There was a time, not so long ago, when South Africa’s then-African National Congress (ANC) president, Jacob Zuma, would boast that the invincible ANC would rule South Africa “until Jesus comes back”.
Last week’s election saw the ANC humbled, largely at the hands of its own political gene pool, and a second coming. Not by Christ, but by the ANC’s own expelled former leader, the selfsame, now-disgraced, embittered Zuma.
The election story was of the ANC’s catastrophic decline in support – in 2019, its share of the vote was 43 per cent higher than it is now – and the loss of its 30-year ability to rule single-handedly. It was also the story of South Africa’s democracy coming of age, shaking off the political legacy of the fight against apartheid and its postcolonial politics for a new era of coalition.
Zuma’s newly founded party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), named provocatively after the ANC’s revered military wing, Spear of the Nation, won 15 per cent of the vote but enough to ensure the ANC lost its overall majority.
The former president, who had been convicted and jailed for obstructing investigations into widespread corruption, may have been kept off the ballot paper by the courts, but successfully played on lingering personal loyalty, Zulu ethno-nationalism, and dangerously Trump-like populist rhetoric to win most decisively in the country’s second province of KwaZulu-Natal which MK will control. It is challenging the overall result and threatens to bring its supporters on to the streets – sound familiar?
For the ANC, and president Cyril Ramaphosa, it is a time for intense introspection about their own and the country’s direction.
The once-mighty liberation movement has, like others elsewhere, hit the buffers electorally, unable any more to trade on its legacy of successfully overthrowing apartheid. Thirty years ago in the country’s first democratic elections turnout was 86 per cent, more than 12 million ANC votes, sweeping the party to power. Last week, such is the alienation of the population – one third of them unemployed – and of the young with no memories of apartheid in particular, that only 57 per cent of voters, 6.4 million for the ANC, bothered to turn out.
“Liberation movements tend to cling on to power long after they have forsaken the idealism of their early days in office,” Alec Russell of the Financial Times writes. “Long ago it [the ANC] lost sight of the distinction between party and state. So corroded has it become in the 30 years since it took charge at the end of white rule that just about anything it touches seems to wither away.”
Zuma’s perception, and that of significant sections of the old ANC, of the party’s special place or uniqueness, his exceptionalist sense that it and he have a special insight into the essence of South Africa, just like de Valera’s sense of ownership of Ireland, are the party’s Achilles heel.
Its all-class, multi-ethnic alliance of urban workers, rising black middle class, and rural poor represented too many distinct interests and political ideologies to hold together. The tensions within society were mirrored within the ANC and as University of Johannesburg political scientist Siphamandla Zondi observes of the MK: it is “just another faction of the ANC that has decided to operate from outside the ANC”. Aided by an ultra-proportional voting system that would guarantee its representation in parliament.
Both Zuma and Julius Malema, another former ANC stalwart who leads the far-left breakaway Economic Freedom Fighters (10 per cent), talk as much about recapturing their party, the ANC, as they do about leading the state. And MK has made that explicit by saying they will not work with the ANC while it is led by current president, Cyril Ramaphosa. That, the ANC says, is not on offer.
Policy differences also make an ANC gene pool coalition unlikely. The ANC strongly opposes the Zimbabwe-like policy of land expropriation favoured by both MK and the EEF, and its policy of assisting black empowerment rather than enforced quotas contrasts sharply with that of both the other parties.
An alliance with the centre-right Democratic Alliance (22 per cent) is now most likely, with options ranging from full-blown coalition, to a deal that involves provincial and city governments, to a “confidence and supply” arrangement with an ANC minority government. It would be problematic to Ramaphosa who is believed to favour a DA deal because many in his party see the latter as still an essentially white party. It is also opposed to the ANC’s proposals for a national health service and economically too liberal for comfort.
But all is changed in this election, all changed utterly in this second chapter of South Africa’s revolution.
As former New York Times correspondent Lydia Polgreen reflects, “the business of ending apartheid as a form of government in South Africa is over. It is never coming back. But if this election tells us anything, it is that the work of building a true multiracial democracy has really just begun”.