Will the ANC still be the government of South Africa in 2025 – a year after the 2024 election and 31 years after coming to power?
Will it still rule us, despite having been a disastrous failure, despite causing record unemployment, despite a sinking economy, despite soaring violent crime, despite wrecking Eskom and the rest of our infrastructure, despite its massive looting and corruption and self-enrichment, and above all despite having betrayed the great multitude of our poor black people who continue to vote for it election after election, even as they see the super-rich, super-privileged ANC ministers shunning them and showing their contempt for them?
Why not? After all, Zanu-PF still rules Zimbabwe after 43 years, despite the fact that it has ruined the economy of Zimbabwe even more than the ANC has ruined South Africa’s, and despite Zanu-PF’s programme of systematic, carefully planned mass-murder of tens of thousands of black people (operation Gukurahundi). We can be sure Zanu-PF will still be ruling Zimbabwe in 2025, so why should the ANC not still be ruling South Africa then?
‘Look what’s happening in the north!’ This was the refrain of every white racist you spoke to in the 1960s and 1970s whenever you opposed apartheid. The white racists told us over and over again, ‘When the blacks take over, they ruin everything’.
I heard this all the time when I was campaigning for the Progressive Party in the late 1960s. We never knew quite how to answer. Personally, I believe that there is no difference between the competence and honesty of blacks and whites and that the failure of African countries after gaining independence had everything to do with history and nothing to do with race. But I didn’t know how to articulate this.
So I watched fearfully as one Sub-Saharan African country after another descended into bloodshed and chaos upon gaining independence. It began with Ghana in 1957, where Nkrumah destroyed the rule of law and the economy. Nigeria was soon divided in a bloody civil war. The Congo suffered murderous factionalism and corruption. In Uganda, Idi Amin slaughtered half a million black people of the wrong tribes (he was considered a great African hero for this and was made chairman of the Organisation of African Unity in 1975).
In Tanzania, Julius Nyerere set up a brutal dictatorship, and forced small black farmers to work as serfs on his collective farms, so ruining Tanzania’s agriculture and impoverishing her people. As might be expected of this great African socialist leader and enemy of colonisation, Nyerere died in a private hospital in London.
And so it went on in country after country: coups, tribal wars, economic collapse, African leaders brutally oppressing their black people. In almost every Sub-Saharan country, ordinary black people were worse off under their new black leaders than they had been under their old white ones. (An outstanding exception was Botswana, next to us, and I find it highly significant that Julius Malema had once singled out Botswana for attack and wanted ‘regime change’ there. The Ivory Coast did quite well too.)
Why should SA be different?
But here’s the thing. In most of these countries, the same government and often the same leader stayed in power for decades. Why should South Africa be different?
White racists expected the ANC to ruin South Africa as black governments to the north had ruined their countries. Unfortunately, they have nearly been proved right – but not quite.
South Africa still has a free press, an independent judiciary (sort of) and a working parliamentary democracy (sort of). The ANC has not ruined the economy as badly as Zanu-PF did after 29 years of rule in Zimbabwe, nor has it embarked on anything even nearly as evil as Gukurahundi. Even if it wanted to, I don’t believe the ANC has the physical means to scrap democracy altogether and institute military rule or a one-party state, like so many governments to the north. In Zimbabwe, Zanu-PF, whether under Mugabe or Mnangagwa, keeps power by murdering political opponents, crooking elections and beating up or torturing anybody it suspects might vote against it.
I don’t think the ANC has the means or the will to do this. In the 2008 election in Zimbabwe, Mugabe lost by a landslide but stayed in power with South Africa’s help, when President Mbeki went out of his way to ensure that the black electorate was overruled and the tyrant stayed in power. The ANC has got no such country to help it stay in power if it loses an election.
Most black leaders to our north assume that ordinary black people will continue voting for them no matter how much they abuse them and steal from them. They assume ordinary black people are so stupid they will vote for their oppressors. To a large extent they have been proved right.
