Africa News blog

Support slumps for rival to South Africa’s ANC

It would be hard for the leaders of South Africa’s COPE party to put a positive spin on its latest poll rating of just over 2 percent. If the breakaway group from the African National Congress gave the ANC a bit of a jolt before elections in April, the ruling party doesn’t seem to have much to worry about from that quarter now.

In terms of electoral success, it hasn’t been a good year for parties trying to challenge the former liberation movements that run most of southern Africa.

In Namibia, a breakaway group from the ruling SWAPO party emerged as the main opposition, but still only won just over 11 percent of the vote and complained of foul play. In Mozambique, Frelimo won another resounding victory, beating both old rival Renamo and the new MDM – which complained at the barring of some of its candidates.

Angola’s President Jose Eduardo dos Santos signalled to his MPLA party that he would wait another three years before a presidential election he is almost certain to win.

The picture is somewhat different in Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe was forced into a power sharing deal with rival Morgan Tsvangirai, a former union leader, but even there the one-time guerrilla told his ZANU-PF recently to stop bickering and mobilise to win ‘uncontested victory’ in the next election.

There is a big difference between South Africa and some of its neighbours in that nobody is challenging the fairness of the electoral system.

But the same question arises here as elsewhere as to when, if ever, opposition parties might be able to seriously challenge the hold of the movements that came to power through their victories over colonial or minority rule.

Death knell for ANC’s political foes?

William Gumede

South Africa’s national elections last week have reshaped the contours of the country’s political landscape. It has almost certainly killed off the careers of many opposition leaders who have become institutions and their parties with them. It virtually obliterated the peer parties of the ANC, with their roots as liberation movements, such as the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) and the Azanian Peoples’ Organisation (Azapo). It is clear the electorate believes these parties are irrelevant, outdated and under poor leadership. The Inkatha Freedom Party, whose founder, Mangosuthu Buthelezi also professed that it has its origins in liberation movement politics has also been brought down to size.

 The IFP has dominated the KwaZulu Natal province since the 1960s, but embarrassingly lost out to the ANC now. ANC President Jacob Zuma’s overt appeal to Zulu speakers in the province who have supported the IFP in the past, by arguing that is better to support him (Zuma) for the presidency, and have a Zulu-speaker in the presidency, has evidently worked. Many IFP supporters have voted for Zuma merely on the basis of ethnic affinity, rather than his record in government.

 But this strategy also run the risks of increasing ethnic divisions, with some Zuma supporters already whispering for the ‘Xhosa-Nostra’ to be purged from government. This is a reference to individuals who were allies of former President Thabo Mbeki, are Xhosa speakers or who are from the Eastern Cape province from where Mbeki and former President Nelson Mandela hail.

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Zuma sweeps in

It was South Africa’s most exciting election campaign for a long time, enlivened by the split in the African National Congress and the personality of Jacob Zuma, the man who is now pretty much assured of becoming president despite the best efforts of plenty of people within his party as well as the opposition.

So far, the results don’t look too different from the pre-poll forecasts. An ANC victory was never in doubt and the battle was as much as anything about whether the party could keep its two-thirds majority in parliament, which lets it change the constitution and further entrench its power. That was still in doubt after early figures.

There was not much good news for the Congress of the People (COPE), formed by loyalists of ousted former President Thabo Mbeki. With only about eight percent of the vote so far, the question may be as much whether it survives as whether it can supplant the Democratic Alliance as the main opposition.

The DA seemed to have done fairly well with its “Stop Zuma” campaign, at least in its Western Cape stronghold, but there was no sign of it making inroads among the black majority.

Whatever losses the ANC had made to COPE and the DA, it seemed to have made some of them up in KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma’s Zulu heartland, where it battered the once locally dominant Inkatha Freedom Party.

It certainly looks as though Zuma’s support was not affected by the fact the corruption charges against him were dismissed on a technicality rather than after a trial.

