EDINBURGH — The world spotlight is on South African elections, with speculation about how the many small parties will eat into the ANC’s power base. The message from the Financial Times, whose journalists interviewed South Africans, is that the ANC will maintain power but it will lose support. This is because voters have lost hope in the ANC delivering a new dawn. Four working-age adults are unemployed for every six who have a job. Instead of South Africa transforming into a tiger-style nation with high growth and rising standards of living, the country’s economic engine has stuttered – which in turn suggests high unemployment will remain a significant feature for the foreseeable future. The upshot is that South Africans can vote but many don’t see the point. – Jackie Cameron
By Thulasizwe Sithole
The ANC has failed to transform the lives of the black majority after 25 years in power, with a growing despondency over the ANC, reports the Financial Times.
“When South Africans head to the polls on May 8, more than a third of working-age voters, nearly all of them black, will not have a job. For 20m young people who came of age under the ANC, unemployment is even higher. Africa’s most industrialised economy has failed to grow faster than the population. The official unemployment figure is put at 27% but the figure rises to 37% if those who have given up looking for work are taken into account,” it points out.
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“After 25 years of a so-called democratic dispensation, it’s only politicians that have access to the good life, the better life. We haven’t seen this new dawn. We haven’t experienced what you call freedom,” it quotes Mr Kota, who chairs the Unemployed People’s Movement, a grassroots NGO based in the Eastern Cape, as saying.
South Africans have reportedly become “spectators” to democracy, according to Kota, who explains the apathy that has greeted the country’s most competitive election since 1994.
The “new dawn” promised by Ramaphosa “refers to turning the page on a decade of egregious looting of the state by his own party under Jacob Zuma, his predecessor”.
It leaves voters in a quandary, points out the London-based FT.
“In South Africa’s parliamentary system, they can only vote in favour of Mr Ramaphosa by voting for an ANC that still harbours Mr Zuma’s cronies. And while a record 47 parties are competing against the ANC this year, no single party is considered a threat to its reign. The main opposition grouping, the liberal Democratic Alliance, is polling about 20%, not much changed from its 2014 result. Mr Zuma’s exit last year removed an easy target.”
But the opposition’s malaise goes deeper, Ralph Mathekga, an independent political analyst, tells the FT.
“South Africa has a politics of many choices, but no alternatives,” Mathekga reportedly said.
“Lack of trust in the ANC translates into a lack of trust across political parties. Elections are never about the opposition winning, but the ANC losing.”
Looking at the polls, the FT says that the ANC’s vote will probably fall this election, from 62% in 2014 to something between 55-60%.
Radical parties, representing the ANC’s extremes, could benefit the most, reckons Mathekga.
“The hard-left Economic Freedom Fighters is widely expected to double its vote by appealing to the disaffected, jobless youth. Julius Malema, the EFF leader, is a former ANC youth leader turned ‘son of the soil’ in campaign posters that promise ‘our land and jobs now’.
“In the past five years the party used its 25 seats in the 400-member parliament to lead calls for Mr Zuma’s exit, and for altering the constitution to allow expropriation of land without payment. The ANC eventually bowed to both demands,” says the FT.
If it can double its seats, Mr Malema’s party would have even greater influence to outflank Mr Ramaphosa on contentious economic legislation such as land, which will “portray him as a weak leader beholden to the opposition”, Darias Jonker, an analyst at Eurasia Group, tells the FT.
