A few months ago I wrote an unfinished article entitled ‘Entering our own ignorance’. It was a blurb I wrote concerning the period of ethical blindness in which the ANC had firmly entered into.
Further, I did not, at the time, envision the sort of dissatisfaction and backlash the ANC would get at this year’s local government polls. While this is not surprising given the time the party has been in power, it was a dramatic turn of events. However, the ANC obtained a resounding majority across the length and breadth of South Africa. And so contrary to the narrative peddled by the chattering classes, the party has proved itself durable.
Nevertheless, the 2016 elections, as Ebrahim Fakir noted at a seminar at UJ, has no grand narrative, so I’ll resist the urge to draw one. As the old adage goes, the ‘devil is in the details’. However, the reality is that the ANC won with a reduced majority!
So how do we interpret this result?
Now, let’s look at those niggling details which are just small enough to have serious ripple effects but might be perceived to be negligible for an organisational machinery as big as the ANC. Firstly, the ANC, across provinces, dropped between 5% to 15%. This means that while the 2019 elections may be assured for the ANC, with a further decreased majority, the 2019 elections could be more sketchy.
But before we get ahead of ourselves let’s look at what’s at stake
Let’s look at two crucial, if not also, symbolic, metropolitan losses. Crucial because of the patronage, and all its attendant ‘benefits’, that flow from it and symbolic because the one metro is the capital city of the country while the other is the economic centre of the Continent. Not only does losing these metros mean that the internal power balance of the ANC in that region change, but given the possible dried up resources, were the DA to government effectively, the DA’s win in these capitals also introduces the idea of the opposition as a national party. Yes, the implication here is that metros are a launch pad for national reach.
Compared to the 2011 local government elections, the ANC in the City of Johannesburg (CoJ), decreased by 14%. A similar scenario in the City of Tshwane (CoT) is evident with the ANC decreasing by 17%. Both the EFF and the DA increased their voter base, though the former starts off from a much lower base. Further to that, the EFF gained more from the losses of the ANC. In my view, this is because given the historical responsibility of the ANC, admittedly some will argue its ‘compromise vision’, aptly represented by the Freedom Charter, the disaggregation of that responsibility, in the foreseeable future, leaves the majority of the voter citizens, whom are black, to oscillate between the broad ideological framework of both the ANC and the EFF. Given the above, I contend that the piece meal success of the EFF is a qualitative win. By qualitative I mean they won numbers that may potentially translate into real power in the long term.
On the other hand, while the DA’s Maimane is a clear winner in these elections, although I suspect that the party was itself surprised by the turn of events, especially the CoJ, one gets a sense that evident that the DA is struggling to make inroads into the voter support base of the ANC: their growth was marginal in the two ‘capital’ metros. A 4% to 6% increase between the 2011 local elections and the 2016 elections is not an ‘aggressive’ growth for the party, especially given the own goals the ANC scored. So this is a quantitative win for the DA. By quantitative I mean that they won numbers which won’t necessarily translate into real power in the long term.
This is why, I suspect, Gareth Van Onselen recommends that the DA consider opening itself up to a further merger with a political party that can grow where the DA is unable to grow. According to his logic, I suspect, this is more precisely a merger in which the administrative strength of the DA is kept intact and the aesthetic/historical mantle of the ANC is retained. But this is not likely because such a merger would not be about dislodging racial capitalism. And because ‘administrative strength’ is equated with ‘white excellence’ within the DA’s organisational make up, keeping that intact might just arouse a racial backlash. In addition, it’s a public secret that the DA struggles to shed itself of its racial past.
So on the contrary, and contingent on the balance of factional power in the ANC, a further reconfiguration within the ANC might just respond to the many societal calls for historical redress: i.e. an end to racial capitalism. This is unless ‘we’ say that coalition politics in the main, representing our separate interests and needs, can better organise South African society?
So what do we really have?
What we have here is the future competing with the past: That is to mean, the ‘unraveling’ of competing visions under the umbrella of the ANC provides credence to the disaggregation of these visions into separate organisational vehicles. So the continued weakening of the ANC means that its overarching vision is compartmentalised between the DA and the ANC.
On the one hand, we have a DA vision which its growing ‘black caucus’ desires to continue the Mandela legacy, while on the other hand we have an EFF vision which yearns to dislodge the Mandela legacy. Since South African political society is, in part, fragmented along these lines, the outcome of the 2016 local government coalitions will, inevitably, come to a head. The issue here is which party can swing the electorate to its vision were the ANC to continue to unravel.
But I want to be a little bit more contrarian…
On the one side of the political spectrum, we have a large moderate electorate; one that is content with a moderate politics of the centre. Its better conceptualised as the Mandela legacy. In this spectrum, and anchored by the Black middle class core, who, located in a white episteme (they feel the direct impact of rating agencies, exchange rates, quantitative easing, and so on), have no lasting need for radical postures or policies. But this is not a subjective observation, at least not necessarily, but is an objective/structural one. It is this class that holds the keys to the metros for the ANC. And interestingly, as one Zuko Godlimpi noted, this class is more radical than the ANC on issues of racism but which, in the main, sits nearly comfortable with the benefits it gets from the economy. So the problem with this class, if we were to call it a class, is that its fidelity to the ‘national’ struggle is sporadic. This makes this strata ideologically compromised.
On the other side of the political spectrum, contrary to public opinion, the country is not moving towards a liberal political economy paradigm, as represented by the DA. The prize here is offering voters, from a policy and historical perspective, what the ANC offers and, more so, what it should have offered at the cusp of our democratic transition. The student protests, the upsurge of Black consciousness/identity and, since 2004, the sharp increase of ‘service delivery’ protests that shaped the ‘bottom up’ politics of South Africa, all affirm a narrative that seeks to dislodge the Mandela legacy: finally, recalling racial capitalism is on the table. However, this ‘class’ or social strata lacks economic power but has the ability to mobilise large sectors of society behind a common program. But this makes this strata organisationally weak.
In a manner of speak, these two spectrum’s mirror the battles within the ANC. So how the ANC navigates this round of politics will reverberate throughout society: that is to mean, the disaggregation of ANC vision is likely to reconfigure the social form of the South African polity.