The political party almost synonymous with anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress (ANC), is losing its grip on power. At the same time, South African President and ANC party head Jacob Zuma is attempting to tighten his hold on the reins.
Zuma announced he will begin to directly oversee state enterprises that have been the source of public corruption, while he continues to battle his finance minister for control over the Treasury.
This comes one month after Zuma’s ANC lost local elections in three major municipalities: Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg (the country’s economic hub), and the capital Pretoria.
“The recent local government elections have demonstrated that the ANC is actually much more vulnerable than we had previously thought,” South African national Prince Mashele tells The Cipher Brief.
Mashele, who is Executive Director of South African think tank The Centre for Politics and Research (CPR), notes, “It is no longer expected or a given that the ANC will win the 2019 [national] elections.”
The party that has become a symbol of liberation, especially for black South Africans oppressed under apartheid, is also losing ground in the less urbanized parts of the country. The University of Johannesburg’s Steven Friedman explains, “In percentage terms, it [the ANC] lost more ground in the rural provinces than the urban ones. So although the headline news has been that the ANC lost control of three major cities, in effect it lost ground across the board.”
The driving forces behind the ANC’s dismal performance last month boil down to three factors: corruption, an urban-rural divide, and economics.
“The ANC is now regarded in South Africa as a corrupt party,” says Mashele. “Over the past eight years or so, it has been led by a very compromised leader – Jacob Zuma – who has hopped from one scandal to the other,” he says.
Indeed, a South African court ruled in June that Zuma must face 783 corruption charges that prosecutors had dropped shortly before his election to the presidency in 2009. Before that, in March, the country’s highest court determined Zuma violated the South African constitution by failing to repay federal money spent on his private home.
When Zuma won the election seven years ago, conflicts within the ANC – an extremely diverse group of supporters and politicians – began to intensify and the ability of the party to discipline itself weakened, Executive Director of Johannesburg-based Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) Ivor Chipkin tells The Cipher Brief.
One of those conflicts is the growing urban-rural split within the ANC. “[The societal] divide between people who rely on patronage and people who are integrated in the market runs right through the ANC,” says Friedman, who is the director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg and Rhodes University.
Friedman explains that if the ANC picks a presidential candidate at the end of 2017, when the party holds its own elections, who is concerned about interests of the urban populace and focuses on stamping out corruption, then the party has a chance of staying in power come 2019.
On the other hand, if the new ANC leader ends up being more like President Zuma – who Chipkin says represents the traditional conservative ANC base – it is much less likely the ANC will win a majority in 2019, according to the analysts.
Economics plays a large part in all of this. “The poor living conditions of black South Africans have not fundamentally changed since the ANC took power in 1994,” Mashele comments.
Even though in the past two decades since apartheid ended there has been a growing middle-class black community that is integrated into the market economy, Friedman points out that, “you still have huge numbers of people who are excluded.”
These South Africans who remain on the outskirts of the market tend to still align themselves with the ANC – as opposed to the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), or the ANC breakaway party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) – because the opposing parties espouse rhetoric in support of markets and the middle class.
However, the problem for the ANC is that perceived party corruption and economic malaise mean that even its traditional support base – that is, the non-market integrated community – is not casting ballots. “The big story in this election [this past August] – whether in urban areas or rural areas – was ANC supporters staying away from the polls entirely in protest,” remarks Friedman.
If the ANC continues down its path of corruption, it elects a new party head who alienates the numerically large urbanized support group, and the economic status of the ANC’s non-urbanized support remains stagnant, it is likely that some ANC voters will stay home, others will switch to support to the opposition, and DA and EFF voters will come out en masse.
In this scenario, which analysts say is a real possibility, there is a high chance the ANC, for the first time since its more than 20-year post-apartheid rule, will be thrown out of power.
Kaitlin Lavinder is a reporter at The Cipher Brief.
