Thirty years ago, on 10 May, Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa. It wasn’t the first time that a former political prisoner had become president of the country in which he had previously been imprisoned. But Mandela had been in prison for 27 years and had been released by the same all-white apartheid government that had imprisoned him. The day he was elected also symbolically ended the regime that its authors and supporters called ‘separate development,’ but which actually instituted and justified the domination of the white minority over the black majority. It was a policy established in 1948 with the victory of the National Party—the party of Afrikaners.
Mandela was arrested in 1963 on charges of conspiracy and terrorism. At the time, the Republic of South Africa had 17 million inhabitants, of whom about 70% were black, about 20% white, and the remaining 10% mixed race and Asian.
The new South Africa: 1994-2024
In 1994, the RSA had 43 million inhabitants, of whom around 5 million were white, 3.5 million were mixed race and just over a million were Asian. The rest, the majority was black. In the election—the first South African election with universal suffrage—around 20 million people voted: Mandela’s ANC received more than 12 million votes and elected 252 deputies out of the total of 400.
The National Party (NP) of William de Klerk, the white leader who had freed Mandela and led the white community to accept the transition, gained around 4 million votes (20.4%) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) of Mangosuthu ‘Gatsha’ Buthelezi, a Zulu prince, took just over 2 million. They governed in a coalition.
Since then, the ANC has always had absolute majorities, despite the vicissitudes and scandals that usually accompany the continuity of power. After two years of transition with F.W. de Klerk as deputy president, and following the departure of the NP from the government in 1996, the ANC—now with Thabo Mbeki as president—added Inkatha to the government; the coalition was abandoned in 2004. In 1999, Thabo Mbeki was elected president; but, in 2005, he clashed with his deputy President, Jacob Zuma, a Zulu operative from the ANC’s ‘military wing,’ Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation).
During apartheid, Zuma had been imprisoned for 10 years on Robben Island (where Mandela was also held). After his release from prison, he directed the movement’s violent actions from outside, particularly from Mozambique. He joined the ANC’s executive committee and, after the party’s legalisation and the end of apartheid, was successively deputy secretary-general and deputy president to Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki dismissed him in 2005 on corruption charges. He also faced trial, in 2006, on rape charges. But in 2009, he was elected the third president of the post-apartheid RSA. During his time in office, accusations of corruption continued. Zuma also maintained traditional Zulu customs, including polygamy.
More serious were Zuma’s relations with the Gupta family and business group, whose members were accused of having undue influence on the government. In the final years of Zuma’s presidency, the ANC was divided, with him and his supporters on one side, and his opponents on the other. Zuma, who was ethnically a Zulu, had the political merit of bringing a section of the Zulu faithful to Buthelezi’s Inkatha to the ANC. But the accusations of corruption with the Gupta, as well as the rape trial, hurt his respectability (although not his popularity). At the end of his term, and perhaps to dilute criticism, Zuma adopted a more left-wing rhetoric, declaring himself a ‘socialist’ and calling for expropriation without compensation on the sensitive issue of land.
Meanwhile, before Zuma’s presidential term came to an end at the end of 2017, there was an election for president of the ANC party. Both Zuma’s ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (who was supported by him), and Cyril Ramaphosa (who won by a narrow margin) ran in this election. In February 2018, Zuma publicly announced that he was stepping down as president of the Republic.
He was later arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced, but went free given his age (he was born in 1942) and state of health. In December 2023, the former president sponsored a new party, the Umkhonto weSizwe (MKP), ‘Spear of the Nation,’ the same name used by the former military wing of the ANC, which had been the protagonist of the armed actions against the white Apartheid government until 1994.
Cyril Ramaphosa, elected President in February 2018 after Zuma’s resignation, is very much a symbol of the ‘New South Africa’ and the new African bourgeoisie, the ruling class of the post-apartheid era. Born in 1959 to a middle-class black family, he has a law degree and, during the apartheid era, became a consultant and secretary-general of the National Union of Mineworkers where he took an active part in the transition negotiations. After losing out to Thabo Mbeki as Mandela’s successor, he devoted himself to business life and became an important businessman whose personal fortune is now estimated at $450 million. He later returned to politics, taking on Jacob Zuma, weakened by successive scandals and corruption. In 2017, Ramaphosa was elected president of the ANC against Zuma’s ex-wife, and he became president of the Republic after Zuma’s resignation. In recent years, the white minority—and part of the Cape coloured and other mixed-race communities—have voted for the Democratic Alliance. This party has its origins in the Progressive Party, the left wing of the white parties of the apartheid era, which grew from 2003 onwards at the expense of the NP’s white voters. Its current leader is John Steenhuisen, born in Durban in 1976.
