People queue to cast their votes in the South African elections in KwaMashu, Durban, South Africa 29 May 2024. © Reuters/Alaister Russell
Decades of unmet promises and endemic corruption have eroded the ANC's legitimacy, creating a surge of support for a party led by South Africa's white minority.
Five years after South Africans of all races went to the polls for the first time, millions of enthusiastic voters turned out for the country’s second democratic election in 1999, assembling solemnly before daybreak and queuing well into the night to cast their ballots.
If the turnout was similar to 1994, however, the mood was decidedly not. With apartheid vanquished, ending 48 years of white settler misrule, neither Nelson Mandela nor liberation was on the ballot this time around; what voters were focused on was livability.
“I hope to see an improvement in the housing stock,” 25-year-old Goodman Ndzuling told me as he prepared to vote in the all-Black township of Soweto that was the stronghold of the global anti-apartheid movement. “Five years ago, we voted to slay the dragon, but now people want to see a real improvement in their lives.”
Twenty-six years later, Black South Africans are still waiting, their patience—and their budgets-- stretched so thin that they are preparing to do what was unimaginable only a generation ago: restore a political party led by a tiny white minority to power in the country’s commercial center, the Johannesburg metropolitan area, which includes Soweto.
Polls show that support for Mandela’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), has plummeted from nearly 70 percent of ballots cast in 1999 in the province that includes Johannesburg, to 31 percent in August. Concomitantly, the Democratic Alliance—a center/right party that merged with the ultraconservative National Party that created the apartheid government in 1948—has surged ahead in the municipality with support from 38 percent of the electorate, according to the party’s own internal polling. That is consistent with electoral trends over the past decade.
It is a stunning reversal of fortune for the ANC, Africa’s oldest liberation organization. The ANC’s abandonment of the socialist policies it espoused in its iconic 1955 Freedom Charter for a pro-business, neoliberal approach in government has left apartheid more or less intact, materially speaking. With an official unemployment rate that has hovered above 30 percent for much of the 30 years, two of every three Black South Africans remain mired in poverty, or roughly 30 million people out of a total population of 52 million; the percentage of white South Africans living in poverty is about 1 percent.
Similarly, whites account for 7.3 percent of the population but continue to own nearly three-quarters of all farmland while Blacks account for 81 percent of the population yet own 4 percent of the land.
Meanwhile, ANC politicians’ penchant for living high off the hog while their constituents suffer, combined with a series of corruption scandals has turned public opinion against the ruling party. In 2022, a former intelligence officer accused South African President Cyril Ramaphosa of attempting to cover up the theft of $4 million in cash from his game farm in the northeastern Limpopo province.
A former labor leader and top Mandela lieutenant turned multi-millionaire businessman, Ramaphosa denied any wrongdoing, saying that the money stolen from his sofa accrued from the legitimate sale of buffaloes but speculation abounds that he did not report the cash to avoid paying taxes. Lawmakers in 2022 blocked an attempt by opposition lawmakers to impeach him.
Professor William Gumede, an associate professor of governance at the University of the Witwatersrand told Black Agenda Report in a phone interview:
“The ANC has simply not delivered for Black people in South Africa.”
That failure has combined with the Democratic Alliance’s sterling reputation for efficiency and service delivery—particularly in Cape Town where the DA is the governing party—to give the party at least a plurality of votes in next year’s elections, if not a majority, meaning that there would be no need for a coalition government.
“There is a big possibility that the DA can win Johannesburg outright because of the ANC’s accelerated decline,” Gumede said. “I think it is very likely that the ANC will drop below 20 percent.”
Johannesburg is only the most symbolic jurisdiction, Gumede said, but the ANC has been losing municipal elections for several years now, especially in Kwa Zulu Natal province on the country’s eastern border.
The possibility exists that the ANC could be ousted from urban areas altogether and become a rural party, Gumede said, adding that the ANC’s growing marginalization reflects a seismic shift in the country’s attitudes.
“The big story is how we’re becoming more nonracial since 1994. The people used to vote along purely racial lines, and the ANC governed as a Black political party. That no longer carries the weight it once did. Black people are very happy to vote for a white party with less than populist policies as long as they are getting service delivery. That is more important than the race of the politicians.”
Not everyone agrees with Gumede, and there remains residual resentment of the party. Following the ANC’s formation of a coalition government with the DA rather than any of several populist, Black majority parties, Phakamile Hlubi-Majola, a union spokeswoman described the DA as the “party of the oppressors” and complained that the appointment of a white education minister would give the DA “the keys to the minds of our children”.
Writing in a local online newspaper at the time, Mphumzi Mdekazi, a doctoral student at Cape Town’s Stellenbosch University, opined that “the DA is driven solely by the group interest of white people, its interest is diametrically opposed to the historical mission of the ANC and of African people.” In summation he denounced as “native traitors” anyone who accommodated the DA’s inclusion in executive government.
South African Blacks’ growing disillusionment with the ANC’s elites also mirrors the widening estrangement between African Americans and their representatives in City Halls, on Capitol Hill, and even the White House as evidenced by Vice-President Kamala Harris’ loss to President Trump in last year’s election in part because of lower Black voter turnout and a small increase in votes for Trump. In New York City upstart winner, Zohran Mamdani won Black votes with a message of improving living standards. In their deepening polarization, working class Black South Africans are no different from those of Washington DC, Chicago's South Side, or many other predominantly Black U.S. communities after the 1960s civil rights movement, which enabled the best educated to move up and out of their segregated milieu, while the neighborhoods they left behind deteriorated.
And in yet another twist, it was parochial notions of racial solidarity that led the Dutch/French Huguenots known as Afrikaners to create apartheid in the first place, tipping the scales in favor of their poor brethren who were jostling with Black South Africans for low-paying jobs and housing.
During the long apartheid struggle, white South Africans would cynically mock the ANC’s leadership as disingenuous. They cared not a whit about Black liberation and merely wanted white privilege for themselves, many whites said.
Tragically, that turned out to be true.
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.
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