Read more: Jacob Zuma must fall
On the night of 22nd August, Johannesburg was the scene of high political drama. The African National Congress (ANC) had held the mayoralty of the city since the advent of multi-racial democracy in 1994. But the party failed to win a majority in municipal elections held earlier that month. At the first meeting of the newly elected council, Herman Mashaba of the Democratic Alliance (DA), a self-made millionaire who only entered politics last December, eventually became mayor after a session that lasted 11 hours. The febrile atmosphere was only intensified when an ANC councillor collapsed on the floor of the chamber and died.
There are few countries in which a governing party in the throes of internal crisis would consider 54 per cent of the vote in mid-term elections to be disappointing. Yet such has been the dominance of the ANC that this is the case in South Africa. The result is the worst ever for the party, a decline of 8 per cent from the equivalent elections in 2011, and almost 16 per cent from its best result in the 2004 general election. Of the country’s six biggest cities, only two are in the ANC’s hands. In response to President Jacob Zuma’s recent claim that his party would rule “until Jesus returns,” Photoshopped images of Christ strolling through South African cities were shared on social media.
Some losses have particular symbolism for the political descendants of Nelson Mandela. Johannesburg is where the modern ANC came to maturity in the dreadful years of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tshwane, the municipality which includes Pretoria, elected a DA mayor as well; echoing its previous role as the epicentre of white power and racist ideology. Indeed, across Gauteng, the urbanised province of 13m which Johannesburg and Pretoria anchor, the ANC slumped below 50 per cent of the vote for the first time. It was reduced to just 24 per cent in Cape Town, the nation’s second economic and cultural centre, which has been in opposition hands for a decade.
The main opposition is the DA, a centrist, liberal party, with around 27 per cent support in national polls. The ANC habitually characterizes it as the last bastion of white supremacy and the party has struggled to overcome that image, eventually electing its first black leader, Mmusi Maimane, last year. The DA still receives near monolithic support from whites and, these days, a clear majority among the Indian and coloured (mixed-race) communities. In the August elections, ANC voters drifted to both to the DA and to the radical left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which reached 8 per cent of the vote. Even the Zulu-traditionalist Inkatha Freedom Party, long dismissed by ANC strategists as a party of elderly country-dwellers living in the past, staged a modest recovery in rural KwaZulu-Natal.
Perhaps more than anything else, however, the ANC suffered from voters in townships sitting it out, with turnout below 40 per cent in some urban strongholds. In more established democracies, otherwise loyal voters of a governing party often give it a kick in mid-term elections. In South Africa, it was a new experience for a party that had grown used to extraordinary loyalty from voters grateful for liberation and prepared to forgive it a lot.
The causes of the ANC’s malaise include years of economic stagnation, the persistence of the grinding poverty and squalor in which too many South Africans live, and the imposition of unpopular ANC mayoral candidates in some key cities. Most of all, the constant swirl of scandal and corruption charges around Zuma, in power since 2009, defined the election campaign. One sticking point is the 246m Rand (£13m) of public money that the president spent on his private home, some of which the Constitutional Court has ordered him to pay back. Since liberation, the ANC has been something of a Teflon party. But this is the first sign that the non-stick coating might be wearing off.
Southern African politics are unusual. Namibia and Botswana, despite having open and fair elections for 27 and 49 years respectively, and high rankings on international human rights indices, have never seen a change in government. Namibia’s SWAPO, a close sibling of the ANC, saw its vote reach an all-time high of over 80 per cent in 2014 parliamentary elections. But instead of South Africa following a similar pattern, it now looks set to have a competitive general election in 2019. And the country’s politics seems to undergoing a more general shift.
The past few years have seen a number of protests by students. They began with a “Fees Must Fall” campaign over a proposed hike of 10.5 per cent to university tuition fees, extortionate in a country where daily wages can be as low as £5; it succeeded and fees were frozen for 2016. That then transmogrified into the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement, targeting a statue of the Victorian colonialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, which spiralled into a series of protests on race and identity issues on campuses across the country.
Some of the protests were spirited and peaceful, some were justifiably angry, and others tipped over into racism directed not only against whites but other racial minorities. In the worst incident, Rhodes Must Fall protestors barred white, coloured and Indian students from entering a dining hall at the University of Cape Town; in another, portraits of historical figures owned by the University were stolen and ceremonially burned, including photo-collages of anti-apartheid activist Molly Blackburn.
While on-campus violence is a departure for post-apartheid South Africa, angry racially charged debate and violent protest are perennial. In poor districts, protests against public services are endemic, and unsurprising in a country where one in three homes has no rubbish collection and one in five not even a shared flush toilet outside. Foreign TV crews may make documentaries in the handful of white squatter camps scattered across the country, but the reality is that almost all of those living in the worst conditions are black.
