Apart from the damage it is doing to SA, the ANC is swiftly becoming irrelevant to the future of the country. For the next decade or so it will still play a significant part in electoral politics, but it has entered the road to irrelevance in what a future SA will look like.
As evidenced by the apathy and results of the local government elections, voters are tired of the ANC’s infighting, incompetence, corruption and foot-dragging on implementing key economic reforms. If it were not for the rural vote, we would be talking about the end of the ANC in 2024. But we are not there yet.
The ANC’s irrelevance and extinction are, however, not just a product of its performance in government and its inability to reform.
The shift is greater than that. It is a revolution of the collective mind. You see, the psychological dominance that the ANC has had over many South Africans is being torn asunder.
For decades millions of South Africans could imagine no future, no settlement, no peace even, without the ANC. The party was at the heart and centre of the collective imagination. Over the past four years many, including this writer, had still clung to the idea that the ANC could reform and renew itself. In many ways, we sought a renewal of the ANC because we believed it was so central to our democratic project.
All that has changed. It is possible, even easy, to imagine and dream of a future where the ANC is not front and centre of our everyday public life. It is possible to see Joburg mayor Mpho Phalatse or uMngeni mayor Chris Pappas, and many others across the political spectrum, as agents of change.
These are not people elected, as the ANC’s fearmongering puts it, by "the whites". They were put in office by black South Africans. The old racial categorisations the ANC still tries to impose on South Africans are falling by the wayside.
ANC leaders across the country are still poring over the results of the local government elections, trying to find answers as to why the party performed so terribly. The head-scratching and hand-wringing stretch far and wide.
Veterans such as former president Thabo Mbeki and rising stars such as former Tshwane mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa have written numerous assessments and come up with hundreds of recommendations. Polemics have whipped across the land from one ANC WhatsApp group to the next.
These are not people elected, as the ANC’s fearmongering puts it, by ‘the whites’. They were put in office by black people
The simple truth is that the ANC has lost the hearts and minds of the people of SA.
Just 12 years ago, the party still dominated the consciousness of South Africans from cities to rural enclaves. That is no longer the case.
The manner in which Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA managed to animate and excite voters in Joburg and Tshwane is telling. If ActionSA does not implode like Agang SA or COPE, Mashaba has a real chance to continue to cannibalise the ANC’s middle centre in the 2024 elections.
He is not the only one. Independents have made headway where once they would have been laughed out of court.
Smaller parties are now kingmakers. The comeuppance the ANC received in metros due to opposition parties ganging up against it has been welcomed by voters.
The carapace of invincibility that the ANC has worn for decades is pierced. The party’s grip on the consciousness of the populace has loosened.
Where once "comrade", used by the ANC, was a universal term of solidarity, black South Africans now routinely employ the EFF’s "fighter" or revert to the respectful nomenclature of the past.
Where once artists took their cue from ANC cultural dogma, many now follow their own or other philosophies.
We are not just a free people, we are also freed from the belief that all knowledge, all wisdom and all stability emanate from the ANC.
Crucially, we are freed from the false belief that without the ANC there is no centre to our being as a country.
Revolutions don’t start or end in the streets, or battlefields, or voting booths.
They start in the mind. A revolution is now taking place in South Africans’ minds, and the ANC is the loser.
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