Jeremy Dewar
The seventh South African election under universal suffrage proved to be a turning point for the party that negotiated the ending of apartheid 30 years ago, the African National Congress. On 29 May the ANC gained only 40% of the votes and 159 seats in the National Assembly, down from 58% and 230 seats. Its actual vote crashed from 10 million to 6.5 million – out of a population of 61 million, the majority youth.
ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa was forced to seek coalition partners for the first time in its history. Ramaphosa himself is a highly divisive figure: hated by some within his party for usurping the corrupt and incompetent Jacob Zuma in 2018; loathed by many for making his own personal fortune (last estimated in 2015 as $450 million, since a secret) while presiding over an economy in which one-third of the working population is unemployed, a rate rising to 50% among the youth.
EFF stalls, Zuma accelerates
But if big chunks of the ANC’s voter base were falling off, none of it seemed to be picked up by the official opposition parties. The second largest party, the Democratic Alliance, saw its vote decline slightly from 22% to 21%, though it gained three more seats.
The DA is made up of several apartheid-era white supremacist parties, most notably the Nationalist Party, which ruled over the Black majority with an iron fist for decades. It is the party of ‘white monopoly capital’ and the big white agribusiness landowners, as well as Western multinationals, from whom it gets its financial backing. In provinces where it has been in office in coalitions, it has imposed vicious austerity on the poor.
The Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema, also suffered a slight fall in support, down a percentage point to 10%. Malema founded the EFF after he was expelled from the ANC in 2013 and built the party on a Stalinist programme of capitalist nationalisations and land expropriation.
Its youth wing was prominent in the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ student campaigns. But its call for a general strike in protest against power outages (‘loadshedding’) in March 2023 fell flat, revealing the EFF’s lack of support in the unions. Malema sought to soften the party’s image and even swapped his party’s red beret-and-shirt fatigues for suits to appeal to the ANC’s base, but to little or no effect.
The big winner in the election was the new party, uMkhonto weSiswe (MK), named after the ANC’s armed wing in the anti-apartheid struggle and founded by ousted former president Jacob Zuma. Zuma himself was barred from standing by the Constitutional Court because of his 2021 conviction and 15-month sentence for contempt of court. But that didn’t stop MK from winning 15% of the vote and becoming the largest party in KwaZulu Natal province.
Zuma presided over South Africa’s economic decline in the 2010s and allegedly received large kickbacks from arms deals and privatisations, especially from the ostensibly super-rich Gupta brothers. His equally notorious claim that the HiV virus could be killed by having a shower after sex earned him huge and lasting disrespect from women, the LGBT+ community and youth. However, he retains large pockets of support from within the ANC, including many of its elected representatives.
Also Zuma’s supposed leftism on the land question is entirely bogus. During the campaign, MK’s proposal to nationalise the land was unbelievably founded on the British model of the land being owned by the monarchy. Needless to say this has not prevented big landowners lording it over their tenants in the UK.
In reality MK’s strategy was to force the ANC to dump Ramaphosa and join them in coalition government. This, unfortunately for them, was never going to happen, given the markets’ insistence that Zuma should never again be allowed near the levers of power.
Grand Coalition
Instead, Ramaphosa formed a widely expected but last minute coalition primarily with the DA on 14 June. The Inkatha Freedom Party, which played a counter-revolutionary role in the latter stages of the anti-apartheid struggle, was also brought into government along with three other smaller parties, largely to offset the strength of the DA in negotiations.
Wrangling over the handing out of portfolios dragged on for over two weeks, with the DA holding out for 30% of the ministries. In the end, it had to settle for just six, not the 11 it had hoped for, and crucially lost its fight for the important Trade & Industry spot.
Ramaphosa knew that the DA’s big business donors would not allow the party to walk away from a deal, having finally ended the ANC’s monopoly position. In the end the ANC leader brought another eight minor parties into the coalition to kill off the DA’s pugnacious push – but it is a sign of the tensions that will emerge over the next few years.
In truth there is enough common ground for the coalition parties to carry out its day-to-day business. Both the ANC and the DA are committed to neoliberalism – tax breaks for the rich, further privatisations, vicious cuts in social spending and clamping down on wages and trade union rights.
While South Africa did relatively well following the 2008 financial crisis, it has floundered since. GDP per capita is rock bottom, at the same level as it was in 2005. The covid pandemic hit the country particularly hard, in large part due to the terrible state of public health facilities. Inflation has been persistently running at 5-6%, nearer 20% for the poor who spend disproportionately more of their meagre income on food and energy. Electricity and water supplies routinely, almost daily suffer from cuts in supply.
Prospects
The problems for Ramaphosa are more strategic and ideological, but they will pose problems in keeping the ANC and the tripartite coalition with the COSATU trade union federation and South African Communist Party together. COSATU remains the biggest union federation but it has suffered several splits over the years, losing crucial affiliations in the mines and metalworking. Its leaders felt it necessary to launch a protest general strike last July over economic issues and anti-union laws. It may soon feel the pressure to go beyond gesture politics.
The SACP is also having to react to the downturn in the ANC’s fortunes. Its conference last year actually debated standing separately under its own flag in the 2024 election, though it chose not to. The Stalinist party is still wedded to the two-stages strategy of the late Joe Slovo and sees its primary task as defending the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ through its ‘Liberation Alliance’ with the ANC. But it wants to ‘reconfigure’ the alliance with quarterly meetings of its component parts in order to keep up the pressure on Ramaphosa.
In particular the SACP has drawn a red line under the government’s support for China and Russia via the BRICS alliance as an alternative to the G7, World Bank and IMF, as well as its refusal to fall in line with sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and prosecution of Israel for genocide in Gaza. This of course will cause friction with the avowedly pro-Western DA, but it also will find allies in the EFF and MK.
The ANC will also in this turmoil find it more difficult to keep its own party in order. There is a semi-open faction within the party that favours uniting with Zuma. They will rail against any attempt to make the trappings of government more transparent, a key demand of the DA and, behind them, big business and foreign investors. In short, the ANC’s woes have only just begun.
The immediate task facing revolutionaries in South Africa is to break COSATU from the ANC and force it to unite in struggle with the other unions. Shop stewards and worker activists need to demand a fighting united front against the coming assault on the working class, which will increase with DA ministers chomping at the bit.
This task should be made easier, now that Ramaphosa has now openly thrown his lot in with the ‘white monopoly capitalists’. But it will mean a struggle against the COSATU union bureaucracy, which has grown fat on its cosy relations with ministers. In particular it will entail a rebuilding of shop steward power within and across the unions and their bitterly rival federations. They should call their leaders to account and demand they not only break with the ANC, but commit themselves to bringing down the Government of National Unity.
But the path towards a working class party, resting on the powerful trade union and township organisations of struggle, has been a long and winding road. Several mis-steps have been made along the way, since Moses Mayekiso first raised the slogan in the 1980s, most recently with the farcical tragedy of Irvin Jim’s stillborn Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party. But underlining all these errors has been Stalinism’s two-stage strategy, which puts off indefinitely the fight for socialism.
The South African working class needs a new, revolutionary party that openly calls for and works towards a second South African revolution. This time it should not only deal once and for all with the white capitalists’ control over industry and the land, but also deal with capitalism, which in its original form or under the guise of Black Economic Empowerment, has robbed the working class of any of the fruits of its revolutionary struggles.