No Netflix twist on May 29

Former president Thabo Mbeki’s grand cameo on behalf of the party that dumped him in 2007 suggests a late wake-up call in the ANC’s attempt to hold on to, or win back, black middle-class voters.

These voters are at great danger, we are told by some, of succumbing to the tasty policy charms of one of the many ANC splinter franchises (mild, spicy or flaming hot). They include the EFF, MK Party, UDM, COPE and the Patriotic Alliance, all offering a familiar policy menu from which to savour one’s disaffection with an ANC that has changed as much as the country it inherited with such fanfare in 1994.

In reality, the ANC has really just come of age, for better or for worse. At the same time, and to critics at least, the limitations and relevance of our version of multiparty democracy are being exposed, along with the ANC’s own race-bound limitations.

Mbeki hasn’t disappointed his upper-LSM audience, presumably conditioned by Netflix into accepting storylines more fantastical than likely. How about the suggestion that his nemesis, Jacob Zuma, may have been an apartheid plot? The idea of Zuma as an avatar of malignant forces comes as more of a relief than a shock, if it’s true, and as a subplot tops the more mundane, and worrying, wisdom that Zuma is simply a product of the ANC. Finish and klaar.

Never, one might think, has the political terrain been more welcoming to the DA, the party that likes to think it personifies what it means to be middle class in South Africa. Yet amid the spectre of load-shedding, water problems, SUV wheel-ruining potholed roads and ever-more imaginative ways to plunder the state (and its citizens), not even a Netflix plot would have the party fun-walking to victory in a wave of middle-class tut-tutting on May 29.

To understand why, the life story of former DA leader Mmusi Maimane provides a few pointers, illustrating the racial pitfalls in South Africa’s contested and uneven transition from apartheid to multiparty liberal democracy. That is, a democracy free of the stranglehold of race and in which there is a fair to even chance the incumbents can actually lose an election.

Take a drive through the suburbs and you’re likely to see Maimane, the affable, almost “born free” leader of the Build One South Africa movement, our own kasi Barack Obama (born 1980) smiling down, offering “A Job in Every Home”. It’s a modest goal, for sure, and a worthy one, but as an election promise it is an indictment of the ANC’s failure to provide a better life for all prepared to work for it. But his candidature, as a lone ranger, also speaks of the DA’s manifest failure to openly embrace a nonracial future. If anything, it has turned its back on it.

Maimane’s story, his unlikely cross-racial triumph as leader of a forward-looking DA in 2015 and his betrayal by those who had held him aloft in 2019, hints at the invisible racial ceiling and the racial gridlock that still defines our politics. His demise as leader of the DA brought to an end the party’s attempts to signal, garishly and loudly, a welcome to black voters who rejected an ANC that sneered at “clever blacks” and mocked Model C accents.

Short of a collective midlife crisis, who would abandon a party that has made the public sector the employer of choice, to give just one example of its largesse?

The elections of 2024, emphatically for the first time, will be decided mostly by voters whose adult years have been lived entirely under the new dispensation. Their only political reality has been an ANC government. It is an election in which the adult black middle class will give its verdict on the three decades. 

Their number excludes at least 10-million voting-age nonvoters, which is about how many votes the ANC got in 2019 by the way, who’ve no interest in elections at all. The question is whether the customary gratitude of older folks may be wearing thin. Short of a collective midlife crisis, who would abandon a party that has made the public sector the employer of choice, to give just one example of its largesse?

Expect no real change, argues commentator Moeletsi Mbeki, in an interview with the left-wing media network Amandla! “What gets forgotten is that all our parties in South Africa are actually middle-class parties. We only have parties of the middle class.”

Mbeki’s analysis is that the working class has thrown in its lot with the middle-class ANC, “which shows that merely being working class doesn’t make you a socialist”. So don’t expect much action on the Left. And of the African middle class in South Africa, he says: “They use the state to enrich themselves through high salaries on the one side, and through corruption on the other.”

It’s a cynical take, perhaps, but it raises the question of how likely the black middle class is to bite the hand that feeds it. And with the DA placing itself beyond South Africa’s racial pale, and given the inherent conservatism of a mature electorate, it’s unclear which party would be poised to benefit from a mass voter desertion from the ANC. Could it have been different for the DA if it had openly accepted the race factor in our politics, instead of fudging it in libertarian code?

