Whatever the DA wins, can it break into the ANC’s core support base?
WITH the final results not yet known, it is still possible to identify some broader trends emerging from the 2016 election. Of them, the number of clear divides that are beginning to define our local politics stands out as important.
South African politics has always been split between urban and rural voters. It has, for sometime now, been masked by the ANC’s results in the metros. But as its national performance has deteriorated, it is that rural base that has held firm and its urban base that has shrunk, revealing more starkly that its core constituency lives outside the country’s cities and towns.
The 2016 election would seem to confirm this. The ANC has lost, or is on the brink of losing, its majority across Gauteng, essentially an urban conglomerate of three metros — Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni. It will lose its majority in Nelson Mandela Bay too, and Cape Town, already consolidated under the DA, will slip further away from it, as the party fairly implodes in that province.
Jacob Zuma, a peasant king of sorts, has exacerbated this pattern. His particular brand of destructive demagogics may well shore up support in provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal, now undoubtedly the ANC’s primary stronghold (another divide worth noting, particular to the ANC’s internal universe). But it has cost the ANC dearly in the metros, home to more of the middle class.
That is not to put everything on Zuma’s shoulders: the ANC more generally has collapsed as an institution. Divided internally and confused and directionless in the government, it has failed to provide even the most basic deliverables — electricity, water and so on — and excellence is an idea not just detached from the ANC but, it would seem, entirely incompatible with it.
Into the vacuum the DA has stepped. The pattern is similar to what has happened across the border in Zimbabwe, where the Movement for Democratic Change caused Robert’s Mugabe’s Zanu (PF) no end of trouble in the country’s urban centres before he dealt with the party in the undemocratic style that has become synonymous with his name.
But the ANC too, has become more focused on its rural constituency. It shores up traditional leadership to secure patronage and, through issues such as land reform and rural development, constantly plays to this component of the electorate. In Zuma, it has a "man of the people", who talks about days gone by, before the modern world arrived and, with it, the pressures of international benchmarking and the global market.
The ANC is a backwards party, trapped in the past, and it is beginning to show overtly in the country’s election results.
Playing into this is a second big divide, and that is the ANC’s ability to act as an opposition. Moulded in the fire of liberation, its nature would seem to be set in cast iron. As its performance in the Western Cape generally and Cape Town in particular has shown, it has not the first idea about opposition politics. It has been destroyed in Cape Town in this election and the DA, already with an outright majority, now faces the prospect of a two-thirds majority.
If the ANC is forced into opposition in any of the Gauteng metros, or Nelson Mandela Bay for that matter, you can expect much of the same — a long, drawn-out collapse, further fuelled by the DA’s comparatively high delivery standards, which serve only to heighten the gap. Once the ANC’s hegemony is broken, it simply does not recover. It cannot — opposition politics is simply not the ANC’s political DNA.
It is an ironic state of affairs but, as Cape Town demonstrates, the DA taking power does not lead to a better balance of power. All it does, over five or 10 years, is lead to an inversion of it. Where the ANC had two-thirds, it is now the DA that boasts it and, although for fundamentally different reasons, the opposition in the metro is now virtually nonexistent. SA seems to remain a country of extremes. It will be worth watching whether this pattern repeats itself in Gauteng, over the coming 10 years or so.
The Western Cape and Gauteng are two of SA’s most urbanised provinces. The political universe they now constitute is an entirely different one to, say, Limpopo or Mpumalanga. While this speaks to the rural/urban divide, there is another angle: they are two financial powerhouses, the home to a vast amount of the South African economy.
In politics, as in government, money talks, and these provinces take up a significant share of the budget between them. That, however, is controlled by the ANC, both at national and provincial level. And so a situation for much political conflict presents itself. The question is whether service delivery will be held hostage to it.
Following on from this, should the DA form a government in any of the metros, there is question of what internal conflicts there are to play out. Formally, there is the establishment of a new civil service, with many key appointments of a political nature. This will necessitate a purge of sorts, with many golden handshakes and, with them, no doubt a great deal of resistance, as the outgoing administration meets the new one at the coal face.
Informally, this could get very messy. Not only do the unions have a great deal of political capital tied up in the ANC administration, but the party has created a complex system of patronage that stretches far beyond the public sector and deep into the private. Many people will have much invested in the ANC government, from tenders through to employment. How they respond will go a long way towards determining just how much progress a DA-led government can make in the first five years.
Finally, there is the ultimate political divide, between the ANC and the DA. With the ANC’s decline (it will probably finish in the mid 50s) and the DA’s assent (it will probably finish upwards of 25%), there are now two big parties in SA. The EFF will grow to about 10% but there is a cap on the market for its particular brand of radical socialism. This is, of course, a healthy democratic development. But the real test will be 2019, when national power is on the table.
Then, there is less to be said about differentiating between rural and urban voters. They all count towards one outcome. Whatever the DA’s achievements in this election, the fundamental question mark remains: is it able to make a decisive breakthrough into the ANC’s core support base?
If the Western Cape is any illustration of what is to come, it can improve further still. The ANC’s self-destruction when in opposition is one thing, but what started in Cape Town quickly spread throughout the province, another pattern clear from the 2016 results. This is why the DA needs to get a formal hold on power somewhere in Gauteng if it is make 2019 count. Such is the contrast between how it and the ANC governs, and given that chance, its performance can be fairly infectious.
As the ANC declines ever closer towards the 50% mark, it becomes harder and harder to crack wide open. It is like a sphere with tissue paper on the outside but, as you peel away the layers, the inner core is made of far harder stuff. This election has done much to strip away plenty of the fluff that has surrounded it. The big electoral conundrum is how, now, does any party crack the centre that holds?
