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Elsewhere in Focus: South African Elections and Decline of ANC [1]

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Date: 2024-06-19  

Hello, everyone. Good morning, afternoon or evening, and welcome to this edition of Elsewhere in Focus. You can find all the articles in the series here (along with my other diaries).

I am sure everyone here knows that the African National Congress (ANC), the party that led South Africa out of the apartheid era, lost a majority for the first time in their history in the South African parliamentary elections held on 29th May 2024. I thought it might be useful to have an overview of the players and politics here, to the extent that I can find. So, that is the topic in focus this week and the next: analysis of the South African Parliamentary Elections 2024. For this week, we look at the reasons for the ANC’s decline.

I know this is relatively well covered news, and I hope that I’d not be boring you with redundant information.

South Africa: Elections 2024 and ANC Decline

Elections 2024

The ANC had garnered more than 60% vote in 1994 elections, the first elections in post apartheid South Africa that allowed all races to vote. In the 2004 elections, they garnered around 70% vote. And in every election since they have been losing vote share.

In the May elections, for the first time in thirty years, their vote share dropped below fifty percent. That is, they needed to form a coalition government to govern, despite being the single largest party. As the report from the Hindu Frontline says (01 June 2024).

The African National Congress (ANC) party lost its parliamentary majority in a historic election result on June 1 that puts South Africa on a new political path for the first time since the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule 30 years ago. With more than 99 per cent of votes counted, the once-dominant ANC had received just over 40 per cent in the May 29 election, well short of the majority it had held since the famed all-race vote of 1994 that ended apartheid and brought it to power under Nelson Mandela. The final results are still to be formally declared by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) that ran the election, but the ANC cannot pass 50 per cent. At the start of the election, the commission said it would formally declare the results by June 2, but that could come earlier. The ANC must now either negotiate a coalition government or at least persuade other parties to back Ramaphosa’s re-election in parliament to allow him to form a minority government reliant on other parties for support to pass budgets and legislation. Parliament elects the South African President after national elections. The second biggest party is the right wing and white dominant Democratic Alliance. Steenhuisen’s Democratic Alliance (DA) party was on around 21 per cent of the vote. The new uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) of former President Jacob Zuma, who has turned against the ANC he once led, was third with just over 14 per cent of the vote in the first election it has contested. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) was in fourth with just over 9 per cent. Why is ANC seeing such high levels of voter dissatisfaction? The inability to transform the lives of Black South Africans due to patronage politics may have something to do with it. From “The ANC’s precarious majority ahead of South Africa’s national elections”, Strategic Comments, 30:2, vii-x, DOI: 10.1080/13567888.2024.2334621

The economic and political backdrop to the election could not be less favourable for the ruling party or more advantageous to its opponents. During Ramaphosa’s six years in office there have been frequent calls for the renewal of party and state, after what he called the ‘nine wasted years’ of Jacob Zuma’s presidency. Demonstrable progress towards those ends has been meagre, however, and principal economic indicators remain very troubling. Growth is negligible, with the National Treasury placing it at 0.6% for 2023 and averaging 1.4% from 2024 to 2026, which will fail to dent existing levels of poverty and unemployment. Debt as a share of GDP reached 73.7% in 2023, an increase from 51.5% in 2018, and will likely continue rising, with debt servicing placing a huge burden on accounts. GDP per capita has not grown since 2007, and unemployment remains alarmingly high at 31.9%, with youth unemployment at 43.4%. Half of the population – 30 million people – live on or below the poverty line. The government’s boast that 28m people now benefit from social grants provides an implicit admission of the failure of the wider economy to generate real prospects, and this is likely unsustainable in light of the county’s weakened fiscal position. Due to corruption and incompetent management, the South African state remains dysfunctional and incapable of delivering basic services efficiently, or often at all, in electricity, water and transport. This, in turn, has undermined the idea of a ‘developmental state’ driving the transformation process, which forms a core part of ANC dogma. For example, the national power utility Eskom has presided over 15 years of rolling power cuts, an energy crisis that is harming businesses, stifling growth and investment, and alienating the ANC’s supporters. While Ramaphosa has tried to publicly draw a line under the systemic corruption of the Zuma period, there remains a gulf between aspiration and performance. In 2023, the country received its lowest-ever score on the annual Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International. It is now ranked 11th in sub-Saharan Africa and is categorised as a ‘flawed democracy’. It is clear that, however dominant it has been hitherto, these are not circumstances in which the ANC can confidently enter an election campaign.

Thirty years after the apartheid ended, most of the Black population still live in poverty. As per the World Inequality Report 2022, the reason is a lack of structural reforms (page 217).