Poverty was, of course, worse under apartheid, something forgotten by those who complain that South Africa has “gone backwards” under the ANC. Millions of small but solid homes have been built by the government, and millions of homes have received access to clean piped water, sanitation and electricity for the first time. Equally, millions of people are still left behind. The primary and secondary school systems are dysfunctional. Far too much money is squandered in one corrupt scheme or another. Even ANC members have started lashing out publicly at the blatant corruption of some of their colleagues.
Economic inequality has grown apace; while a black middle-class has developed, overall levels of racial inequality in income are actually wider than they were in the 1980s. Government policies intended to grow the black-owned business sector have created a narrow, super-wealthy, élite rather than producing broad uplift. Most agencies rank South Africa as having the highest Gini coefficient (a statistical measure of income inequality) of any country with a population more than a few million.
South Africa’s old economy was already hollowing out as apartheid came to an end. Manufacturing jobs have been shed in enormous numbers; the textile industry, once a major employer, migrated almost en bloc to Asia in the years just before and after the millennium. Mining is now less labour-intensive. In some rural areas, especially the former “homelands” into which blacks dispossessed of their land under apartheid were forcibly removed, there is little economic activity beyond the public sector and subsistence agriculture. Like in the rest of Africa, prices for food, clothing and basic household goods are high.
That context will shape the 2019 election campaign, one in which the advantage still rests with the ANC. Its base of support gives it a capacity for door-to-door election campaigning that is the envy of any political party in the world, and it remains in control of most of the country’s patronage networks. Moreover, it is always easier for people to cast a protest vote in local elections: they may be more cautious about handing control of the major institutions of state to the DA and EFF, two parties who have contrasting but equally serious image problems with the working-class black majority.
Internal ANC relationships are more strained than usual. Zuma’s rivals regard him, with justification, as the party’s biggest liability, but he is an impressive internal organiser and is expected to keep control at the quinquennial ANC National Conference in late 2017. At the same time, it is far from impossible that the ANC will slip below 50 per cent. It is the young who were most likely to abandon the party in the August elections. The “born free” generation expects a better life from a country that has yet to work out how to deliver it. And hundreds of thousands of new voters come on to the electoral rolls every year.
Jonny Steinberg, an associate professor at the African Studies Centre at Oxford University, spent the election campaign around the town of Bethlehem in Free State province, in the endless flat savannah that dominates the country’s centre. This is an ANC heartland, where its machine was effective enough to, literally, visit every home in the weeks before the election. Large sums of money were paid to local unemployed people to canvass, as well as spent on posters and election razzmatazz. The party retained control of the council with 70 per cent of the vote, a landslide in most contexts.
Yet the ANC retained the votes of the people of Bethlehem without keeping their affection. Many remarked on the irony of a party employing poor people at very low wages to trumpet its success in government. An even more frequent topic for comment was corruption, especially but not exclusively related to Jacob Zuma. “What happens in 2019 could turn on a dime,” Steinberg said, “The line between gratitude and distaste seems awfully thin.”
Much will depend on whether the opposition can govern effectively. South African mayors have significant executive powers, controlling huge spending and with access to potentially enormous patronage networks. The DA and EFF are poles apart ideologically, and while the EFF voted for DA mayoral candidates, they refused to join their coalitions. That way, the EFF can hold the DA to account from the opposition benches and vote against policies on a case-by-case basis. But it makes effective government challenging, and EFF leader Julius Malema has acknowledged the potential problem. The EFF seemed strangely afraid of power in the post-coalition negotiations, perhaps realising that its promises of swift redistribution of land and wealth might prove difficult to put into practice.
But the DA and EFF share an interest in clipping the ANC’s wings and, ideally, removing it from government. There is a surprising degree of rapport among some of their national leaders, driven by the increasingly authoritarian behavior of the ANC in parliament. As Malema has noted, people want improved services first and foremost. The future of the country may depend on how these unlikely partners co-operate. It might just work. In Cape Town, the ANC’s eclipse began in 2006, when the DA cobbled together a wafer-thin majority with the support of five small parties that included radical leftists, ethno-cultural traditionalists, devout Muslims, and right-wing Afrikaaners.
The margins for error in these situations, however, are low. If the electorate is faced with a choice between a non-functioning opposition and a governing party controlled by a deeply unpopular leader, a growing number of South Africans may decide that the path to better government lies on the streets rather than in the polling booth. The Rainbow Nation seems destined to be perpetually balanced between hope and tragedy.
