Picture credit for Jacob Zuma: moneyweb.co.za; picture credit for Mmusi Maimane: kougademocrat.com
As the drama of coalition governments takes shape we are witnessing simultaneously a momentous era in South African politics drawing to a close. We watch, in all likelihood, the end of dominance by the African National Congress (ANC).
It had been a historic time, as the post-political liberation ANC savoured well-deserved power and consolidated its hold over state and society. The ANC thought its political kingdom was just beginning to settle. However, the complexities and trickery of electoral politics were biting at its heels. Then it became 2016; and the aftermath of local elections is unfolding.
We are spectators to an excruciating event – the ANC struggling to come to terms with a new reality: the dominant liberation movement party has suffered dangerous declines, the latest in the local elections of 2016. It is hanging on, but is facing further seemingly inevitable regressions. There is part denial, part remorse, part introspection, and large-part attempted reinvention-that-stops-short-of-reinvention. More complexities arise with the ANC as governing party and ANC-fused-with-the-state, operating from a different world, one that is effectively light years away from the party that has forfeited its outright majorities and right to govern in the political and economic heartland of South Africa.
The ANC conventionally does better at national than at local elections (and opposition parties better at local ones). Even with this figured in, the ANC is staring its own worst fears in the face. Its electoral support base is buckling under a multi-pronged opposition offensive, fuelled by (to paraphrase) the ANC circa 2016’s managerialist mantra of excellent performance (“we have delivered”), hyper-protection of a flawed president (“President Jacob Zuma is not going anywhere”), and a by now drained parade of liberation credentials (“bear with us, we are still busy liberating South Africa from apartheid and colonialism”).
The 2016 opposition onslaught slowed, perhaps stopped, the ANC in its tracks. The clock of electoral trends caught up with the now former juggernaut. The ANC is still digesting this change of seasons. It lost the metropolitan municipalities, but does it not still hold a good 62 percent of national electoral support? Does it not still govern eight of the nine provinces? Does the room-sized Electoral Commission map not largely reflect the green that the commission used to signify ANC victories in the week of 3 August? Is the party not well entrenched in the state, with loyal cadres deployed across the strategically important state institutions?
The ANC’s under-preparedness to grasp the reality of its declining dominance was tangible in ANC spokesperson Zizi Kodwa’s response to the largely green results board at the IEC national results centre. The ANC is still dominant; the board is largely green, he argued. But below that green surface there were at least 50 other shades of green.
The magnitude of the change went beyond pre-election projections. This time around we had expected downward adjustments in the ANC’s popular endorsements, a continuation of a gradual trend. The result was to have been just another step down the ANC’s graph of measured decline. Instead the graph blipped and three-stepped downward. It brought the ANC’s electoral power to a point we had imagined would still be a few years off, perhaps two or three elections away. Now it is staring down an abyss, where, should the 2016 trend be repeated at national and provincial elections in 2019, the ANC will lose national-level majority power.
The ANC is not ready to plunge into an unambiguous voter charm offensive that might pull supporters back into the fold. It is dissecting the complex 2016 voting choices, in which votes were cast on a big-issue-local-issue amalgam of identity, liberation, service and corruption issues. Black African voters – the electoral “kingmakers” – are among those who are angry about the disrepute the ANC leadership has brought. Many hope the DA or EFF or a wise coalition will help disentangle the ANC’s governance muddle. The so-called township voters gave modest but growing support to the DA and the EFF while large tracts of voters from rural and urban areas continued believing in their ANC. The loyal ones responded to the ANC campaign that hammered home the messages of the DA as reactionary and racist, and the EFF as irresponsible and immature.
The ANC is battling to process that while the election was not a referendum on President Jacob Zuma, his scandals and controversies symbolise the problems and predicaments that delivered the ANC’s 2016 result. His image on the posters and billboards – the derided, tired face – reinforced the connotations of corruption that haunted the ANC in its campaign. It was manna to the opposition parties. The issue is not one that can be dealt with easily. The faction that installed Zuma is the exact one that is now protecting him. Their own power base will implode should they question his appropriateness as leader.
The ANC had hitherto believed that its famed ability to self-correct would redirect it into stabilised or improved electoral fortunes. It had not reckoned that its supporters would switch votes to the EFF and DA, back to the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), to independents or stay at home instead of rallying to the ANC’s rescue on voting day. The ANC continues to proclaim the belief that it will revive its citizen trust and electoral support, that it has heard the voters and intends to work for their support the next time around. Yet all available evidence suggests that this ship is not for turning – at least not any time soon or any time fast.
Part of the ANC’s 2016 local elections story is that the party’s repair team appears not to have been constituted. The ANC’s conviction that it was invincible electorally precluded the existence of such a team. Like the “amorphous markets” there was supposed to have been a benevolent invisible hand to stop the ANC from moving towards the precipice.
Its reaction to the election result has been feeble. It called a National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting to bring on the introspection. It wondered fleetingly whether an altered electoral system might correct the problem. Then the preliminary blame game followed: the ANC did not lose; its supporters were apathetic and failed to vote. It was still to digest that abstention might be, among others, a deliberate political choice. The turnout of 57 percent nationally did not support the abstention argument – on average it was only one percentage point down from 2011. Given the fever-pitch campaigns voters knew that their votes would make a difference, and this inevitably encouraged a high turnout. Besides, 57 percent for local elections is high.
Other forms of blame for the result are still to solidify. The ANC of Gauteng might still be made the fall province for failing to secure outright ANC majorities in Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni. Blaming Gauteng, however, would be a dead end – the ANC declined across provinces, including in the Limpopo, Mpumalanga and North-West stomping grounds of the Premier League. KwaZulu-Natal was the only province in which ANC support had not declined – and here it registered a meagre one percentage point growth, probably due to the IEC’s disqualification of the National Freedom Party.
It was a multi-pronged, multi-party opposition pincer grip that carried the ANC’s electoral decline. Had the EFF not also feasted on ANC core support the DA would not have come within striking range in the core metros beyond Cape Town. A study of municipal-level party percentages shows that the ANC lost support virtually across the board. In many of the smaller towns the EFF expanded into the ANC base, while the DA remained proportionately stable, often registering minimal growth. The joint DA-EFF percentage growth in many cases corresponds precisely to the ANC’s percentage decline.
Unperturbed by local-level drama, almost as if local elections 2016 had not happened, life in the Zuma lane of South African politics continues. Sources close to the president argue that he is not going anywhere – he might even reshuffle his cabinet to drive home the point that he is in charge. In the process a Zuma clone in the form of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma could be slipped in. Yet Zuma dominance – both personally and as a symbol of the broader political order – is no longer compatible with ANC dominance.
The opposition parties are laughing all the way to the next ballot box.
- Susan Booysen is professor at Wits School of Governance, author of Dominance and decline: The ANC in the time of Zuma
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