IS IT TIME TO IMAGINE A POST-ANC-AS-GOVERNING-PARTY SOUTH AFRICA.

THE THRUST OF THIS POST WAS PUBLISHED IN THE SUNDAY TIMES OF 19 NOVEMBER 2023. THIS IS AN UNEDITED VERSION. 

The thought of a less than 50% performance by all the parties contesting for elections is tantamount to thinking of South Africa in post-ANC-as-governing-party terms. Opinion polls about the 2024 national and provincial elections converge at less than 50% performances by all registered political parties. As a result, the discourse is now about coalition government permutations. The national elephant in the room discourse of answering the question ‘'Are we ready for a post-ANC-as-governing-party South Africa?' is relegated to hush-hush affair, and it never gets to a point when the nation openly engages the question.

Since 2016, fierce debates between academics and scholars emerged over the looming inevitability of a post-ANC government in South Africa. Dominant scenarios reflect, at worst, a complete change of the government of the day in the national sphere and, at the least, a change of government in the provinces of Gauteng and KwaZulu Natal. Together with the Western Cape, which a different political party governs, the three provinces will represent the most urbanised and economically significant spaces of what defines South Africa.

The overall performance of the ANC in the 2021 local government elections gave the closest indication of what voters might decide on who becomes the government of the day in the national sphere. At the time of the 2021 voter verdict, service delivery dysfunctions were less acute, the Zondo Commission Report had not become an unreviewed authority on the truth, or otherwise, about corruption and state capture, certain of the public infrastructure was still in a less bad shape than now. The trust deficit between citizens and the governing elite was reasonably better than in the post-Phala-Phala context.

 

Investors have been on a definite path of de-risking their South African portfolios. RSA bonds are no longer as lucrative due to the geopolitical stances the country has been lately taking and the general outlook on the political economy of South Africa by independent rating agencies. The vulnerability of the South African economy to foreign currency-induced inflation has had the consequence of high borrowing costs. Given the interest rate hikes and a runaway inflation crisis, the downward spiral is not ending. 

In such circumstances, democracy suggests we should openly discuss alternative leadership, which should not necessarily be about regime change unless logic cannot be defied otherwise, as a viable way forward. In an election season, rhetoric might yield, as the default way forward, the need to change the government of the day configurations. The depth of such a decision should always be preceded by rigorous policy debates. Individuals and coalition arrangements with the best pathways can then be elected to advance society further and out of the crisis state.

Even with this logic, in South Africa, the challenge has always been the extent to which a new coalition government of the day can muster sufficient legitimacy to be trusted with the liberation promise the Constitution guarantees. The brute truth is that for the longest time, the ANC has been at the forefront of fighting for a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it and that no government can claim authority unless it is based on the people's will. Coalition government arrangements are a consensus of minorities that meet the threshold numbers to form a government. They represent the people’s will as reinterpreted by those who get access to public power through threshold number crunching. Sometimes, pooled proportional representation numbers become the magic to being a kingmaker or otherwise.

Thirty years into a democratic order, the governing ANC can only boast about the infrastructure of freedom it has created. It still struggles to demonstrate the actual on-the-dinner-table plate benefits of the liberation promise to all, safe for a co-opted state salary-dependent elite. What the legal frameworks have translated out of the Freedom Charter and other monumental policy documents of the ANC has been difficult to realise in a way that indicates a better life for all.

The crises of poor execution, impunity of corruption, blatant takeover of livelihoods by criminal syndicates, water and energy insecurity, which have had a multiplier effect on food and nutrition security, and the general insecurity occasioned by unmanaged immigration have become compulsory footnotes on any discourse about the governing party. 

Internal to the governing party are growing cracks of disunity and succession battles bordering on scorched-earth policy politics by certain factions. It has become easy for some members to agree to 'collapse the party if they can't lead it'. Internal reports indicate dysfunctional to non-existent branches in good standing since the last fit-for-conference audits. Save for the appeal and resilience of freedom from a near memory of the apartheid past, the ANC is in a compromised state to survive and thrive over time, especially if it can lose political power through a less than 50% performance in 2024. 

The ANC's compromised ability to withstand governance shocks and stressors and its capacity to effectively respond to the risks of losing the legal means to transform society further has become the cardinal reason why society has started to imagine a South Africa without the ANC as the governing party. Only those leaders who will come up with plans to capture society's imagination of its freedom better will appeal to voter support, and many of this breed are not members in good standing. 

The decay in seeing the ANC as a critical platform upon which the completion of what the 1994 breakthrough promised society had weaponised it against the very liberation which defined it for more than a century. As one ANC elder warned, 'mixing good food with the smallest quantity of poison, the poison will always win' as whatever is served will forever be dangerous; the ANC might have allowed into its ranks members that are a quantity of poison. The socioecological resilience of the ANC and its ability to absorb and adapt to change would require much more than its current internally focused renewal but may call for its leaders to make tough calls.

South Africa is in a state of deep anxiety, save for the opiate that the Springboks have injected into the nation as yet another fix. The essence of South Africa’s 2024 choice of who should govern will be about either continuing with hope in a disintegrating centre of incumbents or betting on a coalition that has made it clear it will tinker, if not reverse, what is considered gains of the post-1994 breakthrough.

In the event of a below 50% performance by political parties, South Africa will be put in a condition where a potential coalition government of the day should be obligated to guarantee the nation of the liberation promises in the Constitutions.  These choices have, to date, yet to be put to voters to ponder. The dominant narrative is about removing the ANC when the question should be our readiness to consider a post-ANC-as-governing party in South Africa with an opposition that says nothing about preserving the least gains we have made in the last and tormenting years gone by. CUT!!!