For a long time now, a fantasy has been abroad in SA about the decline of the ANC. Everyone in the commentariat is waiting for it, a little like Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot. Once it happens, the fantasy goes, we can discard the last decade like an old jacket and begin anew.
Be careful what you wish for. It is happening, here and now. The ANC is definitively in decline. But the era being born is not anything like the fantasy says it ought to be.
The most glaring indication of what the new era may look like is the outcome of last November’s municipal government elections. It is not just that the ANC took a hammering; so did its established rivals, the DA and EFF. Their collective vote share plunged from 88% to 78%.
Their support was stolen mainly by parties that did not even exist when elections were last held: Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA and Gayton McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance. The rise of ActionSA in particular is nothing short of meteoric. Just more than a year old and contesting a limited number of wards, it received more than half a million votes.
Clearly, spectacularly, the electorate is hungry for something new. But what does the new look like? In the form of Mashaba and MacKenzie it is chauvinist, xenophobic and disinterested in the mechanics of governance.
The rise of the new parties has shaken the old ones to their core. What have they done in response? The EFF has promised to go from restaurant to restaurant shaming their proprietors into firing the foreign nationals who work for them. The ANC has vowed to ensure that each workplace in the country employs a majority of South Africans.
This is what the beginning of the demise of the ANC looks like. To keep their vote share, established parties are emulating the xenophobia of Mashaba and fury of McKenzie. A frustrated electorate is pushing the entire spectrum of political parties into a narrow politics of anger and fear.
There are several lessons to learn here. At the core of the fantasy about what will replace the ANC is the idea that the governing party is a cancerous growth. Lop it off and the problem is solved, for the body beneath is healthy and strong.
But the body beneath is neither healthy nor strong. The flesh of SA society is composed of many things. There is goodwill, hope and pride. But there is also enormous anger and hurt, and a degree of brutalisation that is horrible to behold. It is hardly surprising that as it hammers the ANC the country turns its anger not just on the governing party, but on foreign nationals too. After all, the idea that one suffered under apartheid is the most tangible claim there is that one belongs here and and deserves redress.
There is another lesson to learn from the way the ANC is actually declining. Across the world it is passé to claim that there is a widening chasm between the respective world views of elites and ordinary people. But I’m not sure it is understood quite how wide that chasm is.
SA’s elite is divided over many questions. Whether SA needs universal basic income; whether orthodox monetary policy is good enough; what should happen to state-owned enterprises. There is no shortage of controversy. But on the question of foreign nationals there is hardly any disagreement among SA’s elite. From the left to free market right nobody in the elite thinks a surfeit of foreigners within SA’s borders is anywhere near our most urgent problem.
Yet across urban SA, among the citizenry at large, it is regarded as the problem par excellence, explaining unemployment, crime and the stifling of small business. That is one reason why the decline of the ANC is not taking the benign form the fantasy says it should. In the fantasy, SA’s worldview mirrors that of its elite. In reality, it does not come close.
The decline of the ANC is going to produce one surprise after another.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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