EDITORIAL: The ANC is no longer SA’s political lodestar. Will somebody tell them?

The ANC will hold leadership elections in less than three weeks, and its leaders are intensely occupied with the leadership bun fight. Everything else appears to be secondary.

In the distant past the party was different. There was a time when the ANC could interrogate societal developments and provide solutions to public problems. Its stances on issues could be argued with or critiqued.

Its policy positions and brand value enjoyed mass public appeal, judging by how its share of the vote grew from 62.65 % in 1994 to almost 70% in 2009. It started sliding back, in qualitative terms, in the 2000s. An electoral slide gathered momentum after 2009. The party now teeters in the early fifties again, after receiving 57.50% of the vote in 2019’s national elections.

The ANC could receive as little as 41% of the vote if an election were to be held today, according to a recent poll from research house Ipsos, commissioned by the Rivonia Circle, a new think tank. You might think that this distinctly negative slope would teach its members and leaders to act differently. Alas, they appear to be concerned with a narrow leadership battle bereft of progressive or constructive political content.

It is likely to benefit the party’s electoral fortunes if it were to focus more on discussing what solutions the various leadership candidates offer as an alternative to the inertia of ideas that has become synonymous with the ANC of late. The party’s delegates ought to spend time considering realistic solutions to how it can clear roadblocks for our sclerotic economy, get a handle on the quiet tragedy of youth unemployment, the snowballing energy crisis, and climate change.

Understandably, fighting corruption may be a difficult topic considering that the ANC has lost so much moral standing in that regard. However, a credible outcome of the Nasrec conference must include a more believable plan to fight graft.

Part of the problem is how the ANC has conflated control of the levers of state with associated largesse. The party’s membership and leadership are stuck in a party-and-state symbiosis that will require a complete structural reorganisation in order to extract itself. As a result, the party may again elect leaders who are unable to imagine a different way. 

Leadership changes alone sometimes can lead to sustainable and quick results, but they need to be related to deep policy and organisational cultural work that will resonate with public expectations for change and renewal.

If that were to happen, it would still take more than two years for any decisive change to translate to an upswing in ANC electoral support. Add to the equation the attrition associated with greater choice, and the increasing apathy of voters, and it is clear the ANC’s problem is significant. We are dealing with a party deep in electoral decay, which is sometimes masked by wistful games of musical chairs.

Electoral trends

Based on recent electoral trends, we can conclude that as soon as 2024 the ANC will fall below 50%. That would not necessarily be a bad thing for our democracy. Democracies perform better when there is real contestation over ideas and their delivery, and when there is a realistic chance that power can change hands. Competitive politics excises the kind of complacency that has rooted itself in the ANC in a profound way.

Another fact of history that the Nasrec delegates need to contend with is that the ANC’s history on opposition benches is dismal. It appears to simply disintegrate when it loses power. In Cape Town and the rest of the Western Cape, the party simply evaporated as a serious political force once it moved to the opposition benches.

The same is playing out in Nelson Mandela Bay and other significant centres such as Johannesburg and Tshwane, where the ANC expends its political energies on derailing elected mayors who come from different parties through various machinations, instead of taking on the serious and hard work of building itself as a “government in waiting”. We can learn from metro politics that the next couple of years could be difficult at the national level, with a coalition government likely to be a reality after the 2024 elections.

That stage of the ANC’s political life might be a painful but necessary rite of passage for voters, and one way to free us from the structural harm caused by the ANC.

The ANC appears to be unable to lift its gaze from the details of this internal popularity contest. It is unable to “read the room”.  Broader society, however, is not so myopic. Nonpolitical stakeholders will benefit from aligning themselves with the increasingly probable reality of an ANC electoral defeat, irrespective of what leadership combination it settles for come December 16. For the ANC, it may be that it is too late to have even good ideas.