The long-term trends are not looking good for the African National Congress (ANC). The party has been finding it difficult to adjust from ruling in solitary splendour during the first 30 years of the post-apartheid era to its new status as a minority party, albeit the largest one, tasked with leading a clunky coalition government. But far greater dangers lie ahead.
For most of the past nine months, since forming the Government of National Unity, the ANC has been governing as if nothing noteworthy had happened in 2024. It continued pursuing its National Democratic Revolution, regularly reiterating its commitment to the project that favours greater state control over society and the economy. It paid little heed to the priorities or needs of the coalition partners on whose votes it depended.
But the current budget impasse shows the ANC stumbling. Previously, it could let the budget process run on autopilot, managed by a highly competent Treasury, mostly well aligned with the party’s priorities. Now the autopilot has gone on the blink because not enough coalition partners supported the ANC’s plans to increase taxes to feed the state’s insatiable hunger for more money.
That the party has insisted on ramming through an unpopular tax hike, even while the population is groaning under the burden of rising living costs and diminishing economic opportunities, is not just an example of tone deafness. As my colleague Hermann Pretorius points out, it is also an illustration of the failure of political intelligence and nimbleness that should have set the leadership’s alarm bells ringing.
Far wiser
It would have been far wiser of the ANC to abandon the tax hike early on in the process. The small loss of face from following a coalition partner’s lead would have been more than compensated for by showing that the party was sensitive to the needs of a besieged populace.
However, the ANC’s troubles range more widely than that. The party has once again run out of money, as the debit orders of employees started bouncing at the end of February because salaries had not been paid, according to a news report in early March. The same report said that the party had not paid for a big cake ordered as part of its January anniversary celebrations. This was a case of having had a cake and eaten it, leaving the baker holding a dead receipt.
The ANC Youth League has been in the news for not honouring a Sandton restaurant bill of over R800,000 for meals and drinks bought between June and August 2024, as well as not paying for an Mpumalanga media company’s services bought in 2023, to the value of almost R300,000.
All of these are signs that the party is not managing its own finances well, while also struggling to manage the nation’s finances as part of the Government of National Unity.
At the same time, polling trends are pointing towards further decline in voter support for the party. As if the 17-point drop in support from 2019 (57%) to 2024 (40%) were not bad enough, recent polling by the Social Research Foundation (SRF) suggests that support for the ANC might have declined even further since then, to as low as 32%.
When respondents were asked the hypothetical question about which party they would vote for if President Cyril Ramaphosa were no longer in office (after having been removed in a no-confidence vote, for example), just 20% said they would continue voting ANC. These numbers must be causing a sense of alarm in Luthuli House.
SRF polling also suggests that unhappy ANC voters – who in the past continued voting for the party despite their disgruntlement – are losing their attachment to the ANC. This could be true of as much as a third of historical ANC voters, who are becoming detached from their political home and ripe for the picking by other political parties.
Such voters will have been encouraged to see that the ANC’s loss of a majority in 2024 did not lead to chaos, and that having the Democratic Alliance (DA) in government did not mean that apartheid was returning. The GNU has shown that bad things do not necessarily happen when you don’t vote ANC. So why not give it a try?
Not buying it
At the same time, polling by the Institute of Race Relations over many years suggests that voters are not buying what the ANC is selling. Support for racial preferencing policies is at best lukewarm. Land reform is not a top priority, and most voters do not support expropriation without compensation. Nor do they identify with class-warfare rhetoric. Instead, what they are looking for is jobs (the top priority in IRR polling going back almost two decades and supported by the work of other polling outfits as well), better government services and less crime.
The government is not delivering on any of those scores. While that disconnect remains in place, more voters will lose their attachment to the ANC.
How worried is the ANC? In an EWN television interview two weeks ago, the ANC secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula, insisted that the ANC was not without hope. Last week, speaking about the ANC’s rapid diminishment in the Western Cape, he said: “The roof is not falling. It has fallen a long time ago in the Western Cape when we lost the province to the DA. What is before us is a battle to win back the Western Cape.” The comments are meant to communicate defiance and bravado. But they are clear signs that the party is feeling under pressure.
On multiple fronts, the ANC finds itself under siege. The budget battle is taking up a lot of its energy. Many of its flagship policies, like expropriation without compensation and the National Health Insurance, are the targets of looming legal battles, something it will face without extensive public support. The edifice of race-based policies is coming under increasing attack, and its defenders are looking increasingly feeble.
Internationally
Internationally, the Trump administration is applying immense pressure on the ANC to adopt pro-growth policies by withdrawing benefits and indulgences, while taking a diplomatic hardline that has gone so far as to declare South Africa’s ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, persona non grata and expelling him from the US at short notice. There are murmurings that the US could directly sanction leading ANC politicians.
None of the trends outlined above give reason to believe that the ANC can reverse its decline. All of them point towards further weakening. Even if the party secures itself a temporary bump by reabsorbing some of its splinters, like the Economic Freedom Fighters or the uMkhonto weSizwe Party, this will not provide a lasting boost because these parties will reinforce the trends currently driving down ANC support.
However, all is not lost for the ANC. It can stem the slide by embracing substantive policy reforms that will grow the economy and create jobs. Doing so means taking the brakes off the economy by following the advice of the IRR and others: fortify property rights instead of weakening them; scrap race-based requirements in the private and the public sector; walk the talk of making South Africa attractive for business, instead of just talking about it. The IRR’s Blueprint for Growth papers show how to do it.
Ironically, the ANC’s best chances of survival lie in working with the DA, which is highly focused on creating economic growth and jobs – just the thing the ANC needs to save itself. The alternative is that the ANC becomes a sub-20% party by 2034. The choice is its own to make.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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