One of many great unknowns in this election is how power will split in urban centres. The ANC is going to be hard pressed to get to 50% in a number of metropolitan municipalities. If it finishes the campaign strongly, it could just squeak in. If it doesn’t, all manner of possibilities arise.
But one thing is clear: SA’s cities are where the ANC is weakest. The great divide, between the country’s rural and urban populations, is also the ANC’s great divide. At the heart of it is the middle class — that ill-defined, largely ignored constituency that seems to boast no natural political home.
Historically, the ANC has done poorly in cities because they are where most minorities reside, and they tend to be better off. But this is now being supplemented by the emergence of a new black middle class. Market research tells us ANC support drops off among black households with a monthly household income of R12,000 and above. Many of these households are found in cities.
On a macro level, the extent to which the middle class is ignored is largely a product of the ANC’s historic outlook. It is ostensibly a party for “the people”, and thus produces radical populism. It has no real conception of the middle class. And while some of its policies do benefit the middle class — BEE and affirmative action, for example — increased economic independence also tends to lead to increased political independence, as the data suggests.
The black middle class itself, relatively free of bondage to the state compared to the working class and destitute, is appalled by the ANC of 2021. The moment your worldview shifts from survival to quality of life, the ANC is revealed to you as a monster — one that devours and destroys first and delivers last.
Elsewhere, the opposition rarely talks about the middle class, at least not explicitly. The DA’s core offer — service delivery excellence and clean governance — appeals to the middle class by default. But the party, desperate to build a reputation as “pro-poor”, which the facts prove it is, doesn’t explicitly address the middle class. Its language is always universal and politically correct.
The middle class lives in a political void. It has no champion. But in many of the country’s cities and towns, it is the difference between ANC hegemony and a new dispensation. That is the grand trend, slowly playing itself out election after election.
It’s not just politically that the middle class holds the country’s future in its hands, but economically too. If SA is to work, its cities — the batteries that power the economy — must work. Certainly they are the future of any meaningful tax base. You get the sense in places like the Western Cape, run by the DA, that people understand this. But they are hamstrung, constantly undermined by blanket national policies that are inflexible and counterproductive in microeconomic environments that have their own dynamics.
The coming problem is that if the ANC falls below 50% in key metros, the EFF is likely to be able to give it a simple majority as partner. And if the ANC is indifferent to the middle class, the EFF is fundamentally hostile. That will produce a curious situation indeed.
As middle-class voters in urban centres move slowly and inexorably away from the ANC, there is a real prospect they will be governed by a coalition more hostile to their particular needs and values than ever before. Our cities, the factories designed to produce the middle class, will be run by people who either care nothing for them or see them as some sort of class enemy.
That is a recipe for one of two things: fight or flight. Or both. On the flight front, many have already boarded planes and left. First for the Western Cape, then for another country. When it comes to fighting though, what do you do? You can choose the DA, though many black middle-class South Africans find that hard. Outside of the DA, the pickings are slim to none in terms of a real electoral force.
Action SA might put up a good show, for a new party, in Johannesburg in this election, but Herman Mashaba is with the EFF view that the primary purpose of any city should be to cater almost exclusively to the poor. His infatuation with and mental capture by the EFF was so well set that the EFF once pronounced him an “EFF mayor”. He too deals in radical populism.
For the ANC/EFF, high-income and middle-class people exist only to provide the economic resources to service the poor, as opposed to producing an environment in which the goal is to grow and reward that constituency as a vital cog in any local government.
The assumption seems to be that it is a zero-sum game. It is the poor or bust. But that is simply not true. One can do both. In fact, the poor, unemployed and vulnerable are well served by a government that has as its primary focus the creation of a middle class, as opposed to the perpetuation of poverty. What is the point of social grants, after all, if not to give people the opportunity to turn it into a sustainable and meaningful job?
There is one future path for SA where cities are structured around the creation of a middle class and the goal is to lift people out of poverty. In that future, cities are the foundation of a brighter economic future, whatever the ANC’s national policies.
There is another path where the ANC and EFF come together and actively regress what little progress has been made on this front. Where the middle class continues to be the enemy, whatever its race, and cities are designed to be first and foremost social welfare programmes that feed off the rates and taxes of an ever shrinking base and where delivery of services collapses. In that future, our cities become the end of our economy, and the middle class leaves as metros are reduced to mere extensions of the ANC’s national approach.
The former path sets up a grand conflict in the long term. While our cities are the core of our economy, the constitution is structured in such a way that the levers of economic power rest almost entirely with the national administration. Controlled by the ANC, a party in hock primarily to a rural consistency, this sets the scene for a showdown. If cities are to cater for a constituency that is increasingly middle class, they are going to be forced to break with many national policies. It is a political inevitability, and with time one that will be brought to bear even on local ANC governments. The only problem is, by then it might be too late.
The 2021 local government elections will constitute a critical moment in this regard. Cities and the middle class are simply not conceived of as a solution to our problems. Given the opportunity, and control over governments in our metros, the ANC and EFF will make sure they never are.
• Van Onselen, a former journalist who also worked for the DA in various capacities, was head of politics at the Institute of Race Relations before joining market research company Victory Research as CEO. He writes in his personal capacity.
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