Two factors skew ANC vote projections
Abroad consensus has emerged among political analysts and risk consultants that the ANC will secure between 43% and 49% of the vote in the upcoming national and provincial elections.
Such a scenario suggests easy coalition negotiations for Cyril Ramaphosa. The ANC and SA president will simply need to rope in the IFP, or a group of smaller players, to secure a working majority in the National Assembly.
Analysts therefore envision no need for the ANC to strike a national deal with the EFF or DA and see no significant shift in government policy direction.
It is sensible to question the reliability of such prognoses. As sceptics have observed in the past, political analysts tend to agree with one another fully only when they are all wrong.
I believe two factors are now being underestimated. First, water and sanitation services have crept onto the radar of alert political scientists. The 2022 Afrobarometer surveys asked respondents to name the three most important problems facing the country.
A full 30% of those older than 55 chose “water supply ”— pretty much on a par with electricity (32%) and in the same ballpark as unemployment (42%). One in five younger respondents, aged 18-55, also flagged water as a priority.
We can be confident that the salience of water has risen steeply since then, as the collapse of infrastructure and maintenance accelerated. Unlike the Eskom problem, where the ANC boldly attributed electricity shortages to anticoal environmentalism and more energy for the poor, the governing party has no remotely believable tale to spin.
Living without water and relying on tanker deliveries run by politically aligned mafias is galling. Collapsing sewerage systems are an affront to human dignity in a way that loadshedding is not.
The second key threat to the ANC is its own declining internal coherence, revealed starkly by the rise of the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party, promoted energetically in recent weeks by former president Jacob Zuma.
As ANC chair Gwede Mantashe has hilariously observed, Zuma can be likened to other greedy and powerlusting “militia dictators” on the African continent who promoted rebel movements to regain influence. One thinks of Angola’s Jonas Savimbi with his Unita fighters; Central African Republic president François Bozizé Yangouvonda and his rebel insurgents; or perhaps former SA president Thabo Mbeki and his revolutionary Congress of the People (COPE) armchair militia.
The trouble with the MK party is that it is not a conventional opposition party at all. It is rather an ANC faction, concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal, whose ideological positions map directly onto those of the mother body itself. It cannot be undermined by claims that it will withdraw social grants from the poor or return SA to the dark days of apartheid.
Indeed, Zuma has insisted that MK is true to the ANC ambitions and values that Cyril Ramaphosa’s deviant ANC cruelly neglects. The votes the party gains will almost all come directly from a liberation movement that is desperately short of voters.
The conundrum posed by the MK party pushed ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, hitherto a master of “constructive ambiguity” (you can’t understand what he is talking about), to complain that “we defended former president Zuma, even going to parliament and saying that a swimming pool is a fire pool... The Constitutional Court, chaired by Mogoeng Mogoeng, issued a judgment against Jacob Zuma, but the ANC stood by him.”
By revealing something we already knew, the man in charge at Luthuli House has, paradoxically, somehow managed to tell his own party’s supporters they are all idiots.