The horrendous voter turnout and the ANC’s dire performance in this week’s local elections are a clear and unambiguous message from the electorate that it is unhappy with the pace of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s reforms. The results herald a torrid time for him in the 2024 elections.
The ANC took a clear, conscious decision not to name its mayoral candidates for the various municipalities the party was contesting across the country. Instead, it chose to go with the asset it had: Ramaphosa’s popularity. Election posters across the country bore his smiling face.
By doing so, the party was asking South Africans to buy into his renewal programme. The party is well aware that its corruption and criminality at national level during 2008-2017, when its president outsourced cabinet appointments and key decision-making to the Gupta family, had replicated itself at local level. Indeed, much worse was taking place there as cadres stuck their noses in the trough in the knowledge that nothing would be done to stop them.
As the local government election results started trickling in on Tuesday, it became clear that the ANC was on its way to suffering a bloody nose from those voters who got up on November 1 and actually chose to cast their ballots. The results are not just a rejection of the ANC’s corruption and a condemnation of its ineffectuality, but also a clear comment on — if not a rejection of — Ramaphosa himself. Ramaphosa and the ANC had run an “apology tour” of a campaign. The key message was that “we have sinned, forgive us and give us one more chance”.
Voters bought that message somewhat in 2019. This time they stayed home or went with opposition parties. Their message is clear: too much talk, too little action on the ANC’s part. This has a tremendous impact on Ramaphosa’s run for president in 2024. His message cannot be one of promises that “I will fix Eskom, I will fix the unemployment programme, I will fix failing infrastructure”. Neither can he blame state capture and the “10 lost years”.
By 2024, Ramaphosa will have been in power and in office for six years. How long is the work of fixing SA going to take him? If Ramaphosa were a US president, he would have been reaching the end of a four-year term (he started in February 2018). By the end of his fourth year in office, he is supposed to be doing his victory lap.
In many jurisdictions, he would have generally been given 100 days at the beginning of his term to make his boldest moves.
Yet listen to Ramaphosa on any given day, with three years and nine months of Jacob Zuma gone. He still starts his sentence with the words “We will…”.
Now, it’s OK for people like this columnist to complain ad nauseam about the slow pace of reform. We just talk. Voters, on the other hand, send real and consequential messages.
In 2016 voters sent a clear message that they had had enough of the Zuma years, and gave opposition parties the chance to form governments in key metros in Gauteng and Nelson Mandela Bay. They are doing the same in these elections, because they have seen no meaningful progress in Ramaphosa’s leadership of his corrupt party. They have heard the words and slogans — new dawn, thuma mina — but where’s the beef?
Ramaphosa is going to face pressure within the ANC. He will be pilloried by some decidedly dodgy characters who have wanted him out from day one. The truth is that he is failing because he has pandered to them for four years now.
Voting South Africans are giving their support to leaders who are promising action. The support for Herman Mashaba, for example, is part of that trend. Ramaphosa needs to realise that pandering to the thieves and crooks of his party, his accommodation of them, may give him some power within the ANC but it will do major damage to him among South Africans.
The trend is clear. If he does not act decisively now on corruption, it will be curtains for the ANC in 2024. The rest of the country will soon follow.
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