With ANC's monopoly chipped away, I wonder what kind of coalition country we will wake up to

Dear DM168 readers,

At the time of writing this letter to you at 6am on Friday, 31 May, the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) had counted the votes from 51.9% of the voting districts in our seventh election. The results at the time showed the top five parties to be the ANC at 42%, the DA at 23.43%, MK at 10.58%, the EFF at 9.78% and the Patriotic Alliance (PA) at 2.88%.

This got me thinking about the zeitgeist of our country 30 years into democracy and a book, The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, written 11 years after Ghana’s independence in the 1960s by that country’s Ayi Kwei Armah.

The main character of Armah’s novel is a financially embattled civil servant, who refuses to submit to bribery and corruption pressures from everyone around him as a fast ticket to a life of plenty. Armah writes acerbically about the corruption that had captured post-independence Ghana: “Corruption is the national game … many had tried the rotten ways and found them filled with the sweetness of life.”

We South Africans are all too familiar with the rapid descent of far too many of our liberation heroes, who went from warriors for human rights to comrades in corruption competing for conspicuous consumption.

The rotten ways have insinuated themselves into the once  moral fibre of the ANC and, like Armah’s protagonist finds in 1960s Ghana, also permeate our horrifically unequal society where political patronage and favours hold sway.

Many analysts are saying that South Africans voted against the ANC because of the years of corruption laid bare by the Zondo Commission, which have led to a struggling economy, high unemployment, poor service delivery, load shedding and the stripping of state assets at Eskom, Transnet, SAA and other parastatals.

Perhaps the writing on the wall began earlier when the ANC promoted black economic empowerment through ownership deals that, instead of benefiting the majority of black South Africans, favoured the politically connected. Most notable among them was the ANC’s current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who joined the exclusive club of the  superrich – formerly the preserve of white business owners – through several empowerment deals with some of the largest companies on the JSE. Is it this vast social distance from the people and his detractors persistently calling him a puppet of white monopoly capital that earned Ramaphosa a thumping from the electorate?

Though it is true that ANC corruption waylaid economic growth and service delivery to the poor, it seems to me that the ANC under Ramaphosa lost its majority because of its clumsy attempts to root out corruption and decisively deal with the State Capture looters in its ranks. Perhaps, as Zuma's daughter Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, said, it was the silent members of the ANC who voted for MK.

Do the maths. The ANC did not lose most of its votes to the DA, or even to its former Youth League members in the EFF who made a spectacle in Parliament of former president Jacob Zuma having to “pay back the money” that he took from the state to pay for his sprawling Nkandla homestead.

Nor did the ANC lose to newcomers Rise Mzansi and Build One South Africa (Bosa), which have been calling for skilled new leaders, accountability and clean governance. By the looks of the election results, these beautiful ones are kind of stillborn-the best they can hope for is two or three seats.

No, the people who turned their backs on the ANC, who at that early morning count made up 10.58% of the vote, mostly in KwaZulu-Natal but also in Gauteng and Mpumalanga, voted for the visage and 82-year-old smirk of the ANC’s suspended State Capture looter-in-chief, Zuma.

Who knows if they were lured by his populist anti-Ramaphosa rhetoric, his charisma, his “Umshini Wami” dance moves or Zulu tribalism? Or was it the invitation to get a little morsel from his feeding trough or – heaven forbid – in fear that they will suffer the chaos of the 2021 riots if they did not support him?

What we do know from these early election results is that Zuma’s insta-MK party, launched on 16 December 2023, is leading the polls in KwaZulu-Natal  and, so far, has beaten the EFF to become the third-largest party in the country. For a party that has been torn apart by internal squabbles, has no formal structure to speak of and awaits uBaba’s diktat on who will be premier and who will represent the party in the provincial legislatures as well as in the National Assembly, this is scary stuff.

The ANC's chickens have come home to roost.

The MK voters who have taken out the knee  caps of the ANC, EFF and IFP have voted for change. One voter said to News24 that she had lost faith in both the ANC and IFP and MK campaigners who came visiting spoke her language. "One thing about Amajuba is that we really struggle for water, and we have bad roads, so when the MK [Party] spoke that language, they spoke to me," said Busisiwe Makhoba.

While the  desire  for change and better service is  genuine, it remains to be seen whether MK which comprises members who have deserted the same ANC which let people like Makhoba down in the first place, will actually ever meet voters needs.

Unless there's a miracle I'm not sure how  a party led by a man who oversaw state capture,  and in so doing robbed  the poor of basic services could suddenly deliver. Instead of the sweet talking saviour they sadly have been duped to think he is, voters have chosen a feudal lord who wants to tear up the  Constitution and  take us back to the undemocratic apartheid past in which parliament and politicians ruled supreme. They have voted for our sons and daughters to be conscripted into the army, and for all banks and insurance companies to be nationalised.

They have voted to expropriate all land without compensation and to put the state and traditional leaders in charge as “custodians” of it on behalf of the people. We know how that ends. The land will be taken away and given to the political elite and their traditional leader allies, who will use this power to dish out bits and pieces to manipulate people. Sounds a bit like Zimbabwe. Ask any economic refugee from our northern neighbour why they left their country to put up with xenophobic South Africans, and your answer lies in MK’s solution to our problems.

It may sound strange, but our hope for a less destructive path may lie with whomever the defeated ANC chooses as coalition partners. Does it eschew all the hard work of Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, OR Tambo, Albie Sachs and Ramaphosa and, for the sake of expediency, go with its anti-constitutional spawn, the MK party, and the equally unconstitutional former convict turned evangelist Gayton McKenzie’s PA? Or does it choose to partner with the EFF, whose leader Julius Malema said he would only go into coalition with the ANC if Ramaphosa is replaced by Deputy President Paul Mashatile? Mashatile who was exposed by News24 as leading “a life of luxury and seeming excess, using multimillion-rand homes owned by tenderpreneurs and beneficiaries of government contracts on Cape Town’s exclusive Atlantic Seaboard to entertain a string of lovers and friends”.

The third  option (and the most unlikely) would be for the ANC to partner with what looks set to remain the official opposition, the DA and it’s not-so-successful Multi-Party Charter.

The only thing we know for sure is that the country we end up living in by the time all these options and negotiations are worked out is, for better or worse, not going to be the country we lived in before 58.55% of us 28 million voters stood for hours at the polls on Wednesday.

In this week’s DM168, our associate editor, Marianne Merten, who has been engaging with political party leaders and IEC officials at the IEC Results Operations Centre in Midrand, will help you understand what the latest election results mean and what we could expect next.

Please write to me at heather@dailymaverick.co.za about your views on the election outcome so that I can publish your participation in the debate on our letters page.

Yours in defence of truth and democracy,

Heather

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.