At the conclusion of South Africa’s recent local government poll the ruling African National Congress (ANC) lodged a formal objection in response to its loss in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, the province that had produced party stalwarts like Nelson Mandela, the icon of the liberation struggle as well as legends like Oliver Tambo, Govan Mbeki and Raymond Mhlaba. The official reason for the objection was that the party may have been cheated. The real reason, political observers felt, was that South Africa’s ruling party was seeking to cover the shame of a humiliating electoral defeat.
Long before the losses in key constituencies at the municipal poll held earlier this month there had been public indications of declining faith in (if not actual support for) the ANC among the country’s black majority that had voted it into office at the end of apartheid, and kept it there since then. The party had been accused of, among other things, failing to meet the expectations of its mass base and instead turning the country’s economy into a gravy train for the families and cronies of the country’s post-apartheid rulers. That is not an unfounded allegation and the reaction to what are felt to be serious deficiencies in the quality of the ANC’s governance has been there for all to see.
For more than a year now the government has had to face mounting student and labour unrest with protestors demanding reform of the country’s economy. Simultaneously, the protests have challenged the ANC’s moral credibility, pointing chiefly to the indiscretions of state President Jacob Zuma who has been publicly discredited by the so-called Nkandla Scandal, a reference to the allocation of US$23 million of public money to renovate his home in Kwa Zulu-Natal Province. The country’s Public Prosecutor had determined that the monies were improperly spent and ordered a partial repayment. After a measure of animated resistance to the ruling, Zuma not only eventually caved in but was forced into a humiliating apology to the nation.
This is not the first time that Zuma has been directly involved in public controversy, though in the wake of Nkandla he has become a lightning rod for political attacks on the ANC. Allegations of indiscretions have long stuck to him like a limpet mine and since Nkandla the state President’s army of critics have openly declared that an outrage of that magnitude ought to have been met with outright impeachment. At best, it seems that South Africans may have reached the conclusion that any serious reforms inside the ANC will have to wait out the Zuma presidency.
To be sure the ANC still has the lion’s share of local government control in South Africa. In Johannesburg, for example, it won 45 per cent of the popular vote, which, for any other political party would have been an astounding result; not so, however, for the ANC, a party which, since assuming power, has never returned an electoral result of under 60 per cent at any poll. These days, the altered political mathematics in the capital now means that the party that governs the country will have to form a coalition if it is to continue to meaningfully influence municipal politics in Johannesburg, the country’s key local government constituency.
So that while the school of thought that points to the outcome of the local government poll as the possible beginning of a political meltdown for the ANC might be – at least at this juncture – a considerable exaggeration, what is true is that what now appears to be an erosion of the party’s black majority base does not come as a complete shock to observers of South African politics. High unemployment, economic stagnation and a worrisome crime rate have combined with corruption-related scandals to raise the political temperature amongst disaffected blacks in the country. It is, too, far from unreasonable to conclude that a constituency that has long been taken for granted by the ANC has used the opportunity of the local government poll to punish South Africa’s ruling party over its failure to deliver on its promises. That section of the electorate that appears to have turned its back on the ANC can point to the fact that unemployment in the country is reportedly close to 40 per cent; simultaneously, political and labour protestors say that empowerment schemes designed to redress the economic injustices suffered by blacks under apartheid have reportedly been hijacked for the enrichment of well-placed ANC functionaries. Meanwhile, the nature of the labour-driven struggle for better conditions of work and pay in the country’s platinum mines continues to be reflected in the killing of 34 protestors at the Marikana Mine last year.
Promised land reform by the ANC has also failed to materialize, with the commitment to transferring 30% of farmland to blacks by 2014 under the so-called “willing seller, willing buyer” programme having foundered. Less than 10 per cent of the lands have changed hands.
Preoccupied, perhaps, with its domestic challenges, South Africa, in recent years, has made a less than impressive showing on the foreign policy front where much had been expected of the continent’s most developed country. Pretoria’s role as regional mediator in the Zimbabwe political impasse has brought no change in that politically troubled country, whilst South Africa’s military involvement in the crisis in the Central African Republic ended in the loss of more than a dozen of its soldiers with nothing in the way of a resolution of the crisis to show for it.
If nothing in the shifting sands of South Africa’s domestic politics suggests that the ANC is in imminent danger of losing its political grip on South Africa, the ruling party cannot afford to overlook the symbolic significance of the results of the August local government poll and perhaps more importantly, the loss of the constituency with the name of Nelson Mandela attached to it. It will also be mindful too that earlier this year the multi-racial Democratic Alliance (DA) the country’s major opposition party elected the 36 -year old Mmusi Maimane as its first black leader. Mmusi, who has emerged as one of the faces of South Africa’s post-apartheid generation of black leaders, has been seeking, cautiously, it would appear, to turn the DA into a ‘home’ for people of all races who have become disaffected with the ANC. The outcome of the local government poll would appear to suggest that an increasing number of South African blacks, once adherents of the country’s post-apartheid black majority political focus may now be listening to a somewhat different tune.
