It’s do or die for the ANC. One small mistake at this point and the whole ship sinks in five years. If anyone in the governing party is of the view that a 57.5% share of the national vote is comfortable enough for them to waddle around without a care, as they’ve done for 25 years, then they need to reconcile themselves to losing Gauteng, just for a start.
Losing Gauteng in five years will be almost as bad as losing the whole country. It will confirm the party is not in touch with the most populous, most influential and most progressive province, where the most educated cohort plays and lives.
That prospect is imminent. The trend has established itself in the past three elections, as the ANC has dropped four or five percentage points without trying. Stopping this slide will require Herculean steps, including turning a stuttering economy around. This is especially since economic growth of just 2% (our best-case scenario for 2020) is not going to create serious new job numbers.
Anything the new administration does will take years to affect the youth in Mqanduli or Thohoyandou. Spectrum rollout, visa reforms or touting for foreign investment — any gains from these will take a long time to reach the disenfranchised and disenchanted.
The ANC has never clocked below 60% in a national election before. At its zenith, it reached 70% in 2004 under Thabo Mbeki’s stewardship, after hitting 66.3% in 1999. Under Jacob Zuma, it ebbed to 65.9% in 2009, then 62.1% in 2014.
So, these are nervous moments for a party that is still convinced of its dominance in society. It risks either panicking, or failing to take any medicine whatsoever.
Gauteng would be the easiest to change, considering the ANC’s provincial arm represents the more debonair element of the party, led as it is by people au fait with the tides of modern politics. And ordinarily the idea of political reform would not be difficult. But what reforms can the party institute with its support in Gauteng hanging gingerly at the 50% mark? Especially since, when its support was around 53.6% five years ago, it didn’t entertain any such reforms.
You can’t say the ANC wasn’t warned. In the local government elections in 2016, the party tumbled below 50% in three metros — Johannesburg, Tshwane and Port Elizabeth’s Nelson Mandela Bay.
But losing its influence in Gauteng confirms the ANC’s status as just another Zanu-PF, Zimbabwe’s once mighty liberation party that first lost control of the urban centres, then the middle class, and ultimately had to rely on swathes of rural voters to prop it up.
Only, the ANC is in a worse position: it’s not exactly thriving in the rural provinces either. And that is only likely to get worse if it implements the reforms needed to fix the economy, which will undoubtedly change it into a more urban-focused party.
It leaves President Cyril Ramaphosa between a rock and a hard place. The job he has always longed for came at precisely the most difficult time, and the momentum is strongly against him.
James Motlatsi, who has worked closely with Ramaphosa for 40 years, is convinced his character and experience will hold him in good stead. "Cyril has never been chosen in any organisation when things were going smoothly," says Motlatsi. He should know — the two worked alongside each other to create the National Union of Mineworkers in 1982. "If there is a right time for Cyril, this is the time," says Motlatsi.
Huge expectations lie on his shoulders, with everyone expecting swift action to boost the economy. But if he moves too fast, he rattles a hornets’ nest in the ruling alliance, itself a simmering hotbed of factional angst. And if he moves too carefully, a growing wave of people disillusioned with slow change will be itching to have another go at the former liberation movement in local elections in two years’ time.
Nothing drives home the scepticism more than the reaction from Fitch, one of the three big ratings agencies, which concluded that after the elections a "major economic policy shift is unlikely".
The decline in ANC support, and the strong showing by the EFF, whose share of the vote rose to 10.8% from 6.4% in 2014, suggests rising discontent with living conditions, the economy and corruption under ANC leadership, Fitch said.
"It also implies a lack of popular enthusiasm for the economic agenda of Ramaphosa … Given the variety of factors behind the result, the vote is unlikely to greatly change the balance of power between factions within the ANC."
Weaker than ever
Michael Jordaan, the venture capitalist and founder of Bank Zero, describes the elections result as a "Goldilocks outcome".
"A reformist, anti-corruption president got the mandate he needed; yet the ruling party’s margin of victory is such that it now needs to deliver. That the DA lost votes to the right wing — the Freedom Front Plus — was not necessarily the worst that could happen to the official opposition party," he says.
If anything, this may make the DA’s own policy-making easier in future, he adds.
