth. 

Because Tintswalo isn’t a real person, her story isn’t convincing or verifiable — just like the R350 grant stories in 2022 weren’t.

Anyone who knows SA can’t quite visualise Tintswalo. And that’s why Ramaphosa’s language describing her life is also dead — he could only tell South Africans that she lives “a better life”, an extraordinarily bland description. 

• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.