The ANC counts the high cost of a failing president

IT’S the cold weather, the pernicious media, traitorous “clever blacks” and feckless young voters that didn’t bother to go to the polls. The excuses are flowing thick and fast. Could’ve. Would’ve. Should’ve.

It’s all irrelevant. The simple fact is that the ANC has been handed its biggest drubbing in 22 years.

The ANC lost Nelson Mandela Bay, the most important urban conurbation in the Eastern Cape, to an opposition party whose candidate was a middle-aged, white former farmer. In Gauteng, SA’s economic powerhouse, in the metros of Tshwane, Johannesburg and possibly Ekurhuleni, it will at best govern as the largest minority party. At worst, it will be in the opposition benches, no longer able to fuel the great machine of patronage that it has come to depend on.

In the Western Cape, the ANC has been destroyed. In a province with a Xhosa-speaking population of 38 percent, it managed barely a quarter of the entire vote and does not control a single council.

Even in KwaZulu-Natal, President Jacob Zuma’s personal fiefdom, it has taken bruising body blows. On Friday, the ANC yet to be finalised provincial vote hovered around a humiliating 57 percent.

It has also failed in the symbolically important ward of Nkandla. A resurgent IFP retained this with ease.

ANC leaders will have to come to terms with the fact South Africa’s body politic has been set on a fundamentally different course from what they assumed – that of the historically preordained primacy of the former liberation organisation. If it can’t get its head around that, the ANC will be handed an even greater thrashing in the 2019 general election.

In SA, the social democrats are coalescing in the DA, while the radical populists have found a home in the EFF. The ANC is losing the urban vote and having to retreat to the countryside, as happened with its admired fraternal equivalent in Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF.

But unlike Zimbabwe, in agriculturally important KwaZuluNatal at least, not even that is a safe refuge. The IFP won seven rural councils in KZN with over 20 percent of the vote.

The question is whether the ANC, in its own metaphorical retreat from the cities, will echo Uncle Bob in resorting to desperate and despotic stratagems to retain power. For the breaking test of democracy is what happens when a hegemonic ruling party confronts the possibility of losing power in the foreseeable future.

Zuma comes from a military background that might be responsive to the siren calls of securocrats that he has surrounded himself with. It would be a mistake.

If anything, these elections show SA democracy to be in boisterous health. We are not like Zimbabwe; a cowed and pliant populace to be trifled with, to swallow platitudes about the ANC’s vanguard role and instructions from the ancestors – with Zuma as intermediary – on how we should vote.

Zuma has presided over a sustained and accelerating decline in the ANC’s fortunes. Under his leadership, in the 2014 general election the ANC vote dropped five percentage points from its 2009 high of 67 percent. Just over two years later it has dropped another seven percentage points.

Of course this has to be seen within our unique context. Anywhere else in the democratic world a party which after 22 years in power still controls six times as many councils as the opposition combined, would be considered an extraordinary success.

The DA, for its part, now faces real challenges. If it wants to keep the ANC from governing in the hung metros, it will have to enter into coalitions with EFF, with which it shares nothing ideologically.

A mutual antipathy to the ANC is not much of a basis to build a coalition. In terms of political values it would make more sense to seek some kind of modus vivendi with the ANC, although that would be unthinkable to most in the DA.

This election has only been peripherally about local issues. Primarily it has been a referendum on Zuma, secondly on the performance of the ANC.

For Zuma it is a huge personal defeat. Conversely, for the DA’s Mmusi Maimane, who has been derided – both by the ANC and by rival camps in the DA – as lightweight and inexperienced, it is a great victory.

Given the dismal results for the ANC, it seems inconceivable the party leadership, or at least that of it that has not been captured by Zuma, will allow him to serve out his full term. The opposition parties, for all their rhetoric that it is time for Zuma to go, should pray he remains.

For in the same way that in the US presidential elections Donald Trump has become Hilary Clinton’s secret weapon, so Zuma is the best alienator of ANC support SA opposition parties could ever hope for. @TheJaundicedEye