In the person of Maimane, the party believed for a while at least that it had found someone to flip the racial equation. After a strong showing in the 2016 local elections he was blamed for the party’s poor showing in 2019, his “ANC Lite” ringing alarm bells for conservative white interests and voters.

The black middle class, many appalled by Zuma and what had become of the ANC, stayed away in 2019 in droves, a trend that intensified with the 2021 local polls. What they didn’t do in 2019 was vote en masse for Maimane’s DA. And the party’s funders must have wondered how, with even as outstanding a “born free” candidate as the Soweto preacher on the party’s posters — a candidate heir to Mandela — their money could be better spent.

As alarming to them as the failure to gain significant black votes was the DA’s loss of the conservative white vote, as small-town Afrikaners were said to have retreated into an ethnic laager, still offered by the likes of the FF Plus. If nothing else, the DA-inspired multiparty charter, apart from providing opposition ballast, essentially outsources the DA’s reaching-out to communities beyond its limited racial realm. Its own Wasp laager.

The revival of the IFP in the 2019 elections had similarly suggested a retreat into racial and ethnic redoubts was well under way in South Africa, a phenomenon further hinted at by the strong showing of the PA, which played to coloured disaffection with the “African-dominated” ANC.

What was imagined to be the great uncaptured prize of the South African political landscape, namely a large floating African middle-class vote with no natural home, caught the attention of other players who tried to capitalise where the DA (and ANC) seemed to be failing.

The EFF of ANC expellee Julius Malema had obviously gorged itself on the low-hanging fruit of the alleged lack of a “freedom dividend’’, in its appeal to a supposedly disaffected army of waiters, petrol attendants and scooter drivers. Malema also made certain though that red overalls did not entirely obscure the EFF’s claim to also being the rightful home of the educated black middle class. It is no coincidence that the EFF, whose founder was once mocked about woodwork at school, soon boasted a leadership that spent as much time being fitted for academic gowns as it did causing mayhem outside your local Clicks.

What gets forgotten is that all our parties in South Africa are actually middle-class parties. We only have parties of the middle class

—  Moeletsi Mbeki

Much has been made of the ANC falling below 50% in this election, but the more likely interpretation is that the black middle class, and that includes the legions of civil servants and public service employees, not to mention those who have benefited from new laws in the private sector, has done well out of the democratic project. 

When the ANC warns of a “return to apartheid” if it loses the elections, its voters get the code. The entire state apparatus with its boundless capacity for patronage, and to some extent the private sector through BEE and affirmative action, have been refashioned in the interests of the supposed few that constitute the black middle class.

But it is lower down the class hierarchy that things could get interesting, with lower working-class black voters more attuned to the service delivery and other benefits DA rule could bring. They may be less put off by the DA’s alleged lack of and interest in nonracial diversity.

South Africa increasingly shares some of the attributes of the one-party “authoritarian democracies” of Russia and China. Elections in these sorts of countries hardly rattle the status quo and rulers are kept in power and style by coercion and an unspoken pact with the shop-a-lot classes. Liberal democracy has been turned on its head in Russia, where President Vladimir Putin rules as a dictator but is wildly popular, especially in the malls.

Behind all the sideshows and circuses of our politics lies one vital question, which is, will the centre hold? With most adult South Africans showing no interest in electoral politics at all, and with the “ANC generation” dominating the voters roll, the status quo probably has a brighter future than it might have imagined. For now, at least, as we muddle along.

If things had been different, what we might have had to factor in on May 29 was a truly nonracial but not colour-blind alliance, drawing on all of South Africa’s diversity, and the expertise and goodwill of people of all races, and headed for a historic victory against a jaded ANC, humbled in defeat and prepared to rejuvenate itself for the new battle five years hence.

But that seems more Netflix (or Rugby World Cup) than real life, and we will more likely remain captives of our history. Cautious too in embracing a devil we don’t know. It’s not the high road, nor the low, but somewhere in the middle. With potholes.