Available estimates suggest that income inequality in South Africa has been extreme throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The top 10% income share oscillated between 50 and 65% in this period, whereas the bottom 50% of the population has never captured more than 5-10% of national income. While democratic rights were extended to the totality of the population after the end of apartheid in 1991, extreme economic inequalities have persisted and been exacerbated. Postapartheid governments have not implemented structural economic reforms (including land, tax and social security reforms) sufficient to challenge the dual economy system. While the richest South Africans have wealth levels broadly comparable with those of affluent Western Europeans, the bottom 50% in South Africa own no wealth at all. The top 10% own close to 86% of total wealth and the share of the bottom 50% is negative, meaning that the group has more debts than assets. Since 1990, the average household wealth for the bottom 50% has remained under zero. South Africa stands out as an exception in the sub- Saharan African region. The country’s female labor income share is equal to 36%, which is significantly higher than the regional average (28%). Gender inequalities in South Africa are comparable with levels observed in Western Europe (where the average earnings of women are equal to 38% of total national income on average). South Africa is one of the highest emitters in Africa. On average, GHG emissions per capita are equal to 7.2 tCO2e/capita. This is slightly fewer than in China (8.0) and France (8.7) but considerably more than in other African countries, including Kenya

(1.4), and is well over the sub-Saharan African average. On average, the top 10% emit 10 times more emissions than the bottom 50%. Since the early 1990s, these high levels of carbon inequality have remained constant.

The BBC’s Barbara Plett-Usher has a story that gives you a glimpse of what the poorest South Africans endure (28 May 2024).

Jameelah’s room was once a morgue; Faldilah’s was a bathroom; Bevil’s – the doctor’s office where he came to collect his diabetes medication. All of them are squatting in a derelict hospital in the South African city of Cape Town, protesting at what they see as the government’s failure to deliver affordable housing. The end of apartheid brought political rights and freedoms for all. But on the eve of the country’s seventh democratic election, enduring inequality still divides this country. And in many cases the housing policies of the governing African National Congress (ANC) has inadvertently reinforced the geography of apartheid, rather than reversed it. Activists belonging to a movement called Reclaim the City occupied the Woodstock Hospital in the dead of night seven years ago. The aim was to take over property close to the city centre, says one of the leaders, Bevil Lucas, because access to the jobs and services this offers is key to righting the wrongs of segregation. “A new form of economic apartheid” has replaced the racist laws that kept black and coloured people (as mixed-race South Africans are known), trapped in poverty in townships at Cape Town’s edges, he tells the BBC. “The poor and vulnerable have generally been pushed to the periphery of the city.” They now have the right to move but cannot afford the high rents demanded by property developers in the city centre. For Jameelah Davids, location was everything. “My moving in here was because of my son who's autistic,” she says. “He goes to school around the corner. It was so near for him. Everything is there. And he's flourished.” She settled her family in the former office of the hospital morgue.

That is, their policies towards housing reinforced earlier spatial segregation thanks to their reluctance (or inability) to engage in wholesale land redistribution.

The ANC took power 30 years ago with a Freedom Charter that promised housing to a population deprived of secure and comfortable homes by apartheid. Since then, it has built more than three million and granted ownership for free, or for rent at below market rates. But the lists for government houses are still long – Ms Davids has been waiting for nearly 30 years, Ms Petersen for longer. And most have been built far from the city centre, where land is cheaper, failing to reverse the spatial planning of apartheid that embedded inequalities. Nowhere is that more the case than Cape Town, says Nick Budlender, an urban policy researcher, calling it “probably the most segregated urban area anywhere on Earth”.

AP’s Mogomotsi Magome has another story on the economic conditions in South Africa.

How did this state of affairs come about? Perhaps, we will see an answer in the history of ANC since 1994.

ANC Until 1994: A Brief History

Before we look at ANC performance post Nelson Mandela, let us take a look at the organisation’s history up to 1994.

The ANC was born in 1912 as South African Native National Congress. South African History Online has a brief overview.

