In a bid to revive support for the ruling African National Congress (ANC), President Cyril Ramaphosa embarked on a grassroots campaign in Meadowlands, Soweto. As South Africa faces economic challenges and rising disillusionment, the ANC’s traditional stronghold is showing signs of discontent. With polls indicating a decline in ANC’s popularity, Ramaphosa grapples with issues from power blackouts to high unemployment. As the nation approaches a critical election, the ANC must address the deep-rooted economic exclusion and despair that threaten its decades-long dominance.
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Cyril Ramaphosa kicks off campaign as South African voters lose faith in ANC
By Joseph Cotterill in Soweto
President leads efforts to drum up enthusiasm for the ruling party as it faces real prospect of losing its grip on power
Cyril Ramaphosa kicked off the long road to South Africa’s most consequential election since the end of apartheid with a walkabout in the Soweto heartland of his African National Congress.
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The South African president went door-to-door in Meadowlands, a suburb of Johannesburg’s largest township, officially to encourage voters to register ahead of next year’s contest.
But it was also an attempt to drum up enthusiasm for the ruling party that has governed Africa’s most industrialised nation since the advent of democracy in 1994 — now facing the real prospect of losing its grip on power.
Supporters wearing the ANC’s colours of green, black and gold filled the narrow potholed streets, as party members handed out ‘Vote ANC’ T-shirts and the presidential motorcade of black BMWs followed discreetly behind.
But even among those who turned out for last weekend’s spectacle, there were signs of disconnect. “Our parents and grandparents can vote for this ANC, but we can’t,” said Pauline Chacha, a jobless 34-year-old, grabbing one of the garments to shield herself from the sun.
“We’re taking these T-shirts just to make the ANC happy,” she said, underlining the lip service often paid to the party by a generation who are too young to remember liberation and the sense of hope that flourished under South Africa’s first democratically elected president Nelson Mandela. The young are the cohort worst affected by an economy that has been shrinking for a decade in per capita terms.
The 71-year-old Ramaphosa is part of that Mandela generation: an anti-apartheid stalwart turned business tycoon who came to the party’s rescue when he replaced the corruption-marred rule of Jacob Zuma in 2018.
More than five years on, economic chaos is trumping nostalgia.
As the months tick down to a vote expected by May 2024, Ramaphosa is battling to overcome issues ranging from rolling power blackouts and clogged ports to rampant crime and a rate of joblessness that stands at more than 32 per cent.
Ramaphosa’s personal polling “still looks better than the ANC as a whole, and better than opposition leaders individually,” according to William Gumede, head of the Democracy Works civic foundation, but the same data also underscored how the ANC had lost its way at the local level.
In areas such as Meadowlands, the party faces a profound reckoning brought on by the deep sense of economic exclusion and despair that persists among the very people it once set out to liberate, three decades after the end of white minority rule.
“High unemployment, high substance abuse, high teenage pregnancies, and a lack of formally qualified people” were just some of the problems highlighted by Sibusiso Thabethe, a Meadowlands resident and former ANC youth politician, as Ramaphosa greeted would-be voters nearby.
Chacha, standing at her gate a few metres from where the president had stopped to embrace an old comrade, said her family pooled their welfare payments just to make ends meet. Curiosity got the better of her as she stepped outside to see Ramaphosa, but others remained inside. “Many are staying indoors because it’s the ANC,” she said.
Support for the ANC, which won 57 per cent of the vote in the last election in 2019, has fallen below 50 per cent in recent polls, raising the prospect that it will have to haggle with other parties to form a coalition.
This could mean striking a deal with the Economic Freedom Fighters, the far-left party led by the firebrand Julius Malema. “If they drop below, say, 46 per cent, they may have to reach out to the EFF, which they absolutely don’t want to do,” Gumede said. “There are groups in both parties who don’t want to co-operate.”
For the ANC to avoid this and retain a majority in South Africa’s proportional-representation system, it is vital that it shores up its vote in areas such as Meadowlands.
Thabethe said he remained optimistic, doubting that the ANC’s wavering faithful would actively vote for a fragmentary host of opposition parties. “[Citizens] are bitter now, but when it comes to voting, it’s different,” he said.
“We’re still the custodians of the Freedom Charter,” he continued, referring to the landmark 1955 document that committed the ANC to the goal of a non-racial democracy. Thabethe’s black beret and shirt adorned with the raised fist of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela attested to his deep sense of connection with the struggle.
He also reflected on the ANC’s most powerful election assets, one that the opposition is largely unable to match: the organisational capacity in its grassroots branches around the country. But he also admitted that this too showed signs of neglect.
Part of why Ramaphosa had come to Meadowlands is because the local branch is one of the strongest, and had kept meetings and membership up to help turn out voters next year.
But even here, among its voter base, the party’s failings are visible. After Ramaphosa left, branch members showed the Financial Times some of the township’s many problems, from broken storm drains that have led residents to construct their own breeze-block flood barriers to inadequate and overcrowded housing.
As Ramaphosa’s entourage slowly moved deeper into the township, Mpho Mbele, 29, was another young voter who questioned whether the party in power since she was born deserved her allegiance.
“All of them have their own scandals,” the local bakery owner said of the election hopefuls, with Ramaphosa’s “publicity stunt” tour seen as particularly hollow.
Township businesses people such as her — vital to reviving South Africa’s economy and thus to the ANC’s success — were “all just asking for the same thing: can you just give us a kick-start,” she said. “As a businessman, he should have put businesses upfront.”
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© 2023 The Financial Times Ltd.
