It was meant to be a show of strength: The crowd of 83,000 ANC supporters showed South Africans that, despite the country’s many problems, the ruling party is confident of victory in Wednesday’s crucial election.
Instead, as people streamed out of the three-quarters full hall before President Cyril Ramaphosa’s speech began, the Siyanqova (“Conquer”) rally will have ANC leaders more worried than ever that the party that liberated South Africa will lose its majority for the first time since Nelson Mandela led it to victory in 1994.
If the ANC receives less than 50% of the vote and is forced into a coalition government, it has only itself to blame. The state has been hollowed out by rampant corruption under Ramaphosa’s predecessor, Jacob Zuma. Four in 10 South Africans are unemployed and basic public services are poor or nonexistent.
Power and wealth remain concentrated in the hands of a few, and poverty is extreme, making South Africa the most unequal society in the world – and also one of the most dangerous.
“Crime is something people are talking about everywhere in the country, black and white,” said William Gumede, a political analyst who helped some of the opposition parties form a pre-election coalition government. “Crime is robbing South Africans of their right to a full life. Crime is sucking the soul out of the country.”
The progress made under the leadership of Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, faltered when Zuma came to power. Billions of dollars were looted from the state and almost every part of it was bankrupted, from the national airline to the agency that runs the railways. An official investigation concluded:The ANC under Zuma tolerated, supported and enabled corruption.“
The generational divide is widening. At Soweto’s FNB Stadium, then known as Soccer City and site of the opening match of the 2010 World Cup, several older protesters expressed frustration that their children, who came from free families, did not support the ANC.
In 1994, Girlface Dlamini was nine months pregnant on the day of South Africa’s first free elections. While fellow South Africans queued for hours to vote, Dlamini was taken to the front of the row. “They treated me like I was the president,” she says. Her daughter was born two weeks later, the day after Mandela was sworn in. She is now studying for a chartered accountancy at Wits University. “It’s because of the ANC that my child is at university. I’m a domestic worker and couldn’t afford the fees.”
But her daughter, like many “born free” people, has little loyalty to the party that has ruled South Africa her whole life. On Wednesday she plans to vote for Julius Malema’s left-wing populist EFF party. “I was so angry with my daughter,” Dlamini says. “I told her, ‘The ANC are the ones that take you to school!'”
Hers is not the only family at odds over politics. Mary Moniweka, 58, an ANC provincial officer in the capital, Tshwane, has had similar arguments with her daughter. “It’s very painful,” she says.
Moniweka pulled up his trousers to show the bullet wounds he sustained. Soweto Uprising The summer of 1976. “She doesn’t understand what’s going on. She doesn’t get it,” she added.
Moniweka doesn’t know who her daughter will vote for. “That’s a secret,” she laughs. Besides the EFF, Mandela’s party is likely to lose votes to a new party formed by Zuma, Umkhonto we Sizwe, which takes its name and logo from a former paramilitary wing of the ANC.
There are plenty of other options, with 52 parties on the ballot, but the most popular outside the ANC is the Democratic Alliance (DA), which has a reputation for running Cape Town and the Western Cape relatively admirably.
Last Wednesday, the DA rally, held at a much smaller venue in Soweto, drew a much younger crowd. There was anger toward the ANC and none of the loyalty felt by older black South Africans. “Our children drink dirty water and go to bed hungry,” said April Molovbi, 36, who came with her twin sister Paulina and nephew Talepo. “I just want the government to give us jobs and let us work,” April said. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
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Paulina said she had woken up at 3 a.m. to queue for work, but it didn’t work out. Tarepo talked about the various qualifications she had obtained at school. “I have a lot of qualifications, but they’re useless,” said Tarepo, 28, who dropped out of school eight years ago and has been unemployed since. If she could choose her career, she said she would like to be a private investigator, and told tales of corrupt local officials and shady politicians.
But the DA remains tied to the notion of being a white-dominated party: While the attendees at last week’s rally were almost entirely black, behind the scenes, where party members and politicians mingle, the proportion of whites is far higher.
Back at the ANC rally, among stalls selling the party’s yellow, green and black hats, shirts and T-shirts, many bearing the faces of long-dead liberation heroes, Stephen Serapezo, 62, a housing worker from Johannesburg, waited for friends to arrive.
He acknowledged that the ANC had “treated the people unfairly” when Zuma was in power.
But the ANC was being reborn, he argued: “All the bad apples have left the movement.” And he cited the government’s stance on Gaza, and in particular its decision to take Israel to the International Court of Justice: “We are leading the world in making sure that the Palestinians have a voice internationally.”
If the ANC needs to form a coalition government, Serapeso would support a deal with the DA because he believes the two parties have similar economic policies. But he acknowledges he is in the minority at the rally. “They won’t accept it,” Serapeso says, waving to the crowd. They only see the ANC as a white party. They don’t think, ‘Do we have anything in common?'”
Despite his dwindling support, Serapeza believed his party and the country had a bright future. “We are moving forward, there is hope, there is no reason to be discouraged.”