The DA’s bloody nose — the official opposition’s support dropped from 22.2% in 2014 to 20.8% last week — has left the party shuttered in its own laager, obsessing about whether Mmusi Maimane is the man to lead the crusade to displace the ANC. This, you’d imagine, would give the ANC enough space to implement its own reforms.
Only, the ANC is in uncomfortable territory. Dig below those percentage numbers, and you’ll see that the party lost 1.4-million votes, or 19 parliamentary seats, from the 11-million votes and 249 seats won under Zuma in 2014.
True, in the 2016 local elections, it managed a national aggregate of only 54%, or 9-million votes, but national and local elections are like apples and pears, and not really comparable. This is a bigger moment.
Ramaphosa has been in the hot seat for a year, but his task hasn’t become easier since the political chess pieces in the ruling party keep moving. For one thing, he faces resistance from the faction aligned to Ace Magashule, the party’s secretary-general, who last week shocked many when he said the former unionist cannot be credited for arresting the party’s decline.
"The people who made us win the elections are volunteers, communities and people who love the ANC. The ANC has never been about an individual," said Magashule. It was a salvo that thrust to the fore the divisions between Ramaphosa and the party’s third-in-command. The former Free State premier represents the faction that campaigned for Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in 2017, narrowly losing to Ramaphosa.
Magashule is one of those who insist the state should take ownership of the SA Reserve Bank’s shares, in line with a decision at the December 2017 Nasrec conference. He is steadfast on this — and he isn’t alone.
Ramaphosa faces a tough task in steering the ANC away from a Zanu-PF fate as he battles factionalism and gate-keeping
— What it means:
In itself, the Bank spat is of little importance, except that it highlights the arresting reality that the majority of people who attend ANC conferences generally do not understand modern economics. They are still stuck in Soviet-style grand thinking.
Explaining that the ownership of the central bank does not affect monetary policy one iota does not persuade many ANC hardliners, even those normally considered sensible.
Their typical rejoinder: if ownership does not influence interest rates, why are the current private owners hellbent on owning a strategic asset? (It’s a circular argument, and one likely to leave you despondent.)
This stalking horse is also the sort of policy stance that spooks financial markets, wary as they are of any inclination towards populism. The rise of the EFF bolsters the belief that increased populism is on the cards.
This is why Fitch argues that the vote "is unlikely to greatly change the balance of power between factions within the ANC".
The Chinese model
It is true that in the long run, political and economic perceptions can trip up any leader. Or be the making of him or her.
Ramaphosa has long idolised the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping, the father of modern China, who led the country into the market economy after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.
There are vague similarities between the conditions in which both Deng and Ramaphosa were forged. Deng dealt with personal humiliation during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, exile and prolonged heartache. Equally, Ramaphosa was elbowed out of the race to succeed Nelson Mandela by Mbeki, but bounced back in one of the most fascinating political comebacks in ANC history to get the job two decades later.
Deng also gave birth to the thinking that brought about economic reforms and boosted industrialisation in China. However, the failure to advocate for democratisation remains a black mark on his record.
Ramaphosa, apparently, is a big scholar of Asian development, from China to Malaysia and Singapore. He will be aware that to repeat Deng’s success, he needs sharp thinking around the economy and the creation of modern, hi-tech mini-industries.
Politically, he also needs to ensure there are, at the least, a couple of thugs who get to sport orange prison overalls. The ANC will have to be as brutal as the Chinese Communist Party in lynching those found with their hands in the till. Metaphorically.
But that is easier said than done, considering the character of the ANC. It is a broken system, with no verifiable member system; it gets run at the subnational level by brutal gangs particularly skilled at gate-keeping.
Ramaphosa’s own deputy, David Mabuza, got to where he is from this game. Mabuza farmed the membership system in Mpumalanga and turned a pariah province into a kingmaker, ultimately giving Ramaphosa the edge, however tiny, over the Zuma faction two years ago.
The systems that allowed provincial barons such as Mabuza to dictate the terms of the game have not been dismantled. More Mabuzas are being born in every province, district and municipality every day. The ANC hasn’t changed that, and it will reap the whirlwind. It may not be this year, but it will happen.
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