The ANC enters its most dangerous election yet: Terence Corrigan - Biznews

Terence Corrigan
The local government elections have been announced for 4 November, heralding a campaign season that will be keenly watched, and whose results will be anticipated.

By all evidence, this will be the next leg of South Africa’s political reconfiguration. It is the story of the growth of a more competitive political arena, of the evolution of the African National Congress, and of what the upcoming polls will say about its future.

For the first time, the ANC will be contesting an election without the psychological advantage of knowing that it dominates South Africa’s politics, nationally, the way it used to.

It may have fallen below 50% in the 2021 municipal elections, but it was the blow of the 2024 national results that shattered its sense of invincibility. Prior to that, its hand was firmly on the national tiller, and it commanded an unmatched aggregate of support. Even a decade ago, a loss of its electoral majority was hard to imagine. The Institute was on the receiving end of a great deal of scorn for calling on the country to prepare itself for this inevitability. Survey evidence now suggests that maintaining the vote share the ANC achieved in 2024 – around 40% – would be a good outcome for the party in 2026.

The ANC has become associated with the pathologies that bedevil South Africa and its municipalities: incompetence, corruption, economic stagnation, and declining living standards. The Social Research Foundation points out that the signifier “anti-poor” is ascribed to the ANC by 26% of voters, more than 10 percentage points above any other. Even 38% of those who identified themselves as ANC supporters agreed with this characterisation.

Meanwhile, the country’s towns and cities provide a persistent reminder of accumulated governance failings. This is now common cause. President Ramaphosa recently addressed an intergovernmental conference and decried the lack of professionalism, the dearth of managerial and technical skills and the generally deficient functioning of many (perhaps most) of the country’s municipalities. And he had previously gone as far as telling ANC councillors to look at what the Democratic Alliance was doing to understand how to get things right.

This is not confined to out-of-the-way villages. It is a grinding reality even in centres like Johannesburg, which need to function proficiently for the sake of South Africa’s economic future. When parts of the city were spruced up to accommodate foreign dignitaries for last year’s G20 meeting, the sense of public cynicism was palpable: a disconnected government was lavishing money on the comfort of foreign guests, and would probably not maintain what it had done after they had left.

Pushing in the wrong direction
In other words: with the ANC, just about everything is pushing in the wrong direction.

A grave risk for any political party – and especially for one that becomes comfortable in its dominance and importance – is that the fall from power will be precipitous, with a very hard landing. The National Party discovered that, as did the United Party before it. The ANC has already seen this unfold in the Western Cape. After losing power, it failed to reposition itself as an effective opposition, preferring the bombast of denouncing the legitimacy of the DA in office and confidently predicting the moment of “liberation”. Wayward voters, it seemed to believe, would recognise their errors and correct them accordingly.

Having lost its majorities in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, and across most of the metros, the decline dynamic seems firmly in place across the country. Polling suggests, for example, that the ANC is now uncomfortably behind the Democratic Alliance in Johannesburg and Tshwane, and has been thoroughly decimated in eThekwini.

The coming election will be sink or swim for the ANC: literally, in a sense, given that Helen Zille has made the collapse of water infrastructure in Johannesburg an eye-catching focus of her campaign. As this column has pointed out before, the water-supply crisis is an existential one for South Africa, and the ANC has mishandled it.

The ANC has at this point not begun to campaign. Historically, it has tended to ramp up its efforts in the latter parts of the campaign, aiming to capitalise on peak enthusiasm. This year, it is likely to rethink this approach given its vulnerabilities, and the perceptible apathy-to-hostility it is likely to face.

Interestingly, it seems to be attempting to reorientate its approach. In the past, ANC campaigns leaned heavily on the party brand; the public might not even be told who was envisaged as the mayor. Such roles were conferred from the top, which at times led to discontent on the part of local structures. This was well illustrated in 2016, when an attempt was made to impose Thoko Didiza as the mayoral candidate for Tshwane; the blowback came in the form of days of rioting and millions of rands in damage.

