Around 23 million South Africans, including 16,000 of the South African diaspora worldwide who have registered to vote, go to the polls today to elect a new president and Parliament in the most keenly contested general election since the end of apartheid and White rule in 1994.
The result is a forgone conclusion. Jacob Zuma, barring a cataclysmic last-minute shift in voter support, will become the next president of South Africa leading the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to victory. It is the level and nature of the victory that will set the parameters of the Zuma presidency and the immediate future of former President Nelson Mandela’s “Rainbow Nation.”
One wonders what the bygone ANC founder Chief Albert Luthuli and stalwarts such as Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki would have made of a decade of ANC rule. Disenchanted ANC supporters would surely say that these giants of the liberation struggle against apartheid would be turning in their graves. So would others who have sacrificed their lives in the fight against White supremacy in South Africa — Steve Biko, Helen Joseph, Braam Fisher, Imam Abdullah Haron, Yusuf Dadu, Ruth First and endless others.
Zuma, perhaps wary of opposition presidential candidate, Mvume Dandala, leader of the breakaway ANC faction — the Congress of the People (Cope) party — formed last year by dissident members of the ANC, has warned supporters that the ANC needs to win a two-third majority victory if it were to carry out its program of land reform, helping the poor and economic prosperity.
Another opposition leader, the charismatic and feisty Helen Zille, leader of the Democratic Alliance, is also giving Zuma some headaches. The ANC is in danger of losing the premiership of the Western Cape in concurrent provincial elections where the ANC traditionally has had the least support. The alliance is confident of carrying the entire province, which if it happens, would mean the political equivalent of a massacre of the ANC. That South Africans, let alone many ANC members, have been disenchanted in recent years over rampant corruption (Zuma himself until recently was embroiled in a corruption case involving a billion dollar arms deal); violent crime; cronyism; an affirmative policy that has seen unqualified people holding key jobs and ruining the institutional fabric of South Africa; and the failure to improve the lot of the ordinary South African whether in terms of jobs, housing, education, free public health care and other services; is not in doubt.
Helen, one of the South African diaspora working in London as a nurse and who is voting today at the South African High Commission in Trafalgar Square, could not have been more to the point. “I am a member of the ANC and I will always support them emotionally. But I definitely won’t be voting for the ANC. I am disappointed that the leadership has forgotten the ordinary South Africans. They are on a gravy train and only interested in looking after themselves and filling their pockets. They need to be brought down to earth,” she explained.
Such sentiments are quite common these days. They may be a key factor in today’s poll — how many ANC supporters will actually opt for a protest vote to teach the party hierarchy a lesson.
There is no doubt that political life has changed fundamentally for the better in post-apartheid South Africa. This is in large part because of the ANC under Nelson Mandela’s leadership, its history, vision and capacity to unite the country and avoid a brutal racial civil war. But in the process South African minorities of color — the so-called Coloreds (mixed-race people), the Indians and Cape Malays — have also become marginalized. The inverse discrimination is not even subtle in some of the job advertisements — “’Xhosa’ or ‘Zulu’ Speaker Essential.”
But as leading South African commentator and ANC supporter Zackie Achmat warns, landslide poll victories over the last decade have “allowed our leaders to become arrogant and to fail poor and working-class communities in the areas of education, health, housing, water, transport, safety and security and employment...Instead of transformation we have presided over a corrupt political system and state bureaucracy supported at the top by private sector cronies locally and globally. This made me part of that group of citizens that have come to believe that our party’s anthem is no longer “Nkosi Sikelel’ i Afrika” but “Love Me Tender”, sung lustily at every shrinking branch meeting.”
In a rare show of humility by a senior ANC official, treasurer general Mathews Phosa last week admitted in a speech at the Cape Town Press Club that the ANC “has made serious mistakes on public service deployment, black economic empowerment and land reform. People have been given jobs without the necessary qualifications and then could not do the job properly. There were very outrageous cases. Mistakes were made and we must correct them.”
Foreign investors will no doubt be monitoring every election promise the ANC makes. They are most concerned about the ANC jibes about the “nationalization through the backdoor” of the mining giant AngloAmerican — with the suggestion that all South Africans should all be given shares in the company to push Black economic empowerment. Equally worrying is the potential appeasement of the hard left ANC alliance partners, Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (yes, it still exists), whose support helped secure Jacob Zuma the ANC presidency.
Zuma, however, is an astute operator, perhaps not as polished and revered as Nelson Mandela. His style is populist, as opposed to the aloof Sussex-educated “Black Sahib” Thabo Mbeki, whose disastrous presidency over the last five years led to many of the woes South Africa is mired in today.
Whether Zuma can succeed where his predecessors have failed depends on whether he can successfully break from the past. His first Cabinet selection will set the tone especially in the key portfolios of finance, health and labor. With his usual ebullience Zuma at his last rally over the weekend declared that “the country is in safe hands and nothing can go wrong.”
Only time will tell whether Jacob Zuma, indeed, turns out to be the savior of the “Beloved Country”, or whether the “Beloved Country” would continue crying.
