R.W. JOHNSON / The ANC continues to pick over the reasons for its election defeat. It is a curious sight in a number of different ways. For a start, many ANC leaders seem to have been surprised by the result. It is their foundational belief that the ANC represents the masses, so how can the masses have failed to support the party?
For several years now I have been hearing stories of how mortally disappointed and disabused voters in townships and informal settlements are, and this has been fully backed up by opinion poll findings. But, quite clearly, the ANC has been disregarding the evidence in front of its eyes. Right up until election day, Ramaphosa continued to insist that of course the party would win over 50% of the vote.
Part of the reason for this is the ANC’s enormous self-righteousness. It is the party of liberation. Its triumph was historically ordained and historically inevitable, foretold in the Marxist texts. Its onward march to the national democratic revolution has been equally foretold in a thousand speeches, slogans and resolutions. The party is, in other words, utterly convinced, indeed brainwashed by its own propaganda.
To see this in action, have a look at Mmamoloko Kubayi’s extraordinary verdict on the elections – replete with quotes from Lenin, Mao Zedong and other Marxist authorities. It is pure gobbledygook. Ms Kubayi is, for heaven’s sake, a cabinet minister, though she clearly lives in Wonderland.
There just isn’t any room in that theoretical world for big setbacks. If such things happen, they must be the work of extraneous forces – hence the bogeyman of the counter-revolution. For, of course, the party has a long list of enemies: imperialism, neo-colonialism, monopoly capital, the NATO West, white racism, and so on. Any setback for the ANC must mean an advance by one of these forces, cunningly planned by reactionary elements.
Lacking in all this is any sense of agency. Thus the ANC verdict on the elections had a separate section about the failings of the economy – high unemployment, falling real per capita income, and so on. But there was no sense in which the ANC accepted that these phenomena were the direct result of its own policies. If anything, the assumption is that if the economy doesn’t perform well, this is the fault of monopoly capital, which ought to invest more. The idea that the ANC could make conditions more favourable for investors is strangely lacking.
Since all ANC policies are designed to hasten the approach of the national democratic revolution, they are regarded, once implemented, as sacrosanct. The fact that some of these policies are directly counterproductive is simply not considered. There is thus no sign that the ANC has taken on board the fact that Ramaphosa’s signature into law of the NHI bill produced a sharp and sudden fall in the ANC vote. For the ANC elite – civil servants, the middle classes, trade union officials, lawyers and judges – all value their private medical care and don’t want to do without it..
Similarly, the HSRC has warned that South Africa faces a huge threat to its food security, with 20% of its population unable to access sufficient food, due to a major decline in the number of people working in agriculture. This is actually a terrible comment on South Africa’s land reform policy which has forced large numbers of productive (white) commercial farmers to exit the agricultural industry. All too often, they have been replaced by black farmers who have failed to make a go of it, resulting in these farms becoming vacant and derelict, with the farm workers losing their jobs.
Despite the large increase in production by a small number of mega-farms, the overall result of thirty years of land reform is thus a growing failure to feed the increasing population. But land reform is a key ANC policy, and the party can’t bear to think that it might all have been a mistake.
Or again, if you point out that social inequality in South Africa has increased and is increasing, ANC ministers will shake their heads and say it is the dreadful inheritance of apartheid. But it isn’t: it is the direct result of ANC policies which have quadrupled unemployment on the one hand and massively overpaid the ANC elite on the other. Apartheid ended thirty years ago, and inequality has greatly increased under ANC rule.
A key reason for this false vision is that the ANC hasn’t adjusted to the growing social differentiation of South Africa’s black people. ANC rule has seen the rapid growth of black business, a middle class largely in state employment, a small number of black commercial farmers, and so on. (Despite its rhetoric, ANC rule has been a disaster for most of the black working class.) At one level, the ANC is quite proud of this, but despite its Marxist background it doesn’t acknowledge that these groups have contradictory interests.
A classic case is the Mining Charter which, by demanding that BEE interests get first 20% and then 30% of the equity of new mining ventures, has completely scared away foreign investors, so no new mines have been sunk for over a decade. By privileging these potential BEE groups, the government has destroyed many mining jobs. Thus the Mining Charter is directly responsible for the miseries of many unemployed miners and their families.
Perhaps the greatest such contradiction, however, is in local government. These structures have been largely taken over by what one might term the ANC’s second and third elevens – local activists who couldn’t aspire to be national or provincial ministers but who descended on their local towns and cities like a plague of locusts, sucking them dry of resources by every conceivable means – in their eyes, their just reward for their years of struggle.
The ANC has now decided that the resulting collapse of municipal services and infrastructure was a major cause of their electoral defeat. and determined that it must turn this situation around before the 2026 municipal elections. For, of course, there is a direct contradiction between the interests of these local ANC activists and those of the local population, who find themselves living in ruined towns and cities.
It will be interesting to see how the ANC attempts this municipal reform, because it cannot be effective unless it stops all the stealing and the massive overpayment of municipal employees. This will be resisted by every kind of chicanery and violence. Quite what an impossible job this is can be seen from Crispian Olver’s account of his (failed) attempt to reform Nelson Mandela Bay, How to Steal a City. The fact is that the only real way of achieving this in a democracy is to throw the governing party out, and hope the Opposition will do better.
The collapse of urban government under ANC rule is, indeed, the movement’s Achilles’ Heel. Both Durban (the first city to be tackled) and Johannesburg, after several decades of ANC rule, are already at or beyond the point of no return. To see where this process leads, look at that most ANC of all towns, Mthatha, which is now in a terminal state of decline thanks to protection rackets which target not only businesses but even churches, doctors’ practices and, indeed, any enterprise with a revenue.
The big positive about all this is that, despite many predictions that South Africa would go the way of Zimbabwe, this is not happening. In Zimbabwe, repression and election-rigging cut off all routes to change. Here, democracy works. There is a free press, independent TV and radio stations, and when government performs poorly it loses elections. Moreover, despite all the ideological nonsense, the ANC has accepted its defeat and invited the Opposition to help it govern. And while democracy survives, there is always the hope of change and remedial action. All is not lost – and can never be lost – while democracy goes on.