Why are political parties that formed after the end of apartheid so hard to build and grow? Rise Mzansi, ActionSA and Build One SA all did miserably in the 2024 elections. The only exception was the Patriotic Alliance, whose support base grew. Most of those who bothered to vote at all either voted for parties formed during apartheid — the ANC, the DA, the IFP — or for spin-offs from apartheid-era parties such as the EFF and MK party.
Why is this happening? An obvious answer is that SA is not yet sufficiently free of its history to forge new political identities. Nine out of 10 black people who voted did so for the ANC or its spin-offs. Racial minorities voted overwhelmingly for the DA. That the distribution of votes came so close to a racial census speaks to how long a shadow apartheid casts.
But there is another possible reason people cling to old parties. It is not on its own a sufficient explanation, but it may account for it in part.
Across swathes of SA, unemployment levels have been 50% or more throughout the postapartheid era. Many of the people who live in these areas have no reason to believe that the future will be any different from the present. They live in a world in which intergenerational poverty is truly baked in, and it stretches their credulity to imagine that things might one day be different. And so when a party comes around saying that politics is broken and that there is a plan to fix it, this message inspires nothing but disbelief.
What you want from a political party, if you doubt that things will ever substantially change, is something much more tangible, something you can feel and touch, and that can be delivered immediately.
Provide water
In a recently essay published in the New York Review of Books, Mark Gevisser describes travelling on the campaign trail with Rise Mzansi leader Songezi Zibi. They arrived one afternoon in Boitekong, the township attached to Rustenburg, which had been without water for three months because local government had collapsed. When Zibi told the crowd that had gathered that they deserved better, they demanded to know why he had not brought water tanks.
There is a vicious circle at work here. Bad politics creates a poor country, which fashions an electorate consumed by hopelessness. Their hopelessness makes for more bad politics. And so it goes on.
The interaction speaks volumes. The well-off man arrives in an SUV to tell people that he can fix the country’s politics. They reply that if he cannot provide water here and now, he is useless to them. As Gevisser points out, Rise Mzansi got less than half a percent of the national vote; most of the party’s support came from the wealthy suburbs.
And so perhaps some people vote for old parties not because they come from the past and can claim pedigree as a liberation movement, but because they are large and incumbent and are prepared to deliver patronage. If you have given up on change, that is all a political party can offer.
There is a great fear among the middle classes that the centrist politics of the government of national unity (GNU) will be overwhelmed by an alternative populist vision; that poor South Africans will be seduced by a programme to abolish the constitution and nationalise land. But it may be that many among the poor are no longer seducible by any vision, be it populist or constitutional. If this is indeed the case, the danger lies elsewhere: not in the eventual triumph of a populist alternative, but in the triumph of a type of politics that offers no alternative, only naked transaction; a politics that is hollowed out, without content, without ideas, a politics animated by cynicism.
There is a vicious circle at work here. Bad politics creates a poor country, which fashions an electorate consumed by hopelessness. Their hopelessness makes for more bad politics. And so it goes on.
That is not the only reason it is so hard to form new parties and to set an agenda for change. But it is certainly one of them. I doubt whether SA’s electorate is about to be swept into a populist dream. The problem is an electorate that has long ago stopped dreaming at all.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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