If UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calls an election for later this year and loses, he will resign from the party leadership before the Tories kick him out. If Labour leader Keir Starmer doesn’t win that election, as expected, he will resign and make way for new blood.
What will happen to our party leaders after May 29? We know what is likely to happen if the ANC’s national support plunges to the 40% range. President Cyril Ramaphosa, a pretty decent fellow who largely understands the idea of taking personal responsibility, and knows that his comrades will be looking daggers at him, will find himself faced with a blank screen on his beloved iPad. It will be time for him to tap-tap his resignation letter.
For the sake of the stability of the party and the country, he may be asked to hang around for a bit, looking shamefaced, but his fate will be sealed. Enter Deputy President Paul Mashatile.
We know that Ramaphosa would likely proffer his resignation, because he did, in December 2022, write such a letter. A parliamentary inquiry had found that Ramaphosa “may have committed serious violations” and breached anticorruption laws regarding the $500,000 stuffed in a sofa at his farm in Limpopo. Unlike his predecessor, he is not averse to stepping down on principle.
What’s more interesting for South Africa’s multiparty democracy, and its trajectory over the next five years, is what opposition party leaders who might perform poorly in this election would do.
In the second-biggest party, the DA, there is a full-on whispering campaign that John Steenhuisen is yesterday’s man. For months now, DA insiders have been sidling up to journalists and columnists saying Steenhuisen is not long for the leadership post, that he is not in the inner circle of the party leadership, that he does not really know how the coalitions chess game will be played after May 29, and that the DA’s powerful funders find him underwhelming.
In 2014 the DA won 22.23% of the vote nationally. In 2019 it slipped to 20.77%, losing five seats in the National Assembly. Soon after, leader Mmusi Maimane was unceremoniously shown the door. In March the Brenthurst Foundation’s latest poll put the DA’s likely support on May 29 at 27%, while a poll by the Social Research Foundation (SRF) in April put it at 25%.
The problem starts when you start organising against me ... I am very ruthless against people who do such things to me
— Julius Malema
That looks positive for Steenhuisen, but would a constituency hungry for power — and one facing an ANC racked with corruption, infighting and financial troubles — see that as a step forward, or a loss? Of all the major party leaders, Steenhuisen’s future is the most unpredictable. He may go even if the party’s electoral fortunes improve.
The party most likely to come third in these elections, the EFF, is run by a man who brooks no dissent. Julius Malema, who formed the party after being expelled from the ANC in 2013 and led it to a 6.4% haul in 2014, then 10.8% in 2019, has warned adversaries in the party that they should not plot against him.
“The problem starts when you start organising against me, and I hear it in the corners. I am very ruthless against people who do such things to me,” he said at the party’s 10th anniversary dinner in 2023.
According to the SRF polling, the EFF can no longer take it for granted that it will still be South Africa’s third-largest party after May 29. Its poll of 1,835 registered voters in April found that Jacob Zuma’s MK Party was polling at 13%. To be clobbered by the MK Party would be a bloody nose for the ANC, but it would hurt Malema too.
It is kind of funny, in a morbid way, to speculate what the former president would do with his projected 13%. If Zuma chose to become an MP, he would lose his presidential perks and bodyguards. He is unlikely to do that. So, he will stay out of parliament but run the party. However, it does not really exist except as a vehicle for his children and close confidants, so the infighting that has already started will intensify.
This party will not live beyond Zuma. It is, ultimately, a vehicle for him to use as a battering ram in his decades-long fight against his corruption trial.
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