Opinion - Leader Page Articles   

South African elections: ANC versus the rest

The fourth general elections to the South African Parliament, comprising the National Assembly and the Senate, and to the nine Provincial Assemblies are to be held on April 22.

President Kgalema Motlanthe proclaimed the date though the Constitutional Court is yet to rule on the February 9 Pretoria High Court judgment directing the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to change its procedures to enable non-resident South Af ricans to vote. The High Court, however, turned down the plea by the petitioners for an interdict preventing President Motlanthe from issuing the proclamation.

At present, non-residents, except those in specified categories or engaged in official duties abroad, cannot vote. This provision was challenged by a non-resident teaching in the United Kingdom (later joined by some opposition parties) on the ground that the exclusion violated the non-discrimination clause of the Constitution. That ruling is now before the Constitutional Court for confirmation. The CC has set March 4 and 6 for hearing arguments and giving its ruling.

Why this challenge now to a provision and procedure that has remained unchallenged over three previous elections? One reason could be the belief that the majority of the approximately one million non-resident South Africans (other guesstimates put the figure at two million) are opposed to the African National Congress, and would vote against it. There may well be some ground for such a belief. Many South Africans left the country even as the process of transition to democracy began in February 1990, with the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners and the lifting of the ban on the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and other people’s organisations.

Many more left before the first democratic elections, convinced that there would be generalised massacres and, worse, if there were to be a majority rule, meaning a democratic government. Those who did not or could not leave went into a siege mentality. The deep antipathy to and fear of the majority rule persists even now, though in the context of the internal developments in the ANC that have culminated in a split with some well known leaders walking out to form the Congress of the People (COPE) this feeling masquerades as democratic rectitude, not safe under the ANC, particularly under a Zuma Presidency.

Strictly speaking, the April 1994 polls, popularly referred to as the country’s “first democratic elections,” were South Africa’s very first elections. The coming elections are the fourth. All the so-called elections before April 1994 were utterly fraudulent exercises. Before the transition to democracy, less than 15 per cent of the population had the vote, the majority being considered not even South Africans but ‘citizens’ of the so-called ‘Bantustans.’ For a population of over 30 million in 1980, the average strength of the 165 ‘parliamentary constituencies’ was less than 5,000. The ‘Parliament’ thus ‘elected’ was simply an abomination.

Amazingly, these self-evident truths that have been central to the history of the country and its people, and whose distortions the majority of South Africans continue to suffer from, are nowadays not even referred to in mainstream political discourse. It is almost as if apartheid, the institutionalised diminution and impoverishment of the majority of the people, a necessary condition for the enrichment of and concentration of wealth and power in a small minority of whites, never existed. The standard rationalisation is: No, this is not amnesia of the majority, South Africans across the board want to put the past behind them and get on with their lives.

Perhaps. And yet, the past always has a habit of catching up with the present. Nothing illustrates this truism than the developments within the ANC during the (aborted) second term of Thabo Mbeki as South Africa’s President, a denouement that became inevitable following his defeat by Jacob Zuma, Deputy President of the ANC, in the elections for President of the ANC at its national conference at Polokwane in December 2007. That defeat was the beginning of the unravelling of Mr. Mbeki’s second term of office.

Two subsequent developments gave the final push. One, the announcement by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), within days of Mr. Zuma’s triumph at Polokwane, that it was reinstituting its case against Jacob Zuma on charges of “corruption, fraud, racketeering and money-laundering,” a manufactured issue that has been lingering much too long, according to Mr. Zuma and his supporters. The case was earlier “struck off the rolls” by Judge Herbert Msimang of the Pietermaritzburg High Court in September 2006.

Two, this reinstitution too collapsed when Judge Chris Nicholson of the same High Court ruled on September 13, 2008 that the charges were “invalid,” and suggested that political interference had possibly influenced the prosecution. This observation confirmed the popular belief within the ANC and its allies, the SACP and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) that the NPA, formally a constitutionally mandated independent body, was being “misused” by those opposed to Mr. Zuma becoming the next President of the country, meaning Mr. Mbeki and his supporters.

Within days, the ANC’s National Executive Committee passed a resolution “recalling” Mr. Mbeki as President of the country, and he promptly announced his resignation on September 20. Five days later, Parliament elected Kgalema Motlanthe, elected Deputy President of the ANC at Polokwane, as President of South Africa for the six months or so of the remaining term of Parliament.

However, the NPA successfully appealed against Judge Nicholson’s ruling and the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) ordered that the case be heard again. Mr. Zuma’s lawyers have appealed against the SCA’s ruling in the Constitutional Court. But these legal processes are unlikely to disturb the political process that is relentlessly moving towards a Zuma Presidency after the April 22 elections.

Few doubt that the ANC will once again win the elections. The Tripartite Alliance has remained intact. The SACP and Cosatu have solidly backed Mr. Zuma; their nominees will continue to fight the elections as ANC candidates, a unique feature of this alliance rooted in the history of the struggle. Periodically, attempts are made to break the alliance from ideologues with Left pretensions, to no avail.

To the consternation of the media, uniformly hostile to the ANC and to Mr. Zuma as a person, Nelson Mandela, nobody’s tool — who had stayed away from all public engagements for over a year, and kept silent over the internal struggles of the ANC — came out of his self-imposed silence and ringingly endorsed the ANC under Mr. Zuma, addressing him as “my President” at an ANC rally in Idutywa in Eastern Cape, Mr. Mbeki’s birthplace, on February 15. While political leaders opposed to Mr. Zuma have kept quiet, Mr. Mandela is now being presented, naturally in blogs hosted by these newspapers, as a senile old man who has allowed himself to be “commodified.” It is amazing how little such South Africans know of their own history.

However, while the ANC will probably emerge victorious once again, it is not clear if it will increase its strength, as it consistently did in all the three elections held till now. The number of seats won by the ANC and the three parties following it in the National Assembly in the last three elections — with their percentage share of votes in brackets — is given in the table.

True, the basic problems inherited by the majority of South Africans — poverty, poor or lack of housing and potable water and toilets, unemployment and, above all, land — are being still “addressed.” There are other serious problems relating to education and health. Crime continues to be a serious concern across the board, and the poor as always are the worst victims. The envisaged black economic empowerment is cynically seen by many blacks as only a fancy name for selective black enrichment. Cynicism about “politics and politicians” abounds, a most dangerous tendency designed to depoliticise a highly politicised people, encouraged by the resourceful NGO sector.

Where, however, is the alternative to the ANC? Unlike the ANC, the COPE, despite having highly regarded individuals with authentic struggle credentials, has had no time to build branch level organisational structures. The other parties are, rightly or wrongly, still seen as agents of recolonisation.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Swayed by sectional interests
Chavez marches on
South African elections: ANC versus the rest
Memory, guilt and the futility of war
Enlisting fish and chips to fight climate change
Poor nations shortchanged on climate pledges
A hasty decree?
Once house of horrors, Iraqi prison has new air
Grand folly
Law unto themselves

Copyright © 2009, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu