WITH the final results not yet known, it is still possible to identify some broader trends emerging from the 2016 election. Of them, the number of clear divides that are beginning to define our local politics stands out as important.South African politics has always been split between urban and rural voters. It has, for sometime now, been masked by the ANC’s results in the metros. But as its national performance has deteriorated, it is that rural base that has held firm and its urban base that has shrunk, revealing more starkly that its core constituency lives outside the country’s cities and towns.The 2016 election would seem to confirm this. The ANC has lost, or is on the brink of losing, its majority across Gauteng, essentially an urban conglomerate of three metros — Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni. It will lose its majority in Nelson Mandela Bay too, and Cape Town, already consolidated under the DA, will slip further away from it, as the party fairly implodes in that provin...
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