On May 29th, the 30th anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic election, the country goes to the polls again for an election that could mark a major turning point in post-apartheid history. The party that steered that transition and has ruled ever since, the African National Congress, faces the prospect of losing its majority for the first time and being forced to embrace uncomfortable alternatives in coalition, its authority diminished by enduring social deprivation and corruption.
Although the ANC is expected to emerge as the biggest party, polls show that a growing disillusionment with its performance could push its vote as low as 40 per cent from 57 per cent in 2019.
The main threat comes from one-time president and its former leader Jacob Zuma. Expelled from the party for corruption, he is now running a populist campaign in a new party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), named for the former, much-admired ANC military wing, and is likely to take his home province of KwaZulu-Natal. He may, with hard-left allies, end up as a kingmaker in a left-leaning coalition.
The current main opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), which runs the provincial government in Western Cape, is expected to come in second – an alternative ANC-DA coalition would ensure a centrist-liberal economic policy.
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The subtext of this landmark election is an attempted recasting of the narrative of liberation for a young, unemployed generation which never knew apartheid, and specifically of the role of iconic Nelson Mandela. Having led his people to freedom, he is said by critics to have sold out too cheaply to the old oppressor. The price of peace and a violence-free transition, it is claimed, was an embrace of a neo-liberal agenda and the refusal to dismantle white privilege.
Blaming economic deprivation, social disintegration, the highest income inequality in the world, and rampant crime on that continued white privilege, Zuma and MK are reclaiming the mantle of the liberation movement, demanding that the job be finished, that land and factories be expropriated. On their banners now, instead of Nelson Mandela, is his late widow Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, a fierce anti-apartheid activist, who parted company with her husband and came to epitomise the ANC’s most irredentist wing.
Yet disillusionment with the ANC in the teeming townships is not only a response to economic failure. In his new narrative Zuma, Trump-like, buries the truth of his own legacy of rampant presidential corruption and kickbacks to cronies, for which he eventually served some time. But the extraordinary extent of this is well understood.
The ANC under President Cyril Ramaphosa only highlighted this too late. Whether it will get credit for that will be the real story