Rural by-election results puncture voter pattern myths

YET another political myth is coming apart at the seams as the ANC faces a meltdown at the polls in provinces that host former apartheid bantustans.

The myth in question claims that there is a pecking order for voters: people in the suburbs cast a rational vote; those in townships and shack settlements are more likely to vote, without thought, for the same party every time; and those in rural areas that once housed bantustans are unthinking ANC voting fodder.

It was never true – now it is beginning to seem ridiculous.

As this column has pointed out before, most suburban voters support the DA whether or not it governs well.

But black voters in the cities, once the butt of crude racial labels because they voted ANC, have been deserting it in droves.

Now rural voters are doing the same.

In by-elections last week, the ANC suffered disasters in wards in the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and the North West, losing between 22 and 29 percentage points in each.

These are not isolated results.

In the North West, the ANC vote has been imploding for two years.

In KwaZulu-Natal, the Inkatha Freedom Party has been taking wards from the ANC for a while.

The pattern in former ban- tustan areas is in sharp contrast to that in cities: while the ANC was losing urban ground until Cyril Ramaphosa was elected president, it is now regaining it.

According to Dawie Scholtz, the country’s most-quoted election analyst, its gains exceed expectations and it could be on the way to a win at least as big as in 2014 – city voters vastly outnumber those in the countryside.

Rural voters clearly have a reason for dumping the ANC that city voters do not share.

The ANC leadership, it seems, has worked out what that is, which is why a few days ago it published a bill it has been sitting on since the beginning of the year.

The Communal Land Tenure Bill will, Deputy President David Mabuza told parliament, transfer ownership of communal land from traditional leaders to communities.

It implements an ANC conference resolution, one its leaders have been trying hard to ignore.

One of their priorities has been to send friendly signals to chiefs and the bill sends them the opposite message.

ANC leaders must have realised that traditional leaders have, in many cases, become costly liabilities.

A key reason for the ANC’s rural losses is a rebellion against rural state capture: the misuse of land powers by traditional leaders, with the support of provincial governments.

People in several provinces have been losing their land to chiefs who use their powers to make deals with companies.

Local people not only lose land and livelihood — they say the money made on the deals lines the pockets of traditional leaders rather than providing better public services.

They are refusing to vote ANC in protest.

Chiefs were given greater power over land in the hope that they would deliver votes for the ANC.

They are doing precisely the opposite.

The bill may prevent this rural state capture.

Its appearance suggests that ANC leaders have recognised that if they allow traditional leaders to continue using land as they please, they will lose the North West and suffer huge losses in other provinces where bantustans once reigned.

This sends two important messages.

For the first time since 1994 ANC internal politics affects its share of the vote; it now pays a price if it does what politicians want, not what voters want.

Whatever city folk may say, furthermore, rural people know when the government is not serving them and what they can do about it.

Whatever city folk may say, rural people know when the government is not serving them and what they can do about it