On the night of 22nd August, Johannesburg was the scene of high political drama. The African National Congress (ANC) had held the mayoralty of the city since the advent of multi-racial democracy in 1994. But the party failed to win a majority in municipal elections held earlier that month. At the first meeting of the newly elected council, Herman Mashaba of the Democratic Alliance (DA), a self-made millionaire who only entered politics last December, eventually became mayor after a session that lasted 11 hours. The febrile atmosphere was only intensified when an ANC councillor collapsed on the floor of the chamber and died.
There are few countries in which a governing party in the throes of internal crisis would consider 54 per cent of the vote in mid-term elections to be disappointing. Yet such has been the dominance of the ANC that this is the case in South Africa. The result is the worst ever for the party, a decline of 8 per cent from the equivalent elections in 2011, and almost 16 per cent from its best result in the 2004 general election. Of the country’s six biggest cities, only two are in the ANC’s hands. In response to President Jacob Zuma’s recent claim that his party would rule “until Jesus returns,” Photoshopped images of Christ strolling through South African cities were shared on social media.
Some losses have particular symbolism for the political descendants of Nelson Mandela. Johannesburg is where the modern ANC came to maturity in the dreadful years of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tshwane, the municipality which includes Pretoria, elected a DA mayor as well; echoing its previous role as the epicentre of white power and racist ideology. Indeed, across Gauteng, the urbanised province of 13m which Johannesburg and Pretoria anchor, the ANC slumped below 50 per cent of the vote for the first time. It was reduced to just 24 per cent in Cape Town, the nation’s second economic and cultural centre, which has been in opposition hands for a decade.
The main opposition is the DA, a centrist, liberal party, with around 27 per cent support in national polls. The ANC habitually characterizes it as the last bastion of white supremacy and the party has struggled to overcome that image, eventually electing its first black leader, Mmusi Maimane, last year. The DA still receives near monolithic support from whites and, these days, a clear majority among the Indian and coloured (mixed-race) communities. In the August elections, ANC voters drifted to both to the DA and to the radical left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which reached 8 per cent of the vote. Even the Zulu-traditionalist Inkatha Freedom Party, long dismissed by ANC strategists as a party of elderly country-dwellers living in the past, staged a modest recovery in rural KwaZulu-Natal.
Perhaps more than anything else, however, the ANC suffered from voters in townships sitting it out, with turnout below 40 per cent in some urban strongholds. In more established democracies, otherwise loyal voters of a governing party often give it a kick in mid-term elections. In South Africa, it was a new experience for a party that had grown used to extraordinary loyalty from voters grateful for liberation and prepared to forgive it a lot.
The causes of the ANC’s malaise include years of economic stagnation, the persistence of the grinding poverty and squalor in which too many South Africans live, and the imposition of unpopular ANC mayoral candidates in some key cities. Most of all, the constant swirl of scandal and corruption charges around Zuma, in power since 2009, defined the election campaign. One sticking point is the 246m Rand (£13m) of public money that the president spent on his private home, some of which the Constitutional Court has ordered him to pay back. Since liberation, the ANC has been something of a Teflon party. But this is the first sign that the non-stick coating might be wearing off.
Southern African politics are unusual. Namibia and Botswana, despite having open and fair elections for 27 and 49 years respectively, and high rankings on international human rights indices, have never seen a change in government. Namibia’s SWAPO, a close sibling of the ANC, saw its vote reach an all-time high of over 80 per cent in 2014 parliamentary elections. But instead of South Africa following a similar pattern, it now looks set to have a competitive general election in 2019. And the country’s politics seems to undergoing a more general shift.
The past few years have seen a number of protests by students. They began with a “Fees Must Fall” campaign over a proposed hike of 10.5 per cent to university tuition fees, extortionate in a country where daily wages can be as low as £5; it succeeded and fees were frozen for 2016. That then transmogrified into the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement, targeting a statue of the Victorian colonialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, which spiralled into a series of protests on race and identity issues on campuses across the country.
Some of the protests were spirited and peaceful, some were justifiably angry, and others tipped over into racism directed not only against whites but other racial minorities. In the worst incident, Rhodes Must Fall protestors barred white, coloured and Indian students from entering a dining hall at the University of Cape Town; in another, portraits of historical figures owned by the University were stolen and ceremonially burned, including photo-collages of anti-apartheid activist Molly Blackburn.
While on-campus violence is a departure for post-apartheid South Africa, angry racially charged debate and violent protest are perennial. In poor districts, protests against public services are endemic, and unsurprising in a country where one in three homes has no rubbish collection and one in five not even a shared flush toilet outside. Foreign TV crews may make documentaries in the handful of white squatter camps scattered across the country, but the reality is that almost all of those living in the worst conditions are black.
