In the recent local-government elections the Democratic Alliance emerged as a serious rival to the ANC. For the first time since 1994 the ANC appears vulnerable. Many have celebrated this as a sign that South Africa’s democracy is maturing, but the celebration is premature. They mistake electoral competition, or “electoral uncertainty”, as one analyst called it, for democracy itself.
Democracy has a more basic condition than electoral competition. It requires that the parties contesting power behave as if they are voices in society rather than society’s voice itself. The difference is crucial: parties in a democracy must come to terms with the idea that they represent partial interests or a particular vision of society. This is what democrats must believe.
Yet this is precisely what elements in the ANC do not believe. The ANC, they say, is not a party but a liberation movement, one identical with the nation itself. The ANC is the nation. Thus it includes workers and capitalists, liberals, nationalists, communists and social democrats, the unemployed and the employed.
Non-racism gains a particular meaning from this perspective. Africans, whites, coloureds and Indians, to the extent that they vote for the ANC (or, support a “progressive agenda”), can be part of the nation too. Otherwise, they are “counter-revolutionaries” and/or, in ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema’s formulation, “minority groups”.
From this perspective, the DA election victories in Cape Town and the Western Cape are signs that these areas have left the body of the nation. Listen to President Jacob Zuma’s May 1 speech: “The era of division, pain and underdevelopment must come to an end. Cape Town and the Western Cape must become an integral part of the South African rainbow nation.”
Until now, this conception of the ANC has been given empirical credence by electoral results — huge majorities that confirm that the ANC “represents” the nation. The combination of ANC dominance and the belief that it is the nation has given South African politics a particular form. Politics does not happen where it is supposed to in a democracy (in the competition between parties and in Parliament) but within the ANC itself. This is why events in Cape Town are less significant than what happens at Luthuli House in Johannesburg.
Being the nation and representing it are not the same thing. The first is a philosophical claim, the second an empirical one. The devil lies in between.
Until now, electoral supremacy has merely confirmed empirically what some in the ANC hold to be true by definition — that the movement is the sole authentic and legitimate voice of the people of South Africa. Yet this empirical proof is increasingly being challenged. If opposition parties make inroads into traditional ANC areas, the electoral facts will support the ANC’s axiom less and less. Under such conditions, electoral democracy will sit uncomfortably with nationalists in the ANC.
This is what has happened across the postcolonial world. When liberation movements in government faced serious political opposition, they dissolved Parliament and, like the colonial powers before them, ruled by commandment (political scientist Achille Mbembe’s evocative phrase). Why? Not because they were corrupt or inept or evil: they saw electoral loss as a threat to national sovereignty.
As ANC electoral support diminishes and opposition parties gain, how will the organisation adjust? Certainly, many within it will want to improve the accountability of officials and the performance of government generally. They will seek to strengthen the relationship between elected officials and their constituents. They will no longer want the organisation to be all things to all people.
They will, in short, want the ANC to behave like a political party. Yet a powerful and perhaps dominant element in the organisation will regard the rise of genuine political opposition as a threat to the sovereignty of “the people”. They will cry treason.
This is Thabo Mbeki’s legacy — the shift to philosophical reasoning. Therein lies one of the paradoxes of recent South African politics. The threat to democracy comes from intellectuals, not populists. This is the irony, too, of “populists” such as Malema, once Mbeki’s fiercest critics but today his champion.
Greater electoral competition is likely to deepen these contradictions. It promises to advance democracy’s moment of truth in South Africa. As ANC electoral support diminishes, will nationalists in the organisation be tempted to shut down the electoral process in sovereignty’s name? Or will the ANC come through this process transformed from a liberation movement into a political party?
Ivor Chipkin is the director of the Public Affairs Research Institute