The dust is settling after one of SA’s most fiercely contested polls, the 2021 local government elections that left parties scampering for coalition partnerships after poor performances.
The ANC’s electoral decline continued under President Cyril Ramaphosa with a drop below a 50% majority in the national tally.
Also licking their wounds are the opposition DA and EFF that lost significant ground in their traditional strongholds including metros across the country and towns such as in Limpopo.
Business Day reported before the municipal ballot that the ANC and DA would haemorrhage massive support in urban centres such as Joburg and Tshwane, but independent polls got it wrong in their overestimation of the EFF’s potential growth. Localised parties such as Action SA, the Inkatha Freedom Party and Patriotic Alliance were big winners in the country’s cities..
Politicians in SA’s biggest parties were crunching the numbers in the past week in an attempt to argue that their performance was not dismal. But a deeper analysis of the electoral result — city by city and town by town in SA’s nine provinces — shows the ANC, DA and EFF are out of touch with reality and the electorate.
Experts say trends emerging from the poll show voters in urban centres care about governance more than service delivery and racial politics.
“Both the ANC and DA have an existential crisis at the moment. The ANC in a way, particularly in the Eastern Cape and Limpopo, have rock solid support. But the DA did not do too well, (not) as well as I expected them to do in small towns” said election analyst Wayne Sussman.
While the DA did increase its share of the vote, from from 20% in the 2019 general elections to 21%, but to suggest the party did well was not true, said Sussman.
“FF Plus, Action SA and the Patriotic Alliance took a lot of the DA vote,” Sussman said.
The DA was being disingenuous by comparing its result in the 2021 municipal elections with that of the 2019 national vote, when in fact it lost the mass support it received in the 2016 local government ballot, he said.
The ANC’s focus on rural SA seemed to have paid off. Identity politics played a huge role in how South Africans voted in small-town and rural SA. In the Eastern Cape and Limpopo the ANC clawed back support it lost to the EFF.
Gauteng newcomer Action SA, led by former Gauteng mayor Herman Mashaba, won 16% of the total vote in the City of Joburg. Mashaba seems to have wooed black middle class voters from the DA and ANC. Veteran political analyst Ebrahim Fakir said campaigning on an antiforeigner ticket won Mashaba a lot of support.
“I think there is something sinister going on in the minds of South Africans. Partly ActionSA is a fresh alternative and there is disgruntlement with big parties. But ActionSA has tapped into regressive sentiments that South Africans have about foreigners,” Fakir said.
“Mashaba pretends to be pro-poor but he largely attracted black voters who are unhappy with the ANC or the DA ... by tapping into the worst sentiments of narrow identity politics.”
The DA and EFF expected big gains but lost considerable ground in Gauteng. This follows the EFF decision to help elect a DA mayor in Joburg and Tshwane in 2016. Though the EFF emerged as the official opposition in some municipalities in Mpumalanga, it did not grow as much as it expected in the rest of the country, losing support in municipalities in Limpopo, home of EFF leader Julius Malema.
In Limpopo, the ANC regained ground lost to the EFF. The party emerged with a majority in the Modimolle, Mokgophong and Thabazimbi municipalities, which it lost in the 2016 municipal elections. Since 2016, Modimolle was run by a DA, EFF and FF Plus coalition. Now the ANC has the majority.
Load-shedding, according to ANC and DA insiders, cost the ANC as much as 10% of the vote in the days before the election. The DA maintained an overwhelming majority in Cape Town, and won votes in KwaZulu-Natal after July’s violent unrest there. It also marinated its support in places like the Midvaal in Gauteng.
In the Free State, North West, Eastern Cape and Northern Cape, projections by DA pollsters that the party would do well in small-town SA failed to materialise.
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