How well placed will he now be to deliver the change that many South Africans say they want on fighting crime, poverty, corruption and AIDS? Will COPE survive or might its supporters start to drift back to the ANC? Will the opposition ever really be able to challenge the ANC?

Will South Africa’s poor always back ANC?

It’s one of the biggest ironies in South African politics — the most loyal ANC voters are often those the party appears to have let down most bitterly.

For millions of poor, mostly black South Africans, life has barely changed since the African National Congress defeated apartheid under Nelson Mandela in 1994.

Year after year, they wait for the new house, the job, the running water and electricity, the decent education for their children that the ANC has promised. For many, that never comes. Yet most will still vote for ANC and its leader Jacob Zuma in an election next week.

The poorest residents of Munsieville, a township on the edge of Johannesburg, illustrate the contradiction.

Unemployed and tired of living crammed into one-room shacks with no running water or electricity, they are quick to list the ways their government has failed them.

Hundreds share one water tap, which sits next to a stinking mound of rubbish where dirt-smudged children play and stray dogs scavenge for food. They dig pits for toilets.

Many say they have languished for years at the bottom of waiting lists for decent housing. They were left behind while others enjoyed a decade of continuous economic growth that created a burgeoning black middle class.

S.African Election: Democracy in tatters?

William Gumede is the author of “The Democracy Gap: Africa’s Wasted Years” and ”Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC”.

South Africa votes on 22 April with not only its globally admired efforts to build democracy in tatters, but against the backdrop of many other promising attempts to build viable democracies across Africa now backsliding.

Military coups, such as the recent one in Madasgascar, assumed to be part of Africa’s terrible past, appear now to again have become a regular occurrence. The election earlier this year of Muammar Gadaffi – who himself came to power by military coup in Libya – as leader of the African Union, by his peers, is symbolic of the continental regression.

When South Africa became democratic in 1994 with Nelson Mandela at the head, it was hoped that the new democracy at the southern tip of Africa would provide a powerful home-grown impetus for expanding democracy across the continent.

And it initially looked promising, with Mandela’s exemplary moral leadership; and his successor Thabo Mbeki’s initial efforts to champion an African economic, social and democratic ‘renaissance’.

However, soon the African curse struck: Mbeki’s moving rhetoric did not match actual day-to-day practice. While preaching democracy, Mbeki clamped down on internal dissent, packed public watchdogs with uncritical loyalists, and looked the other way when allies were shown to be corrupt or incompetent.

It is inconceivable that the ruling African National Congress, with Jacob Zuma at the helm, will not win South Africa’s national elections. Formidable charges of corruption were dropped against Zuma after the acting head of the national prosecuting authority emphasised that the case against the incoming president was solid, but that possible political interference in the timing of whether to press charges against Zuma made the authority reluctant to press ahead.

Time to drop Zuma charges?

South African prosecutors are considering a legal request by ruling ANC leader Jacob Zuma to drop the graft charges against the man who is expected to be the next president after the elections in April. Zuma has always denied any wrongdoing and his followers say the charges were politically motivated.

A decision to drop the charges would give the African National Congress a big boost ahead of what is expected to be the most closely-contested poll since apartheid ended in 1994. It would also remove a major distraction for Zuma in office and the prospect of court appearances that could tarnish South Africa’s standing abroad.

In the short term, investors might also welcome such a step that removes a source of uncertainty and eases political risk.

Long-term, however, dropping the charges could damage South Africa’s image.

South Africa often boasts about its constitution, but faces rising disquiet about the independence of its judiciary.

A victory for Zuma could add to that sentiment, eroding confidence in the rule of law and stoking fears South Africa is sliding away from the democratic ideals it sought to promote after the end of apartheid. Some foreign investors even worry it could give the impression South Africa is heading in the direction of neighbouring Zimbabwe.

Opposition party COPE said dropping the charges would add weight to perceptions that South Africa is becoming a “banana republic”.

What next for Jacob Zuma?

A court ruling that effectively reinstates corruption charges against African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma could hardly have come at a worse moment for him and the party that has dominated South Africa since the end of apartheid.

