Coalition Country. Leon Schreiber
state resources in South Africa’s new order. This includes everyone from President Jacob Zuma and finance minister Malusi Gigaba, public service minister Faith Muthambi and co-operative governance minister Des van Rooyen, communications minister Ayanda Dlodlo, and Eskom CEOs Brian Molefe and Matshela Koko to ANC Youth League president Collen Maine. To top it all, the Gupta emails revealed how the family had drafted ANC media statements and enlisted the help of the UK public relations firm Bell Pottinger to prop up their predatory conduct.
Built on the foundation of a failing economy, endemic corruption, and increasing violence, the Nkandla and state capture scandals are the trigger moments that have caused the ANC ship to start sinking. Even with hundreds of thousands of leaked emails, we almost certainly haven’t seen the full extent of the state capture scandal yet, and the bad news is likely to keep coming in the lead-up to 2019. In the meantime, we have at least one piece of evidence that shows just how bad the damage to the ANC could be.
The first full municipal by-election since the state capture scandal broke took place on 29 November 2017 in the Metsimaholo local municipality in the northern Free State. The 2016 election had already produced a hung council, with an ANC-led alliance and a DA-led alliance holding 21 seats each. When the council deadlocked, and failed to pass a budget, the national government disbanded it and called for new elections.
In 2016, the ANC had received only 45 per cent of the vote in the municipality, down from 62 per cent in 2011. But things went from bad to worse in the November 2017 by-election when the SACP decided to contest the by-election on its own. In the wake of the ANC’s latest scandals, the SACP got 8.7 per cent, while support for the ANC imploded, with the party garnering only 34.6 per cent in what was once a municipal stronghold. The collapse was particularly pronounced in the townships, where support for the ANC plummeted from 82 per cent in 2011 to only 45 per cent in 2017.
Given that Metsimaholo is demographically similar to large parts of Gauteng, the by-election result should set alarm bells ringing in Luthuli House, the ANC’s head office. Following the ANC’s slide in 2016, Metsimaholo confirmed that the party was on a one-way path to losing power.
It occurs slowly, then all at once
While it may seem as if the ANC has suddenly lost its dominant grip on political power, its decline has been a long time coming. At the most basic level, the party operates within an electoral system actively geared towards promoting coalitions and making it difficult for any one party to become dominant. It was always unrealistic to imagine that the ANC could swim forever against the tide.
But the ANC has also not done itself any favours on other levels during the past decade. It has driven the national economy to the edge of an abyss, inflicting growing hardships on many citizens. It has also looked on as South Africa has become an ever more violent society, with daily news of brutal crimes. Most visibly, amidst the suffering of most of its citizens, the party has allowed corruption to become endemic. Like a perverse version of King Midas, the ANC has reached a point where everything it touches becomes infected with corruption.
But it took the outrageous Nkandla and state capture scandals to finally galvanise our deeply divided society into action. Voters took the previously unprecedented step of punishing the ANC during the 2016 elections, and thousands of protestors flooded the streets in the wake of the Gupta cabinet reshuffle. Whatever remedial steps the ANC may aim to take in the run-up to 2019 are unlikely to overcome the depth of voters’ disillusionment, which has built up slowly but surely during the past decade.
South Africa has entered a phase of rapid change that will soon see blind loyalty to the ANC replaced by a fractured political landscape dominated by coalitions. It is already far too late for the party to self-correct in the hopes of hanging on to its dominant position. Instead, the ANC will soon find that it has tried to close the stable door after the horse had bolted.
Chapter Three
A fragmented opposition
While the ANC is rapidly losing its grip on power, there’s a potential complicating factor standing in the way of coalitions becoming the new normal. As the ANC has so powerfully demonstrated, it is certainly possible for one party to attain a dominant position in our political system if a large majority of voters prefer this. Once support for the ANC drops below 50 per cent, won’t another party simply take its place as a hegemonic force that controls the national government and more than half of all municipalities and provinces? The short answer is no. The ANC’s electoral decline is unlikely to benefit any single opposition party to the extent that it will become a dominant electoral force. The key consideration in this regard is whether the voters who are abandoning the ANC are likely to vote for one other party, or whether multiple opposition parties stand to benefit from the ANC’s decline.
A long walk to power
Let’s start by looking at the potential for South Africa’s official opposition, the DA, to replace the ANC as the dominant force in South African politics. In contrast to the ANC, the DA has traditionally done best in municipal rather than national elections. In particular, the party has grown consistently in metropolitan municipalities since 2006. It now dominates politics in Cape Town, and governs Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane, and Johannesburg as the senior partner in formal coalition and minority governments. Figure 6 displays the DA’s electoral performance in metro elections from 2000 to 2016, and projects this up to 2021.
Source: Electoral Commission of South Africa.
The results are highly significant. In the first place, the DA looks set to maintain its majority in Cape Town well into the future. It is also trending upwards in all seven other metros. However, it is only in Nelson Mandela Bay and Tshwane (and perhaps eventually Johannesburg) where it has a realistic chance of achieving an outright majority (more than 50 per cent of all votes) within the next decade. It is unlikely to capture Buffalo City (East London and Bisho), eThekwini (Durban), Mangaung (Bloemfontein) and Ekurhuleni (East Rand) on its own any time soon.
With at least half of the country’s eight biggest cities still out of the DA’s reach, what about other municipalities and provincial governments? The Western Cape is an interesting case, providing the single strongest argument in support of the idea that the DA may soon take over more of the country’s provinces and municipalities, both urban and rural. Remarkably, the DA’s current dominance in the Western Cape is akin to the ANC’s overwhelming support in most parts of the country during the early 2000s, when it was just about the only game in town. In the Western Cape, the DA has now become the only game in town.
But this wasn’t always the case. As recently as 2006, the DA had majorities in only two Western Cape municipalities. The ANC controlled three outright, and had more support than the DA in 17 more. But 2006 was also the year in which the DA was able to cobble together a seven-party coalition which took control of Cape Town, the province’s political crown jewel (Chapter Nine returns to the remarkable story of the 2006 Cape Town coalition).
The multiparty alliance elected the DA’s Helen Zille as mayor of Cape Town. Between 2006 and 2011, her administration managed to turn the failing municipality around in financial and administrative terms. By the time the 2011 local elections came around, the National Treasury and external credit ratings agencies were regularly rating Cape Town as the best-run metro in the country, and the city consistently achieved unqualified audit opinions, attesting to its sound financial management.1
Cape Town’s success provided a political springboard for the DA to expand into the rest of the Western Cape, and Zille’s party masterfully took advantage of the opportunity. During the 2009 provincial elections, the DA built its campaign around its growing track record of clean governance in Cape Town. The strategy paid off, and the party wrested control of the provincial government from the ANC.
In the 2011 municipal polls, the party kicked its campaigning up another notch by adopting the slogan ‘We Deliver For All’. It again vigorously canvassed voters in the Western Cape on the basis that it was no longer just an opposition party; instead, the Cape Town experience had turned it