The African National Congress (ANC) is South Africa's governing party and has been in power since the transition to democracy in April 1994. The organisation was initially founded as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) on 8 January 1912 in Bloemfontein, with the aim of fighting for the rights of black South Africans. The organization was renamed the ANC in 1923. While the organization’s early period was characterized by political inertia due to power struggles and lack of resources, increasing repression and the entrenchment of white minority rule galvanized the party. As a result of the establishment of apartheid, its aversion to dissent by Black people and brutal crackdown of political activists, the ANC together with the SACP formed a military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation/ MK) in 1961. Through MK, the ANC waged the armed struggle and obtained support from some African countries and the Soviet bloc for its activities. With the increasing internal dissent, international pressure and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the apartheid government was forced to enter into negotiations with the ANC. This saw the collapse of apartheid and the ushering in of democratic rule in 1994. In the national elections from 1994 to 2004, the ANC had consistently risen in electoral popularity. With the 2009 elections, the party suffered a drop in popularity that was repeated in 2014. This time period also coincided with the presidency of Jacob Zuma. The ANC rose in popularity in the 1940s after an entry of left wing leaders forced it to turn towards movement politics and union organising. Srinivasan Ramani’s article for the Hindu gives some of these details (26 May 2024). Formed in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress to press for rights of Black South Africans, it was renamed to its current appellation in 1923 and mostly functioned as an organisation devoted to getting legislation passed in favour of the community. But by the 1940s, with the influx of younger left-wing activists committed to mass mobilisation movements, trade union activity and resistance tactics, the ANC, under the leadership of Alfred Xuma, had become a major movement. In the 1950s, the ANC intensified its mass campaigns, which included strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience movements, and by 1955, it was a key signatory to the “Freedom Charter” that became vital to the anti-Apartheid struggle. Other signatories included parties and organisations such as the South African Communist Party (SACP), the South African Indian Congress and trade unions. The SACP, along with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), remains aligned with the ANC as part of the Tripartite Alliance, which was forged in 1990 after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. Organisations aligned with the ANC such as the uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK or Spear of the Nation) launched an armed struggle against Apartheid in the 1960s after the ANC itself was banned and its leadership went underground. Leaders like Mandela were arrested and remained in jail for nearly three decades. Negotiations by the Apartheid regime with the ANC to end the system and transit into multi-racial democracy began in the 1980s. After the release of Mandela and the lifting of the ban on the ANC in the early 1990s, an interim Constitution was ratified. The ANC clinched a thumping victory in the 1994 elections and Mandela became President. The party was popular during the Mandela years and saw its peak in terms of electoral performance in 2004 under Thabo Mbeki (despite his turn to neoliberalism). Then, the decline began.

Jacob Zuma and State Capture

Under Thabo Mbeki, the country turned to neoliberalism and under Jacob Zuma, neoliberalism and state capture became entrenched, leaving most of the Black population and many of the biracial population poor. Benjamin Fogel and Sean Jacobs writes about those years for Africa Is a Country (22 Feb 2018).

Zuma nearly decade long regime will go down as the worst presidency of the post-apartheid order. Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratic president, cemented a reputation as the great unifier; a father of the nation. As a result, even Mandela’s harshest critics tone down the effects of his economic policies or the failure of his regime to tackle head-on the legacies of South Africa’s racist past in favor of reconciliation. Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, was loved by business elites and birthed South Africa’s now thriving black middle class (including the black students who fronted #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall in 2015 and 2016). Mbeki’s government, however, set records for the number of street protests against it over the privatization of water, electricity, housing evictions, and, crucially, his unforgivable denialist response to South Africa’s HIV/AIDS crisis.

Thanks to trade union opposition to Mbeki’s neoliberal policies, Jacob Zuma managed to present himself as the leftist opposition to Mbeki despite rape accusation and corrupt arms deals.

Zuma was a flawed figure from the start; ANC, trade union and communist leaders such as Ronnie Kasrils (who served as a government minister under Mandela, Mbeki and Zuma), had long questioned his leadership qualities and Zuma had been implicated in widespread corruption and survived a rape trial (he was accused of raping the daughter of his former Robben Island prison cell mate). In 2005, Mbeki fired Zuma, the then-deputy president, over corruption charges. The anti-Mbeki forces including most of the left such as the South African Communist Party (SACP) and largest trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), coalesced around Zuma claiming that he was the victim of a political conspiracy. It helped that Zuma came across as humble with the common touch, something the aloof Mbeki lacked. While hired mobs burned effigies of the woman he was accused of raping and chanted “burn the bitch,” the left — including COSATU’s then general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi — declared that Zuma would reverse neoliberalism in South Africa. When the ANC’s national elective conference in the city of Polokwane (held every five years) came around in 2007, Zuma was swept into power. Mbeki was forced to retire as the country’s president one year later and in 2009, on the back of an improved ANC showing at the polls, Zuma was elected South Africa’s President. If the poor expected respite from the global recession or the negative effects of neoliberal policies from Zuma, what they got instead was increased repression and state violence, politicization of key institutions of the South African state (to settle political disputes within the ANC), widespread incompetence (for example, temporary chaos in making welfare payments to desperate poor people) and extensive political influence peddling; what South Africans call “State Capture.” The latter refers to a particular type of corrupt relationship between the state and outside interests usually capitalists, in which private interests take control of key elements of the state and are directly able to influence, guide and shape policy. South Africa has a long history of state capture; alliances and collusions between various white regimes and white business facilitated the super exploitation of the black majority during colonialism and Apartheid. In its post-apartheid version, the Guptas, an Indian business clan close to Zuma, were able to hire and fire ministers, guide state appropriation policy and even manage to change official affirmative action policy to include them as naturalized black South Africans.

Both the South African left and the ANC themselves supported Zuma through his actions at least until mid 2010s.

