The political party associated with anti-apartheid leader and former South African President Nelson Mandela – the African National Congress (ANC) – may, for the first time since apartheid ended, be in a position to lose the next presidential elections in 2019. The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder spoke with the University of Johannesburg’s Steven Friedman about the forces behind the ANC’s dwindling support.
The Cipher Brief: The ANC suffered losses in local elections last month. Where were these losses, and what are the demographics of the regions where the losses occurred?
Steven Friedman: The expectation was that the ANC would do very badly in urban areas and much better in rural areas. The reason for that is that residents of urban areas, particularly black residents of urban areas, are much more integrated into the market economy than people in the rural areas, and they, therefore, tend to be more critical of government. What happened is that the ANC lost control of three major metropolitan municipalities, but in percentage terms, it 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. It lost ground in rural and urban areas, and, in some cases, the losses in rural areas were greater than those in urban areas.
TCB: What are the factors behind this? Why did the ANC see losses in the rural areas?
SF: In 2014, the ANC lost substantial ground in urban areas, particularly in Gauteng province, which is where Johannesburg and Pretoria are the big economic centers. That led to a debate within the ANC on how to respond to this particular phenomenon. Urban politicians – those who have a connection to the market in the urban areas – think the answer to this is to regain support among urban voters. Rural politicians think there’s no point in trying to get these urban voters back because they are lost to the ANC. Instead, they think the ANC ought to shore up the rural vote and make sure that the urban vote doesn’t matter as much.
The way this faction of the ANC went about this was to work with traditional leaders in rural areas and essentially give them more power in exchange for those leaders securing a large number of votes for the ANC in their constituencies. However, this was, in my view, very unpopular with many people in the rural areas because it involved attempts to shift land from small farmers to the traditional leaders.
TCB: What were the driving forces behind the ANC losses in 2014?
SF: This was a very clear urban-rural split. In 1994, when apartheid ended, South Africa was a highly concentrated economy with very strong barriers to entry, and the reason for that was mainly racial exclusion. It was an economy mainly for white people and not for black people. What has happened in the last 20 or so years is that a section of black society has been integrated into that market economy. Either they’re professionals or in management, or in many cases people who are regularly employed in the workplace. But you still have huge numbers of people who are excluded. Those people rely very much on politicians for economic lifelines. Whereas the first group is reliant mainly on the market, the second group is reliant on politicians.
The group that is reliant on the market increasingly is rejecting the ANC. They feel it’s corrupt and does not serve their interests. They are moving to other parties or staying at home and not voting.
TCB: What are the other parties that are gaining popularity, in opposition to the ANC?
SF: Other parties aren’t gaining substantially from the ANC. The big story in this election – whether in urban areas or rural areas – was ANC supporters staying away from the polls entirely in protest. Despite disillusionment with the ANC over the past few years, the ANC historically has a very strong symbolic appeal to voters and, for that reason, most of the unhappy ANC voters aren’t transferring their support to another party – they’re just not voting.
The two major parties that would like to get the ANC vote are the Democratic Alliance (DA), which is the official opposition, and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). The Democratic Alliance started off as a party almost exclusively of white people in the suburbs and a couple other racial minorities, and it has been trying over the last few years to extend its appeal to black people. It’s essentially a pro-market party, which tends to represent many of the interests of middle class people.
The EFF is a breakaway from the ANC. It very often is understood by the media as a left-wing party, because it tends to use a lot of left-wing rhetoric. However, the EFF appeals to those middle class black voters who feel that although their economic circumstances have improved and they now have qualifications that their parents and grandparents didn’t have, they still encounter the same racial attitudes as their parents and grandparents encountered in business and the professions and universities. Therefore, they gravitate toward the EFF argument that whites control too much of the economy, and that blacks should have a greater share of the economy.
If you look at what happened in this past election compared to the last election, the DA improved by five percentage points and the EFF by two percentage points. That is not much. And most of that was achieved, not because voters switched to those parties, but because the DA, in particular, was able to get its voters out in a much more efficient manner than the ANC. Essentially, the DA supporters (particularly in the suburbs) were keen to vote, seeing this as a huge opportunity, and they came out in huge numbers.
TCB: You’ve talked about how the South Africans who are becoming more reliant on the market are the ones who are not voting for the ANC. Will this trend continue? If so, what does the ANC need to do to maintain power?
SF: Whether it continues or not is going to depend on the internal politics of the ANC. This divide between people who rely on patronage and people who are integrated in the market runs right through the ANC. So you have two factions within the ANC, and what they’re competing about at the moment is who will become the next ANC presidential candidate, which will be at the end of 2017 (with the national election in 2019).
Will the next president be one who is concerned about the interests of people in the cities, who is going to try to show urban voters that the ANC is not corrupt and shares their interests? Or is the next president going to be one of the patronage politicians?
If the first group wins, then there is a very high possibility the ANC will be re-elected in 2019, because many of those voters who were not prepared to vote for the ANC will go back. Remember, they have not crossed over to an opposition party.
If, however, the patronage group wins, there is a high possibility the ANC would lose its overall majority because it would not win back any votes in the cities. And what we’ve learned in this past election is that the ANC cannot generate enough votes outside the cities to cancel out losing in the cities.
In other words, the ANC will be reelected in 2019 if it can win back city voters, and it can only win back city voters by electing a different sort of candidate.
