File photo by
Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg via Getty Images
National liberation movements seek to represent or constitute a nation in opposition to colonial oppression. As a result, they often try to organise across class and include a far wider spectrum of opinion than political parties in freer societies.
There can be a strong sense that their secrets must be kept, that legitimate disputation happens within the movement and that external opposition is either a proxy for the enemy or “objectively reactionary”. When they are successful, their popular legitimacy can enable an assured hold on power for decades.
Given all this, it is not surprising that the two elections that have been most consequential in post-apartheid South Africa were for the presidency of the ANC rather than parliament. The election of Jacob Zuma as president of the ANC in 2007 and Cyril Ramaphosa in 2017 shaped our society in profound ways. Zuma’s ascent to power began our decline. Ramaphosa’s defeat of Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma did not arrest the ongoing decline but things would have been very different if she had won the presidency of the ANC.
This year a national election could, for the first time, be equally consequential. It is possible that the ANC may win less than 50% of the vote and be forced to form an alliance with another party or parties to continue to govern. If this happens, the nature of that alliance will have significant ramifications for the character of the ANC and the governance of the country.
Although the number of parties that will be listed on the ballot is expanding there are, broadly, two primary poles of opposition to the ANC. One comes from within the ANC and is a displacement of contestation originally carried out within the party. The African Transformation Movement (ATM), the new uMkhonto weSizwe party to which Zuma has aligned himself and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) are all exiled factions of the ANC.
While the first two are currently small players, polling indicates that support for the EFF is growing. The EFF is notorious for changing its position on important issues — we should not assume that its embrace of the authoritarian and kleptocratic faction of the ANC that first cohered around Zuma and seeks to root its authority in the claim to represent the military tradition of the ANC rather than democratic principles is sincere and will be permanent. It is a potentially significant development though.
The other pole of opposition to the ANC is broadly liberal and includes the DA, Build One South Africa, and, it seems, Change Starts Now. It intersects at points with the more right-wing populism of ActionSA and the ethnically rooted conservatism of the Inkatha Freedom Party and the Freedom Front Plus.
This group of opposition parties do not, with the arguable exception of Change Starts Now, have their roots in the ANC but are, particularly in terms of aspects of economic policy, broadly similar to the liberal faction of the ANC. Their offering to the electorate centres around anti-corruption, efficient governance, and pro-business policies.
Ramaphosa was backed by powerful forces in the media, a group of NGOs and, it is said, half a billion rand from business to contest Dlamini Zuma for the presidency of the ANC in the hope that he would give decisive leadership to the liberal faction of the ANC. His weaknesses as a leader have meant that he has not given leadership of any sort and has left the party in stasis. The big money has moved to Roger Jardine.
This broad distinction between two primary poles in our electoral politics — an authoritarian populism enthused by outrightly kleptocratic figures and currents and a liberal faction focussed on good governance and pro-business positions — does not exhaust the range of contenders that will soon be at the hustings. Along with the explicit conservatism of the IFP and the FF+ there are a range of small parties, some of them, like the Patriotic Alliance, plainly toxic.
Our proportional representation system incentivises the formation of small parties with no hope of building a broad base of support and can result in them exercising considerable power via collations. If the ANC comes in at just less than 50%, small parties could acquire significant influence.
However, this broad distinction does enable potentially fruitful comparison with the crisis of liberal democracy in many societies where right-wing populism threatens once stable forms of consensus. In many of these societies the post-Cold war view that politics as mostly class-based contestation around economic systems and the distribution of their surplus was historically exhausted was widely accepted.
Governance came to be understood as a matter of technocratic management and politics, a matter of personalities and hot-button social issues such as abortion and gay marriage rather than economics and social justice.
The entrenchment of neoliberalism resulted in steep decline in living standards for many. In the UK, more than one in four children now live in poverty and more than one in five households have to skip meals or go without food for a whole day. In the US, life expectancy has declined by almost three years in less than a decade with the largest factor driving the decline being deaths of despair: suicide, drug overdoses and liver disease due to excessive alcohol use.
In both countries, the leaders of parties once rooted in labour have successfully contained internal challenges from the left while the parties that have long represented elites have moved far to the right. As in many other countries an exclusionary and authoritarian nationalism centred around racism and xenophobia has become a key ideological mechanism to deflect popular concern at dropping standards of living away from elites and exclusionary economic systems and towards vulnerable minorities.
Many increasingly powerless people have developed a libidinal attraction to the power wielded by disinhibited authoritarian leaders.
In South Africa there will be no party rooted in labour and no left party on the ballot. Zuma’s socially and politically destructive record in office means that it is farcical to claim that the posture of radical nationalism adopted by the new parties that aim to sustain his authoritarian and kleptocratic form of politics is left-wing.
The EFF is more complicated, but its authoritarianism has always been clear and there are clear grounds for urgent suspicion of any party that fawns over Zuma in Nkandla and welcomes Carl Niehaus into its ranks.
Among the prominent politicians in South Africa, Herman Mashaba is the closest to the right-wing populists that have rushed to prominence or power in other countries in recent years. But the crudity of the authoritarian populism initially associated with Zuma, its reckless debasement of the public sphere and its embrace of clownish but toxic figures like Niehaus, Mzwanele Manyi and Dali Mpofu all resonate in form rather than content with the right-wing populism associated with Donald Trump and evident in many other liberal democracies.
Our situation in terms of rule by a sclerotic, corrupt and repressive former national liberation movement is more like some of the other countries in southern Africa than liberal democracies elsewhere. But in terms of the two primary poles of opposition to the ANC, both organised across a set of parties, our politics is analogous to what is happening in many liberal democracies.
One force, authoritarian and populist, claims to speak for the people while advancing the interests of an elite at the direct expense of society. The other eschews politics as popular participation and contestation over economic inclusion while offering more of the same largely neoliberalism that led to widespread disenchantment with established forms of politics.
We should not be surprised that less than half of all eligible voters participated in the 2019 election or that there is no popular enthusiasm for the broadly liberal parties outside of the ANC.
We do not have a Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders within the ANC and its wider alliance let alone a figure like Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Lula da Silva, Evo Morales or Gustavo Petro outside of it. We do not have the sort of electorally oriented popular movements that sustained these leaders as they rose to prominence or power.
We do not have a party on the ballot that offers a credible vision of emancipation via increased participation in political life and economic inclusion.
Democracy will only be secured when it is deepened by an emancipatory alternative rooted in the excluded majority. That project cannot come out of either of the two primary poles of electoral opposition to the ANC. It will have to be built from the bottom up, meeting by meeting, neighbourhood by neighbourhood and year by year.
Richard Pithouse writes about politics, music and poetry.