Cautionary tale
The Tshwane outbreak is a cautionary tale about another impulse within the ANC: the intense competition of different factions and interest groups. Didiza had been named after local factions were unable to agree on a candidate themselves. Perhaps it is inevitable in a party as large and diverse as the ANC, and which disavows the expression of such natural inclinations as personal ambition, that friction and faction are constant features. The much touted “unity” that the party declaims is an ideological fiction.

As the scope for the benefits of office shrinks – the jobs, the prestige, the patronage opportunities, and even for lucrative malfeasance – competition within the ANC stands to become ever more ferocious and zero-sum.

For these elections, the ANC has taken the extraordinary step of declaring that mayoral candidates may be sought from outside party structures, even from outside party politics. This is at glaring odds with past practice and the professed culture of the party.

Many will baulk at preferment being suggested for those who have not proven their loyalty and ideological reliability over those who have. Others will have a further objection, fearing the loss of patronage. Whether this is even allowable in terms of the ANC’s Constitution may be a sticking point. This initiative does suggest an appreciation of the depth of the crisis the ANC is facing; but it’s hard to see how even attempting this will not crash directly into the political systems – formal and informal – that the ANC has cultivated.

In other words, the outlook from today’s perspective is more sink than swim.

If the past year (with the campaign for the 2024 election) is any indicator, the ANC seems set to attempt an appeal based on redistributive promises. In other words, doubling down on BEE, labour legislation, an ideological foreign policy, employment equity, National Health Insurance and so on. The thinking is that even if the party brand is compromised, the ANC will hold out the prospect of giving its voters “stuff”.

Not a radical one
But if this is indeed what plays out, it will only serve to confirm the dire state of the ANC and the inevitability of its decline. This is neither a popular nor a promising approach. South Africa’s electorate is not a radical one, and if it ever had faith in such promises, this is fading. Recall that prior to the 2024 election, President Ramaphosa signed the NHI Act into law, hoping for a last-minute boost. If anything, it did the opposite. Frans Cronje commented that this had hurt the ANC, since private medical care is a trusted and sought-after commodity in South Africa, even among the country’s poor people, who will spend a considerable amount of their very meagre resources to access it. There is no confidence in the ANC’s operating such services. 

Looking forward across the next six months, it seems that the most likely outcome is for the ANC to sink into one of those large, flooded potholes that its stewardship of the country has fostered.

That being said, this fate need not be inevitable. A party with an organisational base, financial resources (which, as James Myburgh has noted, are held out of the public eye in trusts), and a long-standing role in the country’s politics has the basic tools for its ongoing relevance. But that depends on reassessing its role and more fundamentally, its character. (Back in the 1990s, Tony Blair in the UK successfully did this with what had become the largely unelectable Labour Party,  and kept it in office for a decade.)

A revolutionary liberation movement is ill-suited to the challenges of running a modern state and a growth-oriented democracy. Liberation movements endlessly and self-referentially battle the past or pontificate on matters of global importance, while the latter look for pragmatic solutions to problems in the here-and-now. An organisation can be one thing or the other, but not both. And there is little indication that the ANC is willing to make such a change.

Crisis of its own making
The coming months will be fascinating to watch, as the ANC attempts to navigate all this. It will be doing so in a crisis of its own making, where any possible solution will be angrily contested. Even failing systems can work well for defined groups.

The outcome in November could be a salutary comment on what the ANC has done and failed to do.

Terence Corrigan is the Project Manager at the Institute, where he specialises in work on property rights, as well as land and mining policy. A native of KwaZulu-Natal, he is a graduate of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg). He has held various positions at the IRR, South African Institute of International Affairs, SBP (formerly the Small Business Project) and the Gauteng Legislature – as well as having taught English in Taiwan. He is a regular commentator in the South African media and his interests include African governance, land and agrarian issues, political culture and political thought, corporate governance, enterprise and business policy

https://www.biznews.com/leadership/anc-most-dangerous-election-terence-corrigan

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.