The ANC counts the high cost of a failing president

It’s the cold weather, the pernicious media, traitorous “clever blacks” and feckless youngsters that didn’t bother to go to the polls. The excuses are flowing thick and fast. Could’ve. Would’ve. Should’ve.

It’s all irrelevant. The simple fact is that the African National Congress has been handed its biggest drubbing in 22 years. 

The opposition parties are of course delighted. However, it is a result that should be welcomed most by the ANC, for this is a last-chance wake-up call that has been a long time coming, giving the governing party a chance to remedy the arrogant disdain with which it has treated South African voters, especially since the advent of President Jacob Zuma.

The ANC lost Nelson Mandela Bay, the most important urban conurbation in the Eastern Cape, to an opposition party whose candidate was a white, middle-aged, former farmer. In Gauteng, SA’s economic powerhouse, it is no longer the biggest party in Tshwane and if it retains that title in Johannesburg, it will be by a whisker. But in both cities it will likely be in the opposition benches, no longer able to fuel the great machine of patronage that it has come to depend on.

An indication of the importance of getting to the polls, if ever one was needed, is that with 90% of the votes tallied, the advantage see-sawed between the ANC and the DA in both Johannesburg and Tshwane by a margin of barely 500 votes, on a turnout of over 1.1m.

In the Western Cape, the ANC has taken a thumping. In a province that it once ruled with a substantial majority and that has a Xhosa-speaking population of around 38%, it managed barely a quarter of the entire vote and does not control a single council.

Even in KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma’s fiefdom, it has taken bruising body blows. The ANC share has for the first time dipped to 59%.

It has also failed in the symbolically important ward of Nkandla. A resurgent Inkatha Freedom Party retained this, the site of Zuma’s controversial R240m state-funded private residence, with ease. 

ANC leaders will have to come to terms with the fact that South Africa’s body politic as been set on a fundamentally different course from what they assumed – that of the historically preordained primacy of the former liberation organisation. If they can’t get their heads around that fact, the ANC will be handed an even greater thrashing in the 2019 general election, which is just over two years away. 

In SA, the social democrats are coalescing in the Democratic Alliance, while the radical populists have found a home in the Economic Freedom Fighters. The ANC is losing the urban vote and having to retreat to the countryside, as happened with its fraternal equivalent across the Limpopo in Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF.

But unlike Zimbabwe, in agriculturally important KwaZulu-Natal at least, not even the countryside offers a safe refuge. The IFP won seven rural councils in KZN with over 20% of the vote.

The question is whether the ANC, in its own metaphorical retreat from the cities, will echo Uncle Bob in resorting to increasingly desperate and despotic stratagems to retain power. For the breaking test of democracy is what happens when a hegemonic ruling party confronts the possibility of losing power in the near future. 

Zuma comes from a military background that might be responsive to the siren calls of securocrats that he has surrounded himself with. It would be a mistake.

If anything, these elections show that SA democracy to be in boisterous good health. We are not, unlike Zimbabwe, a cowed and pliant populace to be trifled with, to swallow platitudes about the ANC’s vanguard role and instructions from the ancestors – via Zuma as intermediary – on whom we should vote for.

Zuma has presided over a sustained and accelerating decline in the ANC’s fortunes. Under his leadership, in the 2014 general election the ANC vote dropped five percentage points from its 2009 high of 67%. Just over two years later it has dropped in excess of another eight percentage points. 

Of course, this has to be seen within our unique context. Anywhere else in the democratic world a party which after 22 years in power still controls six times as many councils as the opposition combined, would be considered an extraordinary success. But if your of stated expectation is to rule “until Jesus returns”, it at best means that the Resurrection is imminent.

The DA, for its part, also faces challenges. If it wants to keep the ANC from governing in the hung metros, it will have to enter into coalitions with EFF, with which it ideologically shares no common ground.

A mutual antipathy to the ANC is a rickety basis on which to build a coalition administration. In terms of political values it would make more sense to seek some kind of modus vivendi with the ANC, although that would be unthinkable to most people in the DA.

This election has about local issues only peripherally. Primarily it has been a referendum on Zuma, secondly on the performance of the ANC.

For Zuma, who drove the ANC campaign and literally was its face on every poster, it is a significant personal defeat. Conversely, for the DA’s Mmusi Maimane, who has been derided – both by the ANC and by rival camps in the DA – as lightweight and inexperienced, it is a significant victory. 

Given the dismal results for the ANC, it seems inconceivable that the party leadership, or at least that of it that has not been captured by Zuma, will allow him to serve out his full term. The opposition parties, for all their rhetoric that it is time for Zuma to go, should pray that he remains.

For in the same way that in the United States presidential elections Donald Trump has become Hilary Clinton’s secret weapon, so Zuma has repeatedly shown himself to be the best alienator of ANC support that SA opposition parties could ever hope for. 

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