There are two main reasons for this. One is class. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most class-conscious region on Earth. The black working class does seem as ready to bow to the black ruling class as a medieval serf in Europe was ready to bow to his lord.
Subservience to their black masters does seem natural to most ordinary black people. They seem perfectly aware of their situation and even laugh about it. In East Africa, poor black people refer to their black lords as ‘the Mbenzi’, referring to the big, black, gleaming German cars they drive. But they still vote for them – up to a point.
In South Africa, most ordinary black people seemed to accept it as part of the natural order that they must send their children to awful township schools with black teachers while the ANC elite sends its children to posh suburban schools with white teachers; they accept that they must use public transport and state hospitals while the ANC elite uses Mercedes and BMWs and private hospitals.
Genuinely surprised
Julius Malema was once asked why he sent his own children to posh schools with white teachers. He was genuinely surprised that anyone would ask such a question. Didn’t they know he was part of the ruling class elite and could not possibly descend to the level of the schools of low-class black workers?
Another reason is race (or tribe or nation, as you wish). In black Africa, voting is highly tribal and black leaders exploit this fact. In South Africa tribalism matters, of course, but not as much as in countries like Zimbabwe or Rwanda. In South Africa no single tribe has an outright majority of the population. The biggest are the Zulus, about a quarter of the total population; but in Natal where they are dominant, they seem split between the IFP and the ANC.
Anyway, the ANC does not – publicly at least – present itself as representing any tribe in particular. Both class and tribe are fading in South Africa. Opinion polls show the fraction of people who will vote for the ANC going down and down. It seems that the stupid people who kept on voting for the ANC in the past aren’t all that stupid after all. They’re beginning to revolt, and the ANC is alarmed.
The election of 2024 looms and has become a matter of obsessive interest – especially for the ANC. I believe that opinion polls are an accurate indication of people’s voting intentions at the time of questioning – but not necessarily a month after that, let alone a year after that.
Various clever ‘scenarios’ are being drawn up, often using a graph with two axes, to show the likely outcome of the 2024 election and the likely stability of the government that results from it. Will the ANC win an outright majority? Or will it have to form a coalition, and with whom? Or will it lose altogether, and shall we then be ruled with a coalition that excludes the ANC, and who then will form that coalition?
As far as I can see, the worst possible outcome is also the most likely. This is where the ANC vote drops below 50% and it goes into coalition with the EFF. This is a logical coalition since the ANC and the EFF have exactly the same political beliefs. They both believe in the National Democratic Revolution, with state control of everything and black African nationalism; they both hate capitalism, except for themselves; they both want Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC); they both want to do in South Africa what Robert Mugabe, whom they both worship, did in Zimbabwe; they both support Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine, and both blame the West for it.
Weak and indecisive
The difference is that the ANC, especially President Ramaphosa, is weak and indecisive, whereas the EFF, especially Julius Malema, is clear and decisive. An ANC/EFF coalition will in practice mean an EFF government, with Malema as the state president. Malema will just push Ramaphosa aside, and proceed to implement EWC, seize the white farms, nationalise the mines, abolish private property, scrap the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and strengthen ties with Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and Zimbabwe.
If the ANC and the EFF between them do not get enough votes to form a coalition government, would they accept their loss of power? I think they would have to. They can’t call in the armed forces or the police to change the election result, as Mugabe and Mnangagwa did. The ANC’s enormous patronage network in the civil service and the state bureaucracy would certainly try to keep it in power but I don’t believe even they would be able to defy a parliament with a majority of other parties.
In this case, after 30 years, we would have a government without the ANC. How wonderful! What reason for hope! But who would form it with the DA, surely its largest party? Not all the likely partners look very promising – although all look much better than the ANC or the EFF.
My powers of prophecy are non-existent. Almost all of this article is based on the past, on the African past. I suppose the past is as good a guide to the future as any other, but it is not all that good, as Nassim Taleb pointed out in his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
Will a Black Swan event happen in South Africa, changing completely our course up to now? I don’t know. And will it be for good or bad? I don’t know.
[Image: Melinda Fiorino from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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