There appears little doubt that Zuma will be the party’s presidential candidate ahead of elections expected around April, but the ANC now faces its toughest electoral test yet with hefty graft charges hanging over its man.

Prosecutors say the ruling means Zuma remains charged with corruption, fraud and money laundering. This might severely hurt his image, internationally and at home, during a battle to fend off a challenge from the new party of ANC dissidents called COPE. The ANC is still expected to win, but maybe without such a sweeping parliamentary majority to be able to shape laws as it wishes.

The news brought renewed concerns of political instability and the rand fell to a one-month low.

Zuma’s lawyers may appeal to the Constitutional Court, the highest in the country, which will drag out the case further. Zuma has said before he will only step down as president if found guilty of the corruption and fraud charges.

Prosecutors and Zuma may try to secure a deal that will end the long-running saga over charges that Zuma’s supporters see as politically motivated.

A settlement may suit Zuma if it looks as though he will face new charges and a trial that will either coincide with the election, or punctuate the first years of his presidency.

How far will South Africa’s ANC shift?

Given that the leaders of the world’s most firmly capitalist countries are splashing around unprecedented billions to nationalise banks, prop up industry and try to get economies moving, it might seem churlish for anyone to question South Africa’s ruling ANC for planning to spend a bit more freely.

This weekend, the African National Congress set out its election manifesto priorities of creating jobs and improving education and health – promises interpreted by many as marking a generally leftward shift under the leadership of president in waiting Jacob Zuma.

But the plan raises the questions of how the spending will be paid for and how dramatic a shift to the left there will be – of major interest to investors as well as South Africans.

“Zuma did not attach a price tag to the manifesto, but ANC leaders privately admit, to allay fears of a tax hike, that it would be too costly to implement,” said this article in the Sunday Independent.

Africa’s biggest economy has grown significantly since the end of apartheid in 1994, although the dynamism had started to falter even before the global financial crisis spread gloom around the world.

South Africa’s poor and its workers had long complained that the benefits were not being shared around fairly and that only those in a new elite were thriving. The leadership under Zuma, widely expected to become president this year, was always going to be under pressure for more social spending from the ANC grassroots and the party’s union and Communist Party allies.

The pressure may have increased further with the emergence of the new COPE party after the ousting of President Thabo Mbeki. Although COPE’s electoral impact is uncertain and it has not yet spelled out its policies clearly, the fact that close allies of Mbeki are behind it has suggested it is likely to align more with the former president’s stance, seen as ‘pro-business’.

from Global News Journal:

Should the ANC be worried?

There was jubilation, defiance and a sense of history in the making in this farming community this week when some 4,000 South Africans gathered to lay the groundwork for what may be a seismic shift in the political landscape.

It is too early to say whether the birth of the Congress of the People will be the political equivalent of an earthquake or a minor tremor. But there is no denying that the new political party caught the nation's attention with the inaugural conference in Bloemfontein.

Delegates sang anti-apartheid anthems, danced and denounced the ruling African National Congress. Many had recently defected from the ANC, which has ruled since the end of apartheid in 1994. Some admitted they had fallen out of favour with the party after new leader Jacob Zuma took over a year ago.

The COPE faithful speak of a need to save the country from Zuma, who is the frontrunner to become the country's next president after the general election in 2009. They believe he will reverse the gains made under Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, ousted as president by the ANC in September.

"We cannot allow a man like Zuma to take power. This would be a disaster for our country," Joseph Mabunda, a COPE supporter from Bloemfontein said on Tuesday after the new party named its leadership team and outlined its programme for the 2009 election.

COPE's leader is former defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota. Many South Africans refer to him as "Terror," a nickname picked up on the soccer pitch decades ago. It is said he was an accomplished though aggressive player, and his supporters believe he can rekindle that magic against Zuma.

COPE supporters were buoyed by recent by-election victories - their candidates took slightly less than a third of the seats in contention. On Tuesday, delegates carried a mock ANC coffin outside the conference hall.