Poverty was, of course, worse under apartheid, something forgotten by those who complain that South Africa has “gone backwards” under the ANC. Millions of small but solid homes have been built by the government, and millions of homes have received access to clean piped water, sanitation and electricity for the first time. Equally, millions of people are still left behind. The primary and secondary school systems are dysfunctional. Far too much money is squandered in one corrupt scheme or another. Even ANC members have started lashing out publicly at the blatant corruption of some of their colleagues.
Economic inequality has grown apace; while a black middle-class has developed, overall levels of racial inequality in income are actually wider than they were in the 1980s. Government policies intended to grow the black-owned business sector have created a narrow, super-wealthy, élite rather than producing broad uplift. Most agencies rank South Africa as having the highest Gini coefficient (a statistical measure of income inequality) of any country with a population more than a few million.
South Africa’s old economy was already hollowing out as apartheid came to an end. Manufacturing jobs have been shed in enormous numbers; the textile industry, once a major employer, migrated almost en bloc to Asia in the years just before and after the millennium. Mining is now less labour-intensive. In some rural areas, especially the former “homelands” into which blacks dispossessed of their land under apartheid were forcibly removed, there is little economic activity beyond the public sector and subsistence agriculture. Like in the rest of Africa, prices for food, clothing and basic household goods are high.
That context will shape the 2019 election campaign, one in which the advantage still rests with the ANC. Its base of support gives it a capacity for door-to-door election campaigning that is the envy of any political party in the world, and it remains in control of most of the country’s patronage networks. Moreover, it is always easier for people to cast a protest vote in local elections: they may be more cautious about handing control of the major institutions of state to the DA and EFF, two parties who have contrasting but equally serious image problems with the working-class black majority.
Internal ANC relationships are more strained than usual. Zuma’s rivals regard him, with justification, as the party’s biggest liability, but he is an impressive internal organiser and is expected to keep control at the quinquennial ANC National Conference in late 2017. At the same time, it is far from impossible that the ANC will slip below 50 per cent. It is the young who were most likely to abandon the party in the August elections. The “born free” generation expects a better life from a country that has yet to work out how to deliver it. And hundreds of thousands of new voters come on to the electoral rolls every year.
Jonny Steinberg, an associate professor at the African Studies Centre at Oxford University, spent the election campaign around the town of Bethlehem in Free State province, in the endless flat savannah that dominates the country’s centre. This is an ANC heartland, where its machine was effective enough to, literally, visit every home in the weeks before the election. Large sums of money were paid to local unemployed people to canvass, as well as spent on posters and election razzmatazz. The party retained control of the council with 70 per cent of the vote, a landslide in most contexts.
Yet the ANC retained the votes of the people of Bethlehem without keeping their affection. Many remarked on the irony of a party employing poor people at very low wages to trumpet its success in government. An even more frequent topic for comment was corruption, especially but not exclusively related to Jacob Zuma. “What happens in 2019 could turn on a dime,” Steinberg said, “The line between gratitude and distaste seems awfully thin.”
Much will depend on whether the opposition can govern effectively. South African mayors have significant executive powers, controlling huge spending and with access to potentially enormous patronage networks. The DA and EFF are poles apart ideologically, and while the EFF voted for DA mayoral candidates, they refused to join their coalitions. That way, the EFF can hold the DA to account from the opposition benches and vote against policies on a case-by-case basis. But it makes effective government challenging, and EFF leader Julius Malema has acknowledged the potential problem. The EFF seemed strangely afraid of power in the post-coalition negotiations, perhaps realising that its promises of swift redistribution of land and wealth might prove difficult to put into practice.
But the DA and EFF share an interest in clipping the ANC’s wings and, ideally, removing it from government. There is a surprising degree of rapport among some of their national leaders, driven by the increasingly authoritarian behavior of the ANC in parliament. As Malema has noted, people want improved services first and foremost. The future of the country may depend on how these unlikely partners co-operate. It might just work. In Cape Town, the ANC’s eclipse began in 2006, when the DA cobbled together a wafer-thin majority with the support of five small parties that included radical leftists, ethno-cultural traditionalists, devout Muslims, and right-wing Afrikaaners.
The margins for error in these situations, however, are low. If the electorate is faced with a choice between a non-functioning opposition and a governing party controlled by a deeply unpopular leader, a growing number of South Africans may decide that the path to better government lies on the streets rather than in the polling booth. The Rainbow Nation seems destined to be perpetually balanced between hope and tragedy.
