Predictable decline of ANC

The results of South Africa’s general elections have delivered a stunning blow to the ruling African National Congress (ANC), depriving it for the first time since it came to power under Nelson Mandela 30 years ago of an outright majority under the country’s proportional representational system.

Seats are allocated to the parties in this system according to the percentage received of the total votes cast.

ANC’s tally this time has fallen to 40.2 percent from the 57.5 percent in the last elections in 2019.

This means the ANC will garner 159 seats in the 400-seat parliament, necessitating the formation of a coalition government. Possible partners in such a coalition include for example the centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA) with 87 seats and 22 percent of the vote.

Missing from the coalition, in fact arraigned in militant opposition to any coalition that emerges will be the newly formed uMkonto weSizwe (MK) (Spear of the Nation, the title during the struggle against apartheid of the ANC’s military wing) of former ANC leader and President Jacob Zuma.

Zuma fell from grace and high office on corruption charges, to be replaced by outgoing President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Ramaphosa’s background includes student activism against apartheid, trade union leadership (Council of Unions of South Africa, CUSA, and Conference of South African Trade Unions, COSATU) starting from being a mine workers’ leader. He was also very important in leading the ANC’s negotiations with the white apartheid regime from 1991 onwards until that abhorrent ‘system’ gave way to Nelson Mandela’s victory as President in the 1994 elections.

The transition from white apartheid rule in South Africa is a very interesting story. Dutch (Boers) and British white settler colonialists had taken over South Africa starting from the first colony set up by the Dutch East India Company in 1652.

The Boers set up their South Africa Republic and the Orange Free State while the subsequent British colonial settlers established the Cape Colony and Natal.

All this transpired at the expense of the indigenous black population, and only after a series of resistance wars against the colonialists.

Eventually, the desire of the British to merge the Boer areas with their own in a united South African colonial enterprise led to two Boer-British wars in 1880-81 and 1899-1902.

The second war led to the defeat of the Boers who wanted to retain control of ‘their’ territories and ‘modern’, unified South Africa was born.

The pre-existing oppression of and suppression of the indigenous black South Africans at the hands of the white settler colonialists finally transmogrified, especially after WWII, into the apartheid system, which implied ‘separate development’ for the blacks, a euphemism for displacing the black population into Bantustans (black reservations) and grabbing their land.

Even those black South Africans who were not confined to these Bantustans or managed to escape them and enter mainstream South African life in the cities were horribly discriminated against and oppressed.

‘Whites Only’ signs were ubiquitous in public areas, transport, even washrooms. If people think the US deep south’s slavery was bad, even it could not hold a candle to the cruel fate meted out to the indigenous South Africans.

Gandhi travelled to South Africa in the 1910s after finishing his law studies in Britain to help the Indian indentured labourers community in the country, who had been transported there by the British colonialists.

There he set up an ashram and conducted struggles on behalf of his unfortunate countrymen as well as against the horrific white settler colonialist laws ad practices such as the pass laws.

Every non-white person in South Africa had to, on pain of persecution, carry an identification pass. Gandhi, amongst other actions, led the movement to publicly burn these passes as a show of defiance of and resistance to white domination and persecution.

The ANC was born out of, and deeply influenced by, Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance. But long after Gandhi had left South Africa to continue his struggle for Indian independence, the ANC tended to adhere to these precepts.

The turning point arguably came with the Sharpeville massacre in 1961. Ironically, the defiant rally against the pass laws and other oppressive laws and practices was led by ANC’s smaller and more militant rival, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).

The South African police opened massive and indiscriminate firing on the peaceful rally, murdering, according to official (understated) figures, 69 people, including nine children, and wounding 180, including 19 children. Many were shot in the back as they turned to flee. After Sharpeville, the mood turned ever more militant amongst the black population.

Even the hitherto pacific ANC turned to armed struggle (hence ‘Spear of the Nation’).

The armed resistance was not very successful, and crackdowns eventually led to the arrest and incarceration of ANC’s leader Nelson Mandela in 1962, sentencing to life imprisonment, of which 27 years were spent with the ANC leadership on maximum security prison Robben’s Island.

The long internment of Mandela and growing opposition to the inhuman, cruel and oppressive system of apartheid the world over, especially in the US-led west, which was the main supporter, politically and economically, of apartheid, led to South Africa incrementally becoming isolated and morally condemned (Cf. Israel today).

This eventually translated into economic isolation through the boycott movement, triggering an economic crisis, actual and of confidence.

Apartheid South Africa did not, however, concede to the demand for a just society without the countless sacrifices of the South African people. Eventually, white South African President F W de Klerk brought Mandela back from Robben’s Island, negotiated with him and was sufficiently persuaded by Mandela’s vision and wisdom to concede an end to apartheid in favour of a democratic South Africa.

While the world rejoiced with South Africa at this turn of events that culminated in Mandela being elected President in a free and fair election in 1994, and while the demise of apartheid went unmourned, informed analysts had fears and question even then about the future of a South Africa in which Mandela had prevented a potentially bloody civil war by promising there would be no black revenge against the whites, who would continue to live peacefully as citizens of the changed country.

Truth and Reconciliation processes healed many wounds and helped South Africans to look forward to a very different and better future. Mandela’s peaceful revolution was in sharp contrast to the rival PAC’s position, summed up in their slogan: “One settler, one bullet.”

But while Mandela’s incredible peaceful victory promised much hope, there remained a fly or two in the ointment. The ‘revolution’ was political, but it left intact the economic structure, in which the whites were a privileged elite and the blacks impoverished and destitute.

Without a revolutionary restructuring of the economy and wealth ownership in favour of the blacks, the chickens of this compromise were sure to come home to roost some day.

Instead of addressing this historic inequality, Mandela’s successors fell prey to the temptations of high office and were increasingly perceived as corrupt. This was quite apart from the inherent inequity of a white rich elite and a struggling mass of the poor black people. Those poor have now spoken.

Whether the ANC manages a coalition that agrees to retain Ramaphosa at its head, as the ANC is insisting, or he is removed from within the party, the message delivered by the people of South Africa must be heeded, or the ANC’s decline could end up in a complete rout.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024