AN ELECTION OF HOPE
It’s time for a breath of fresh air. Nowhere is that sentiment more evident than in the comparisons being drawn between South Africa’s first democratic election on April 27 1994 and the May 29 poll. Both ballots offered a sea change — in 1994, from the horrors of the apartheid system, in 2024 from the serial disappointments of entrenched ANC rule.
Certainly, it’s over-optimistic to suggest the ANC will be going anywhere fast; the party may well lose its outright majority, but it will retain its hold on power. The outcome could run the gamut from coalitions with small, undemanding parties that are happy to forgo policy demands in return for a seat at the table of power, to deals with more radical — and damaging — partners. In between there’s room for political and economic reform or regression, depending on the extent of the electoral setback to the ANC and the prevailing political mood.
Still, the party is unlikely to walk back any deep loss of support; if it falls below the 50% mark, it won’t claw its way back in the next election.
And so, as the University of Johannesburg’s Prof Steven Friedman argued in our cover story last week, our politics are headed for the kind of reset that will bring us in line with comparable country peers. And an opening of the political space that allows more parties to align more closely with voters’ ideological and policy preferences.
That’s no small thing, if you consider an Ipsos poll released on Monday that found fully a third of South African voters don’t feel any political party completely represents their views or opinions.
Still, most South Africans are too cynical and worldly-wise to expect the erosion and eventual end of ANC dominance to magically usher in a new era of clean and efficient governance fostering shared prosperity.
More than likely, there will be a mishmash of messy coalitions whose leaders at times serve the national interest, and at other times continue the now entrenched practice of lining their own pockets.
What the chink in the ANC armour does is throw into sharper relief South Africans’ disappointment with the status quo. The mere fact that 2024 is being seen as a watershed election shows how tired people are of the same leadership making the same mistakes.
They’re tired of cadre deployment and an incompetent civil service; of patronage networks that trump equitable service delivery; of infrastructural collapse; of joblessness, poverty and pervasive inequality. Of a stagnant economy in which reforms proceed with all the alacrity of continental drift.
And so we have 2024, “the new 1994” an election of hope.
Yet for that hope to be in any way realised, voters needed to turn up at the polls on Wednesday. Indicatively, in 2019, 17.6-million South Africans voted just 49% of the voting-age population, according to a paper by elections analyst Collette Schulz-Herzenberg. So where the ANC won 57.7% of the vote, it was handed that majority by fewer than half of all eligible voters. It was the steepest decline in voter turnout yet.
To not turn out could be to the benefit of the status quo; Ipsos modelling this month found low voter turnout would favour the ANC, pushing it closer to 50%.
If South Africans are to embrace the hope of change — of a more open party political system where contestation is robust, where parties must work for votes, and where lines of accountability are sharper now is the time to act.