The novelty of an election
On Sunday, 2 June 2024, the predictions of most analysts were confirmed: for the first time since 1994, the ANC did not have an absolute majority of the vote. The decline since the 2019 elections, when it had 57.5% of the vote, was very serious—a decline to just over 40%. But of the almost 28 million voters, only 16 million voted.
In a highly fragmented vote (there were more than 70 parties and coalitions contesting these legislative elections), there were five parties with the most votes: in first place was still Ramaphosa’s ANC, with its 40.18% of the popular vote. In second place was the DA (Democratic Alliance), with 21.81%; in third place, and showing that in all continents and civilisations political popularity is not affected by court rulings, Jacob Zuma’s MKP took 14.58%; the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) of another ANC dissident, Julius Malema, got 9.52%; and the Inkatha Freedom Party, Buthelezi’s historic Zulu party, received 3.91%. Between them, these five parties accounted for more than 90% of the vote.
Inkatha was unable to withstand the onslaught of Zuma’s MKP. Zuma, in fact, achieved his influence in the ANC precisely because he turned the Zulus and Natal towards Mandela’s party, and for standing up to the charismatic Buthelezi.
There was no surprise at the fall in support for the ANC. The party had been, for many years, the object of collective devotion in the black community, both because of the figure of Nelson Mandela and because it was seen as the party that brought about the end of apartheid. But the fact is that the country’s situation, in terms of economic well-being and security, is extremely negative: unemployment stands at more than eight million South Africans, meaning that one third of South Africa’s labour force is unemployed. In 1994, it was half that number.
Another scourge of the country is crime. The Republic of South Africa has earned and retains the sad title of being one of the countries at the top of the homicide index—more than 27,000 people were murdered in 2023, an average of 75 people killed every day in a population of 62 million. The reports of violence against women are also shocking, with an average of 380,000 rapes a year—a statistic that reveals that one in four women in the country has been raped. One of the types of rape practised among young males in Soweto is so-called ‘Jack Rolling,’ a synonym for gang raping; in prisons, this also takes place when a newcomer is subjected to the same practice by his cell mates.
Corruption is another of the country’s scourges, with greater visibility during Jacob Zuma’s years in office, when he was involved in many corruption cases. It should be borne in mind that, with the end of Apartheid, many also hoped for an end to inequalities and social injustice. This obviously didn’t happen, even though the whites lost their political dominance. Hence a radical Left has emerged to the political left of the ANC, in the form of Malema’s EFF, a clearly Marxist-Leninist party. Another scourge of the country is the power cuts to which the Eskom public power company has subjected the country’s families and businesses. Here, too, the criticism of the company’s mismanagement falls on Jacob Zuma’s presidency, affecting senior ANC figures. But although Ramaphosa put the fight against corruption on the agenda, he doesn’t seem to have had much success.
The difficulty of coalitions
According to the South African political-electoral system, the 400 seats in Parliament are allocated in proportion to the parties’ popular votes; and it is Parliament that elects the president of the Republic, despite the presidential system in force.
Thus, in the elected parliament, the ANC will have 159 seats, the DA 87, Zuma’s MKP 58, Malema’s EFF 39, and the Inkatha Freedom Party 17. The majority is made up of 201 votes. Despite the defeat, President Ramaphosa remained calm and said just what was expected, that he was going to talk to all the parties. The ANC’s Secretary General, Fikile Mbalula, hastened to add that the majority party is open to negotiations with all political forces, but that Ramaphosa’s position as president is non-negotiable.
This rules out any negotiations with the MKP, since Zuma wants his former comrade and deputy president out of the ANC leadership as a precondition for any negotiations. The gulf between the two is deep, not least because it was Zuma who brought Ramaphosa into government in 2012. The chances of a coalition are vast, but so are the difficulties; and the leaderships of the big parties may also be struggling with their bases to make deals.
Clearly, given the constancy of the Democratic Alliance vote, the votes lost by the ANC went to Zuma’s MKP and Malema’s EFF, which account together for 25% of the popular vote. The most stable and durable coalition would be ANC-DA, but both the left wing of the ANC and a substantial part of the ANC and DA voters don’t favour this possibility. An ANC-EFF coalition would be a shock to investors (the EFF has a Marxist-Leninist economic programme); and with the MKP, Zuma doesn’t want to discuss anything without Ramaphosa first stepping aside.
In the meantime, the new parliament has to elect a speaker and a president in relatively short order. Some analysts have raised the question of whether the two parties to the left of the ANC—Zuma’s MKP and Malema’s EFF—are interested in creating a situation of deadlock and confusion that would force a new election. Zuma has already raised doubts about the legitimacy of the results and called for a recount; and in South Africa there is recent memory of the unrest and violence in Kwazulu-Natal following his arrest.
Optimists, including President Ramaphosa, say that democracy always has a way of finding solutions. What comes next will be an important test for the RSA, for democracy, and for democracy in the RSA.
