ANC kicks off election season as Zuma lurks

DURBAN, South Africa: South Africa’s ruling ANC kickstarts its election campaign Saturday for polls on May 29, facing its worst result ever amid high unemployment, a sluggish economy and a challenge from its former leader.

President Cyril Ramaphosa and his embittered predecessor, Jacob Zuma, are expected to address rival events in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, a key electoral battleground.

In power since the advent of democracy in 1994, Ramaphosa’s African National Congress has suffered a sharp decline in support, beset by allegations of corruption and mismanagement.

It is facing an uphill battle to keep its parliamentary majority, with polls showing it particularly vulnerable in KwaZulu-Natal -- Zuma’s home province.

Long resentful about the way he was forced out of office, the former president has joined an opposition group seeking to cut into the ANC’s share of the vote.

“Zuma represents the single biggest threat to the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal,” said Zakhele Ndlovu, a politics lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.

The feud between the two leaders will play out in the open on Saturday, when the ANC expects 85,000 activists to fill a soccer stadium in Durban for the launch of its election manifesto. Zuma will be holding court less than an hour away at a country club in the coastal town of Scottburgh. South Africa’s second-most populous province, KwaZulu-Natal is seen as a gauge of the ANC’s national prospects.

It has the biggest ANC membership, but the party is already under pressure there from the liberal Democratic Alliance and its ally, the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party.

“If the ANC doesn’t do well in KwaZulu-Natal, it will not do well nationally,” said Susan Booysen, a political analyst for the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.

Polls indicate the party could win as little as 40 percent of the vote nationwide, which would force it to seek a coalition government to stay in power.

But, due to budgetary constraints, Ramaphosa is unlikely to make grand electoral promises, analysts say. He is instead expected to tout the ANC’s credentials as the liberation movement that brought democracy to South Africa and helped lift many from poverty.

Access to healthcare and social security grants are a key draw for a large part of the electorate, said Booysen. “The big task for the ANC will be, despite all other problems and its own decline, to project itself as a big strong party that can really do things,” she said.—