The ANC's choices

Sustained mismanagement cost it its majority

The end of the African National Congress’ (ANC’s) monopoly on power may be a dismaying development for South Africa’s Grand Old Party, which has led the country since the fall of the apartheid regime. But for this $400 billion economy that was once perceived to share a position in an elite grouping of developing economies — Brics or Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa — 30 years of dominance has proven a liability for the country’s 60 million people. Having performed well for the first decade after 1994, when the charismatic Nelson Mandela was elected the country’s first black President, economic growth has been anaemic, falling to 0.6 per cent in 2023 from 1.9 per cent in 2022. Per capita income has stagnated, and unemployment at 33 per cent is among the highest in the world. According to the World Bank, 55.5 per cent of the population live in poverty and, ironically, the country is one of the most unequal in the world.

The principal cause of this crisis has been the inability to build state capacity, which was once geared towards benefitting a tiny white minority. Over the past 15 years, key infrastructure services — electricity, transport, railways, ports, and sanitation — have deteriorated. This has severely limited the country’s ability to build on the natural advantages of mining and mineral reserves — it is the world’s fifth-largest diamond producer — and tourism. Corruption is rife — incumbent President Cyril Ramaphosa’s predecessor, Jacob Zuma, was forced to resign following complicity in a corrupt arms deal. The country has also failed to reverse the notorious spatial exclusion policies of the apartheid era, which kept crowded Black townships at great distances from the central business districts and cut off from key economic infrastructure, and isolated former Black homelands from the industrialised belts. Post-apartheid urban planning and zoning policies precluded the creation of affordable housing near city centres. As a result, most urban Black South Africans still live in slum-like townships on the fringes of fragmented cities where job commutes are long and expensive.

Given this story of “stagnation and exclusion”, it is no surprise that the ANC has lost its parliamentary majority. With 40.18 per cent of the vote share in an election that saw the lowest turnout in 30 years (58.64 per cent), it will be forced to seek a coalition partner to cross the requisite 50 per cent to form the government. It faces tough choices. The party with the second-largest vote percentage at 21.8 per cent is the Democratic Alliance (DA), the ANC’s traditional Opposition, which has long championed economic liberalism and opposed fiscal transfers and affirmative action in employment. But the DA is seen as a party of the privileged White minority — it is headed by a 48-year-old stridently pro-business white man — requiring the ANC, the party that fought apartheid, to make a potentially painful choice. The DA may, however, be a better choice than Jacob Zuma’s MK Party, which polled a surprising 14.6 per cent, or the communist and Black nationalist party Economic Freedom Fighters with 9.5 per cent of the votes. The Western Cape Province, which the DA has controlled since 2009, has lower unemployment levels and better infrastructure among South Africa’s provinces. But its standing among the Black majority is low, suggesting that the ANC is faced with a difficult choice.