Zuma broke South Africa’s left. In August 2012, police gunned down, in broad daylight, 34 miners in Marikana, in South Africa’s North West Province. The ANC government and their allies in COSATU and the SACP claimed that the murdered workers were “criminals” who, aided by potions, charged the police in a suicidal frenzy and thus deserved to die. Evidence later emerged that the police had been placed under political pressure by ANC politicians including Ramaphosa to intervene in the strike and that the massacre was not some sort of tragic accident, but a deliberate premeditated act. As a member of the mine’s board Ramaphosa sent an email saying the strike was “dastardly criminal and must be characterized as such.” As a result, “… in line with this characterization, there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation.”

Imagine trade unions calling striking workers criminals.

Jacob Zuma’s dabbling in corruption seems to have been extensive. In Dan Mafora’s piece for Africa Is a Country, you can read more about it (05 May 2021).

A second report by Madonsela, released in October 2016, put Zuma at the center of a grand scheme of corruption known now to South Africans as “state capture” (nowadays the subject of a well-publicized government commission). In it, she investigated claims that Zuma had allowed and indeed empowered the Guptas, a wealthy Indian family, to make and influence the making of important executive decisions. These included, among others, the appointment of cabinet members: it was alleged that several high-ranking ANC members of parliament had been invited to the Gupta household and offered bagfuls of cash and cabinet positions in exchange for government contracts. This, it was alleged, led to almost all of South Africa’s state-owned companies being bled dry of cash by overpriced and illegally concluded deals. Zuma was alleged to have been either personally involved in or aware of many of these dealings. In her report, Madonsela found that there were many claims which warranted further investigation and that due to the lack of resources in her office and the impending end of her term—which would act as a time limit on the investigation—it was necessary that they be referred to a commission of inquiry for a proper and fuller investigation.

Even so, the 2019 general elections saw ANC get nearly 57% of the vote though only 40% or so eligible voters turned out. What happened in the Cyril Ramaphosa years?

Facing Jacob Zuma: The Cyril Ramaphosa Years

Cyril Ramaphosa failed to deal with corruption comprehensively.

This may be because many of the ANC’s major leaders were implicated in the scandal. Anthony Butler’s biography of Ramaphosa for Oxford Research Encyclopaedia provides details of his governance (19 October 2022).

When it came to government, Ramaphosa’s approach initially reflected the cautious, consensus-forming, and institution-building approach that had marked his earlier career. One key priority was the state-owned enterprises, which had been ruinously mismanaged over the previous decade. Ramaphosa appointed new ministers, replaced the most corrupt and problematic boards, and moved the organizations some way toward financial sustainability. The new president also took an incremental approach to addressing corruption, perhaps in part because so many leading ANC figures had become implicated in it. Presidential commissions of inquiry helped restore the revenue service and the Public Investment Corporation, which manages public-sector pension funds, to better health. Ramaphosa also instituted a more transparent process for appointing National Prosecuting Authority directors and launched an investigation into the functioning of the intelligence services. He set in motion reforms to the structure of the state, promised a reduction in the complexity and cost of governance, and created new interventions in the failing municipal sphere of government. His economic policy positions remained somewhat ambivalent, with a characteristic ANC mix of pro-market and strongly statist economic-sector ministers appointed to cabinet. Ramaphosa’s focus on investment was initially lauded, but there were growing complaints that the economic reforms needed to stimulate economic growth were slow in coming. In foreign affairs, Ramaphosa’s continued South Africa’s longer-term support for an African Continental Free Trade Area.

If we look at the data quoted in Strategic Comments, South Africa saw economic stagnation and deterioration in his years. Most of it may be thanks to Zuma as Ramaphosa claims, worsened by Covid 19. The point though is that change has been slow in coming. Most of the Black majority of the country remain poor. Democracy may have won as Gerald Imray reports for ABC, but the dangers remain (6 June 2024).

It wasn't meant to underestimate South Africa's troubles, though, and they are stark: The South African Human Rights Commission, one of several independent bodies set up by the government with a mandate to guard democracy, found in 2021 that 64% of Black people in South Africa and 40% of those with biracial heritage were classified as poor, but for white people that figure was only 1%. That must change quickly, Madonsela warned, or South Africa's democracy could face sterner tests ahead and the constitution that she co-wrote could be in danger of becoming “meaningless" to people. She cautioned that some might conflate the failure of the ANC with the failure of democracy as a whole. More than 80% of South Africa's population is Black and the frustration of millions over broken government promises cannot be underestimated.

Would things be different in Ramaphosa’s new term as President in a coalition government? We can read about it next week.

Until next Wednesday everyone. Stay safe. Be well. Take care.

May the people find a way to tap democracy to our advantage. Don’t leave it to politicians because they won’t do it without consistent pressure; not just in terms of elections but movement politics and other forces.

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