AYABONGA CAWE: Reflections on a ‘white’ election

Many people have spoken animatedly about the strong turnout of mostly white voters in the suburbs. Where I voted, save for groups of local black middle-class residents and a few ANC activists, there were very few black people, at least when I was there.

This wasn’t surprising to me, nor a reflection of other voting stations. I had voted there before, and as was clear from images on social media platforms in the evening, voting stations in largely white areas stood at odds with the low turnout painted by the national statistics.

One caller on MetroFMTalk spoke about the comparison between a voting station in his neighbourhood in Roodepoort (which was choc-a-bloc full) and one in Soweto, which he found  relatively empty. Anecdote is not a replacement for empirical fact and evidence, but this fits in with the results that trickled in at the results operation centres.

By the time these thoughts are published, the election results will have been released. It is already clear that the story will read like this: “ANC victory [albeit in the midst of deep electoral decline], decline in the DA and a good showing by the EFF and IFP in Jacob Zuma’s heartland.”

But there is no bigger story coming out of these elections than the performance of the Freedom Front Plus (FF+). This is notable not only because of the dent it made in the DA’s support, but the ominous signs of a “fightback” against the land debate and other redistributory policy in a stagnant economy with highly unequal outcomes. Moreover, that they made it to the top four parties in the heartlands of white agriculture and landownership in Mpumalanga, North West, Limpopo and the Free State, with improvements in the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape, is also worth noting in the context of the land debate.

In many ways, this is a verkrampte show of force, not only in the traditional white right wing but in the erstwhile white DA constituency, which is unsettled by the policy, demographic and other shifts in the party under Mmusi Maimane’s leadership. It is a fact that the FF+ in many ways is the political home of narrow advocacy and agitation around the tropes of “white genocide”, “reverse racism” and “African incompetence”.

Alongside pressure groups such as Afriforum, the FF+ is the most recognisable overhang from the apartheid political environment, with an ideology appealing to a spectrum as wide as the old Conservative Party, AWB and DP elements.

That it has links, ideologically and in practice, with right-wing elements in the global north is what should startle us most. The same right-wing and its symbols inspired Dylan Roof to massacre black churchgoers in Charleston, and Brenton Tarrant, who in a self-filmed rampage killed mosque-goers in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Tactically, this is the largest victory not of the “marginal” presence of the FF+, but of the international pressure they have mobilised to influence key debates on redistribution here in SA. In a Trumpesque world as interconnected and interdependent as the one we live in, that matters. By receiving a boost in the National Assembly and legislatures in most provinces, another stage has been provided for the offensive in all of its economic, political and social dimensions.

In many ways, it complicates the implied strategy of the government during the campaign season and in the fifth administration, that any legislative decisions to speed up the transfer of land, economic transformation and structural change will occur in a context of limited opposition, save for the DA.

For Maimane it presents a choice of moving further to the right on policy, in opposition to a potential ANC-EFF alliance on key social and economic laws, to secure his internal position in the party, or jettisoning the base that voted for the VF+ and moving closer to the views of the black bloc in the organisation.

Whichever choice he makes will occur in what will undoubtedly be an animated and landmark-setting sixth administration.

• Cawe (@aycawe), a development economist, is MD of Xesibe Holdings and hosts MetroFMTalk on Metro FM.