While half the world’s population in 2024 is heading to the polls in 64 countries, there is a temptation to become fixated on just one contest: the US in November. The potential return of Donald Trump promises such chaos on the international stage and also seems to mark a precarious tipping point in the worldwide contest between autocracy’s Trump wannabes and democratic rule.
Elsewhere, however, are elections well worth watching. In South Africa, a tightly contested campaign for the May 29th general election has a bizarre neo-Trumpian twist. The ruling African National Congress (ANC), which 30 years ago ended apartheid, appears set to lose its majority and unshakeable hegemony for the first time. The ANC has 230 of parliament’s 400 seats.
President Cyril Ramaphosa, like Joe Biden, is fighting off predecessor Jacob Zuma, a populist demagogue and self-styled people’s hero. Zuma also faces criminal charges over an allegedly corrupt arms deal, and has already served time on contempt charges for refusing to testify at a public inquiry into corruption in which he was implicated.
And yet, although Zuma is indelibly associated with what has been called “state capture”, a system of cronyism and backhanders that reached up to the highest levels, his po-faced promise now is to restore integrity to the government. Drain the swamp.
Like Trump, however, allegations against him of corruption, and the accompanying “political persecution”, serve only to rally the faithful. When he was jailed in 2021, protests gave way to riots in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces and more than 300 people were killed.
Belatedly the ANC expelled him, only to see him launch a new party named provocatively after the ANC’s old, much-admired military wing, uMkonto we Sizwe (MK).
The latest polls show MK posing a very significant threat to his old comrades, not least in the two most populous provinces, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, where the ANC holds majorities in the legislatures.
A nationwide poll this week for the Brenthurst Foundation think-tank has found that the ANC’s support has fallen to 39 per cent, five points down in the past six months, making a coalition government highly likely after the election. That prospect will not come easy to an entitled ANC used to ruling on its own.
The ANC’s traditional appeal, that it led the heroic struggle to end apartheid, now rings hollow with a young generation born under its rule
The largest poll gains were recorded for the main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), up four percentage points to 27 per cent, and 13 per cent for Zuma’s new MK. The far left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), an earlier breakaway from the ANC, were at 10 per cent (-7). In KwaZulu-Natal, MK now appears set to be the largest party, on 25 per cent of the vote, with the anti-immigrant Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) on 19 per cent.
Overall nationally, with 33 per cent support, the 11-member Multi-Party Charter (MPC), an anti-ANC coalition including the DA and IFP, is poised only 6 percentage points behind the ANC.
Ramaphosa, although still the most popular politician, is on a hiding to nothing. Unemployment, voters’ top priority, is now at 32 per cent, with the country suffering rolling power blackouts and desperately poor service delivery. Corruption, with which the ANC is still tainted, comes next in voters’ preoccupations. Grist to the Zuma mill.
One old ANC stalwart, Mavuso Msimang, the head of the ANC’s Veterans League, who resigned over corruption and then retracted his resignation recently, tellingly rebuked the party. “Of course, the ANC did not invent corruption. We inherited a morally bankrupt state and that was built on the most profound forms of corruption. When we took over government in 1994, we had the moral high ground, and the conviction that we would be able to root out the old-boy networks that had benefited from, and strangled, the apartheid economy,” he wrote. “Yet, three decades later, the ANC’s track record of corruption is a cause of great shame. The corruption we once decried is now part of our movement’s DNA. This has had dire consequences for the most vulnerable members of our society.”
As the president is discovering, the ANC’s traditional appeal, that it led the heroic struggle to end apartheid, now rings hollow with a young generation born under its rule. “Nelson who?” the young ask.
In his recent state of the union address, Ramaphosa clumsily touted what he said were the party’s successes during its 30 years in power by conjuring up a fictitious “child of democracy”, Tintswalo, a Setswana name that translates as “gratitude”. She would have access to basic rights denied to the vast majority of non-whites under apartheid, including quality housing, education and healthcare.
The poll finds, however, that more than half the country’s 27 million voters blame “the ANC government of the last three decades” for the country’s problems. Only 11 per cent say apartheid was to blame. Widespread dissatisfaction with ANC governance increasingly trumps any legacy loyalty to the liberation movement.
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