of surveys, two thirds of South Africans already believe the government is managing the economy ‘very badly’, or ‘fairly badly’.23 If the ANC wanted to reverse its current downward trajectory, changing voters’ overwhelmingly negative sentiment around the economy should be at the top of its to-do list.
But Zuma’s 2017 cabinet reshuffle that triggered the downgrades effectively tied a ball and chain around the party’s ankles. Junk status means that it will be much more expensive for the government to borrow money, significantly reducing the funds available to spend on poverty alleviation and on kick-starting economic growth. Even if it wanted to, the downgrades mean that it is now almost impossible for the ANC to fix the South African economy any time soon. It takes an average of seven years for a country to recover from junk status.24 With negativity around the economy already at historic highs, and with the government unable to raise the money necessary to fund any kind of recovery, the ANC will probably lose power long before South Africa eventually recovers from junk status.
The ANC’s performance on the third key metric identified by South Africans – crime – reflects a similar pattern. On the whole, crime rates first declined slowly but surely after the ANC took power. This was also true for some of the crimes most feared by South Africans, including murder, housebreaking and car-jacking. However, this trend reversed about a decade ago. Today, the number of murders, housebreakings and car hijackings per 100 000 people are far higher than they were ten years ago.
Given that the ANC inherited a country that already had one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world, it was perhaps understandable that voters were initially patient. Nobody could have turned the country into a peaceful paradise overnight. But citizens did want to see a gradual decrease in crime. Between 1994 and 2006, this was largely true, and the ANC could claim that it was making progress. However, as in the case of corruption and economic growth, the government has rapidly lost ground in the battle against crime during the past decade.
One of the key reasons for worsening personal safety in recent years is the chronic instability of corporate governance of the state’s police and prosecuting services. As the Zuma cabal sought to avoid prosecution, crippling the investigative and prosecutorial independence of law enforcement agencies was one of its key survival strategies. As a result, South Africa has had no less than five police chiefs since Zuma became president, four of whom were eventually involved in corruption scandals themselves. The Hawks, supposedly South Africa’s equivalent of the American FBI, also remains in a state of chaos, with an acting head in place since a Constitutional Court ruling that Zuma’s appointment of the totally unqualified Berning Ntlemeza was irregular. Then there is the NPA head and Zuma sycophant Shaun Abrahams, who, in 2016, was embarrassingly forced to climb down from a political witch hunt against former finance minister Pravin Gordhan, and who failed to prosecute any members of the Zuma-Gupta cabal after hundreds of thousands of leaked emails exposed their brazen corruption.
The logical consequence of this maladministration is that the security services have lost what little ability they had to protect South Africans. For example, since 2011, the number of roadblocks organised by the police have declined by 74 per cent.25 In 2016, the police were only able to identify suspects in a quarter of all murder cases, and in 18 per cent of robbery cases.26 The implication is staggering: three out of every four people who committed a murder in 2016 have never been identified. The number of convictions obtained by the supposedly elite investigation unit, the Hawks, has also dropped by 83 per cent since 2011.27 In short, the country’s security services have been gutted.
For many South Africans, this is a matter of life and death. The murder rate has spiked by 20 per cent over the past five years. In the same period, cases of aggravated robbery have increased by 31.5 per cent (Figure 5). Statistics South Africa’s 2016 Victims of Crime survey put it bluntly: ‘South Africans feel that violent and property crime is increasing to the extent that the majority of households don’t feel safe to walk alone in parks or allow their children to play freely in their neighbourhoods.’28
Source: Crime Stats SA.
By 2009 – precisely because it had made some progress in raising living standards during its first 15 years in power – the ANC faced a population with much higher expectations than the society it had inherited in 1994. In fact, the combination of social grants – which sustain 17 million people every month – with increased public sector employment meant that the ANC had succeeded in making sure that more than half of South Africa’s 8.3 million middle-class citizens were black. But the middle-class black South Africans of 2009 had much higher expectations than the impoverished people of 1994 who had just emerged from the apartheid era. While the poorest people worry most about finding their next meal, middle-class citizens tend to care more about fighting crime and corruption, and finding good schools for their children.
Fatally for the ANC, just as the party faced an increasingly modern, wealthy and mobile society with higher expectations for the future, ANC members essentially surrendered any hope they had of meeting these expectations when they elected Zuma as leader. A decade into the 21st century, the ANC chose a semi-literate man mired in allegations of corruption to lead a modern market economy deeply integrated into the global system. The ANC drank poison when it chose Zuma at its Polokwane conference.
But it was a slow poison. As a result, the country’s backsliding over the last decade in terms of mounting corruption, economic decline, and rampant crime is not enough to explain why the ANC is only now in danger of losing its hegemony. Even though the 2009 and 2014 election results showed that the party was slipping, Zuma’s government was still returned to power with an impressive 62.15 per cent in 2014. Why should 2019 be any different? The answer to this question is all about timing and semantics.
Political crises are never triggered solely by failures of governance. Instead, longer-term trends need to coalesce around a visible focal point that encapsulates the broader crisis in the public mind. This is the reason why phrases like ‘the assassination in Sarajevo’, ‘Watergate’, and ‘the Rubicon speech’ became short-hand references to the crisis that triggered the First World War, the corruption of Richard Nixon, and the death throes of PW Botha’s presidency.
On 31 March 2016, the Constitutional Court provided the spark that ignited the powder keg of simmering resentment and unmet expectations when it ruled that Zuma had violated the Constitution when he failed to comply with a report by the Public Protector to pay back a portion of the public funds spent on his private home. Like Sarajevo, Watergate, and Rubicon, the ANC’s impending disaster now had a name: Nkandla.
The Nkandla scandal, involving state expenditure of R246 million to upgrade Zuma’s private compound, quickly became a byword for all that had gone wrong in the previous decade. It illustrated how brazen the new elite had become in stealing from South African citizens. Built on a hill, and surrounded by a sea of poverty, Nkandla also showed vividly how the majority of South Africans remained trapped in poverty while a small group of predators fed off their misery. The scandal even highlighted the collapse of the security services, as Zuma roped in then police minister Nathi Nhleko as his primary defender. During Parliamentary meetings and media conferences, Nhleko sweated profusely as he claimed that an amphitheatre was actually a break wall, and that a swimming pool was a ‘fire pool’ meant to supply fire fighters with water.
Unlike any previous event in modern South Africa, the Nkandla ruling squarely focused the public mind on the ANC’s failings. Ignited by the scandal, the suffering induced by years of corruption, economic decline and crime finally started showing its face at the polling booth, five months after the Constitutional Court ruling. But the 2016 municipal elections were just the beginning. As if the Nkandla scandal wasn’t bad enough, Zuma’s corruption again focused the public mind on the ANC’s failings when, from late 2016 onwards, the term ‘state capture’ was introduced into the public lexicon. This time, the damage went much further than just Zuma.
The release of Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s State of Capture report in November 2016, and the stream of exposés in the media following the massive Gupta email leak, implicated more than half of the ANC’s