The ANC has sarcastically pointed out that only in South Africa can a party that wins 62% of the vote be deemed to have lost an election or be in a worse position than its opponents.
This was a reference to the weekend media analysis of the local government election results, which highlighted the fact that, despite retaining its dominant position, the ANC had been significantly shaken in a way that could foreshadow future electoral trends.
“How does a party that wins 23% of electoral support win the election?” Gwede Mantashe, ANC secretary general, asked journalists when briefing them on the party’s reading of the results. Mantashe’s rhetorical question is a useful corrective to the overly gleeful celebration, couched as analysis, of some political commentators who are enamoured with the idea of a strong opposition challenging the ruling party.
Yet Mantashe himself sets up a straw effigy. No one has claimed that the ANC lost the election. What has been highlighted is that the party’s majority has declined since the 2006 elections and that the shift is partly concealed by the continuing disintegration of the Inkatha Freedom Party in KwaZulu-Natal.
Coupled with a 4% drop in the 2009 provincial and national elections, the results confirm a gradual shift among voters who have supported the ANC so loyally over the past 17 years. No longer are they willing to put up with long queues to throw their weight behind the former liberation movement.
The ANC is in a very fortunate position because its core constituency is, by and large, not yet ready to cut the umbilical cord with the party of Nelson Mandela. It is a testament to its close emotional bond with its supporters that when Khutsong residents were so angry about their incorporation into North West in 2006 they boycotted the election — fewer than 1% voted — rather than entrust their vote to other parties.
The pattern was repeated in this year’s elections, when the communities of Balfour, Ermelo and Ficksburg, which had erupted over service delivery and the ANC list process, overwhelmingly returned the party to office, even though the turnout was not great in some places.
However slowly, some township people are beginning to vote with their feet staying away from the polling stations. Given a lack of a credible leftist alternative to the ruling party, it is evident that most black South Africans are not yet ready to make the giant mental leap required to make their cross against a historically white party, the Democratic Alliance.
Helen Zille’s DA, after increasing its support from 16% to 23%, must be feeling the most satisfaction about the outcome of the elections. It also more than doubled its support among black voters. But the fact is that, if you break down the statistics, this rose from a minuscule 2% to 5%.
I wrote a few weeks back that the party had hoped to reach double-digit figures in terms of black support. It had also hoped for big gains in Mpumalanga and Limpopo, where Zille invested significant time and energy. Which brings me back to my conviction that the real story of the elections continues to be about race, however unpalatable that may be. Black South Africans continue largely to support the ANC and, when they don’t, they prefer to stay home.
The other side of the coin is that even though the ANC never had massive support among the minorities to start with whatever support they had has diminished with the loss of coloured and Indian settlements such as Eldorado Park and Lenasia. I don’t have an explanation for why this is happening. It would be foolhardy to reduce it to Julius Malema, the ANC Youth League leader, or to service delivery, because the obvious question would then be whether black South Africans are more prepared to put up with shoddy services than the minorities.
But if you consider that whites, Indians and coloureds collectively account for between a quarter and a fifth of the South African population and that is where the DA support is currently pegged, you can see that there might be a pattern there. In the spirit of non-racialism, we would no doubt ask: What’s race got to do with it? Unfortunately, much more than we like to think.
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