in 2016, causing ANC support to plummet to 59.04 per cent. North West, Gauteng and the Western Cape house 42 per cent of the country’s population. They hold the key to whether South Africa will be governed by a national coalition as early as 2019.
Simply put, the decline in ANC support in South Africa’s vital metropolitan areas is accelerating rapidly, and seems set to continue into the 2020s. While the evidence is more equivocal at the provincial and national levels, the 2016 municipal elections clearly showed that growing numbers of ANC voters are willing to abstain or even change their votes in order to express their dissatisfaction with the governing party. Therefore, the ANC’s slide seems set to continue in the 2019, 2021 and 2024 elections. If this happens at current rates, South Africa will soon be governed by a multitude of political coalitions at the municipal, provincial and national levels.
When the crew panics
But don’t just take it from the data. In an extraordinary turn of events, some of the most vocal supporters of the theory that the ANC will soon lose its grip on political power are key role players within the ANC itself. Although some party bigwigs started whispering after the 2016 municipal polls that the ANC’s majority could be in danger in 2019, it took Zuma’s controversial cabinet reshuffle in March 2017 – widely interpreted as a move to consolidate the infamous Gupta family’s hold over the country – to open the floodgates of panic in the party. Suddenly, a succession of senior party figures started talking about an imminent electoral disaster.
One of the first to sound the alarm was Pravin Gordhan. During a CNN interview conducted one month after his dismissal as finance minster which was broadcast worldwide, Gordhan stated: ‘There are many of us who are extremely worried that if we continue as we are in the African National Congress, we are likely to lose the 2019 elections.’11
Soon afterwards, the ANC’s Parliamentary chief whip, Jackson Mthembu, dramatically declared: ‘We’re not sure if we will continue to be free after 2019.’12
Former Mpumalanga premier Mathews Phosa also warned that the ‘ANC will have to perform a miracle to obtain 50 per cent in 2019’, while Gauteng ANC leader Paul Mashatile cautioned that ‘muddling along as before might see us lose Gauteng in 2019’, and that party leaders would ‘only have themselves to blame’ for such an outcome.
Other ANC leaders, including Zweli Mkhize and Lindiwe Sisulu, also warned starkly that the party’s majority was in danger.13
But the most astonishing statement of all came from former president Kgalema Motlanthe. In April 2017, when asked in the course of a BBC interview whether he would vote for the ANC in 2019, he responded as follows: ‘I don’t know yet. It is not a given, because … we are forever snowed under in an avalanche of wrongdoing, and at some point there will be a tipping point.’14 If a former president’s vote for the ANC can no longer be taken for granted, millions of others must also be having second thoughts.
Squandering dominance
Why, at this precise moment in our political history, is the ANC facing the prospect of losing its political dominance? While the rhetoric about the party’s decline burst into the open following the 2016 municipal elections, and especially after the cabinet reshuffle in March 2017, the reasons for voter dissatisfaction with the ANC go back further.
In fact, the 2009 election result provided the first hint that the ANC was losing electoral momentum. As noted earlier, this was the first time that the party’s support at the national level did not increase significantly compared to the preceding municipal election. Take a close look at Figure 3 (page 37) between 1994 and 2006, you can see a clear see-saw pattern. It shows that the ANC consistently received 8–10 per cent more votes during national elections compared to the preceding municipal elections.
Now look at the trend between 2006 and 2016. The see-saw is gone, replaced by a steady downward curve. The pattern was broken with the election of Zuma in 2009 when, for the first time, the ANC barely managed to increase its national vote compared to the previous municipal election, and this new trend accelerated in 2014. It is this trend that should worry party leaders most, because it suggests that the ANC vote in 2019 will drop below the historic low of 54.49 per cent that the party got in the 2016 municipal election.
Knowing that the 2009 campaign represented a turning point, we can begin to look at some of the reasons for the party’s decline. Let’s be guided by the opinion of South Africans themselves: in every Afrobarometer survey between 1999 and 2015, citizens have consistently said they are most concerned about three issues: corruption, unemployment and poverty, and crime. Above, all, the ANC’s declining fortune since 2009 is rooted in its deteriorating performance in respect of these three metrics.
Most visible of these is undoubtedly the scourge of corruption, which has long plagued the ANC. Some of the earliest scandals date back to the presidency of Nelson Mandela; the first high-profile corruption case, known as the Sarafina scandal, surfaced less than two years after the ANC came to power. In 1996, then health minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (who lost to Ramaphosa in the ANC’s 2017 leadership race), gave a close friend a R14 million tender to produce a theatre performance about the dangers of AIDS. In the months that followed, the ANC repeatedly chose to protect Dlamini-Zuma after she was caught lying to Parliament, and even after the funder of the production, the European Union, revealed that it had not approved the contract. As the New York Times reported: ‘ … after more than two years in office, the ANC is developing a poor record on handling charges of corruption and misconduct within its ranks’.15
ANC leaders with a penchant for dodgy deals and access to the national piggy bank then kicked it up a notch with what became known as the ANC’s ‘original sin’: the notorious arms deal. In early 1999, the ANC-led government rushed through a deal to purchase military equipment from a range of global suppliers. Despite the fact that the country had opted for social development over armed conflict just five years previously, the government insisted on buying new fighter jets, submarines, warships and military helicopters costing more than R90 billion (in 2017 rands).
International investigators from Britain, Germany, Sweden and France soon implicated ANC heavyweights, including Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, Tony Yengeni, Fana Hlongwana, Chippy Shaik and Jacob Zuma’s financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, in bribery by arms suppliers totalling more than R1 billion.16 Only Yengeni and Schabir Shaik were held even partly accountable: Yengeni served a mere four months in prison for receiving a luxury vehicle from one of the contractors, and Shaik was released on medical parole after serving only two years and four months of a 15-year sentence for one charge of fraud and two of corruption. The first corruption charge related to payments by Shaik to Zuma in order to further what the state described as a ‘general corrupt relationship’. The second involved payments to Zuma by a French arms company, which Shaik had solicited. At the time of Shaik’s release in 2009, the state alleged that he was ‘terminally ill’. By 2017, however, he was still working at improving his golf handicap on some of South Africa’s smoothest fairways.
The farcical pretend-investigations into the arms deal, including the findings in 2015 that there had been no wrongdoing17 by a commission of inquiry set up by President Jacob Zuma, opened the gates to a flood of corruption surrounding the government and parastatals such as Eskom and Transnet that would eventually threaten to consume the ANC.
The year 2005 brought the ‘Travelgate’ scandal in which 40 MPs – 10 per cent of MPs in the National Assembly – were charged with benefiting from false travel claims to the value of R18 million. All 14 MPs who were eventually convicted were members of the ANC.
Two years later, in 2007, national police commissioner Jackie Selebi was charged with corruption, fraud, racketeering, and defeating the ends of justice for accepting bribes from drug dealers totalling more than R1.2 million. Soon after Selebi was fired (after spending months on suspension with full pay), his successor, Bheki Cele, irregularly awarded an inflated R500 million lease for South African Police Service headquarters in Pretoria and Durban to a billionaire businessman, Roux Shabangu.
Zuma’s name had repeatedly cropped up during the fraud and corruption trial of his financial adviser, Schabir Shaik. In his judgement on 2 June 2005, Judge Hilary Squires referred to a ‘mutually beneficial symbiosis’ between