Why 2024 vote is crucial for South Africa

If ruling African National Congress is forced to share power, it will be historic and might actually be a good thing

This famously is the year of elections — with around 40 per cent of humanity having the chance to vote in 2024. And already it has become a bore’s charter. Sit next door to the wrong person at dinner, and many hours will pass while you hear about the crucial importance of Arab Americans to Joe Biden’s chances in the Detroit suburbs or why the Scottish National Party’s performance in Renfrewshire could determine Keir Starmer’s path to Downing Street. The justification for these lectures is always that this particular contest is a “historic” showdown. Just like they insisted the last election was.

So it’s odd that relatively little attention is being paid to the one contest that looks genuinely historic. South Africa’s election, due to be held on May 29, is the most important since the 1994 contest that vanquished apartheid and swept Nelson Mandela to power. Given the Rainbow Nation’s centrality to democracy in the world’s fastestgrowing continent, it has a good claim to being Africa’s most important election for three decades too.

The African National Congress (ANC), the party that Mandela led to victory and which has ruled South Africa ever since, looks likely to fall below 50 per cent of the vote for the first time. Voting for the ANC has been the default option for most Black South Africans for a generation. But almost all opinion polls show the ANC will lose its parliamentary majority. The party obtained 57.5 per cent support in the last national election in 2019.

In the long term, this is a good thing. Democracy without contestability becomes inefficient. In the short term, though, the ANC not winning outright opens up a series of historic possibilities that range from the promising to the catastrophic.

South Africa has become as famous for its blackouts as its rugby. Visiting the country means learning a whole new vocabulary — of “baseload,” “inverters” and “load shedding.” The same goes for virtually every other piece of infrastructure that the ANC has been entrusted with.

Whatever the short-term consequences of the ANC losing its monopoly on power — and, economically, they could be pretty dire — something fundamentally good has happened: South African politics has become competitive. To win votes in the future, ANC politicians will have to start focusing on fixing schools, roads and railways.

That could have a deep impact not just on the country but on the whole continent. In Zimbabwe, there has been an economic implosion; in Rwanda, to be fair, President Paul Kagame’s economic record has been stellar, but the human rights record of his Rwanda Patriotic Front leaves a lot to be desired. In general, much of the continent’s growth has come from places where democracy feels more real — like Senegal, Ivory Coast and (with some obvious ups and downs) Nigeria.

The US, UK and the European Union have a vested interest in democracy being embedded in South Africa. So if the ANC is forced to share power, it will be historic. It may not initially feel great but, longer-term, this is the way to a better South Africa.