by Roger Southall
The ANC, the party that has led South Africa since the first democratic elections in 1994, has long considered itself a “liberation movement” – representing all South Africans, as the “voice of the people”.
But its dismal performance in the 2024 elections (winning only 40% of the vote) confirms that its transition from the status of a liberation movement to just a political party is now complete.
There can no longer be a pretence that it alone represents “the people”. It is now simply the largest among a host of ordinary political parties doing what ordinary political parties do: scrambling for votes, political power and influence.
In reality, any notion of the ANC embodying the people has been creaking for years. Those at odds with its leadership have peeled away to found new political parties. First there was Bantu Holomisa in 1996. In 2012, Julius Malema was expelled and founded the EFF.
The message was clear: the coalition on which the ANC was based was becoming ever more fragile and could not last.
Hence the historical significance of the electoral eruption of the MK Party of Jacob Zuma.
Prior to the 2024 elections, Zuma’s party was widely recognised as representing a threat to ANC hegemony, both nationally and in KwaZulu-Natal. But the strength of its performance has taken SA aback.
Within six months, and with only the rudiments of organisation stolen from the ANC itself, it has taken 14.5% of the national votes and 45% of the KwaZulu-Natal votes in its first election.
Few can dispute that its rise is the most dramatic stage in the dissolution of the coalition, which gave the ANC a claim to being a liberation movement.
The ANC’s claim goes back to its foundation in 1912. It was a reaction to the formation of the Union of South Africa and the exclusion of the majority black people from the right to participate on equal terms with whites.
At its creation, the ANC was the coming together of black and coloured population (in the old terminology): SA’s diverse ethnic peoples, their chiefly representatives and the emerging African professionals and black middle class.
This culminated in its leadership of the Congress Alliance, the bringing together of the ANC with the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress and the (largely white) Congress of Democrats.
By the early 1990s under the leadership of Nelson Mandela, the ANC could put forth a highly plausible claim to be the genuine representative of the people. By this it meant the overwhelming majority of South Africans, of diverse colours and backgrounds, who were bound together by a commitment to non-racialism and who were oppressed by apartheid. This was confirmed by the ANC’s performance in the 1994 elections, winning 63% of the vote.
If any movement could lay claim to having liberated SA, it was the ANC. However, while aspiring to unity, the ANC was never a monolith. Indeed, it was precisely because it was always a coalescence of diverse tendencies, notably of communists and non-communists, and of Africanists and those committed to non-racialism, that so much importance was attached to it being a liberation movement.
A political party was seen as just that: a grouping which represented just a part of the people. In contrast, the ANC viewed itself as embodying the essence of the people, the soul of the nation, and as capable of reconciling differences which might otherwise blow a historically and racially divided nation apart. It followed that its rivals were divisive.
In other words, there was always a tension at the heart of the ANC’s notion of democracy. It was always a difficult balancing act. While it celebrated the diversity and plurality which found form in the Constitution, which was largely based on the tenets of liberal democracy, on the other hand it insisted on the unity of the nation under its leadership; distinctly illiberal.
Liberal democracy presumed that the ANC’s leadership of the nation could be displaced at an election. But the alternative notion of democracy suggested that it could not. If the ANC was “the people”, how could “the people” overthrow the ANC?
At its height, reached in the 2004 election, the ANC swept just under 69.7% of the total vote. With Holomisa’s UDM winning 2.3%, the total vote for parties representing its historical tradition amounted to 71%.
In the 2013, the total vote for the ANC tradition, made up of the ANC (62.15%), EFF (6.35%) and UDM (1%), amounted to 69.5%. In 2019, the combined vote remained much the same, at 68.3%. So it remains in 2024, with the combined vote for the ANC (40.18%), EFF (9.52%) and MK Party (14.59%) at 64.3%.
The ANC tradition remains dominant, but the ANC as a liberation movement does not. Herein lies much of the significance of the 2024 election. It is the ANC that has lost ground, not the ANC tradition. What has become divided could reunite. Or more likely, bits of it could.
A commitment to the form and values of the Constitution is becoming the major fault-line in SA politics, opening the potential for an alliance between MK Party, the EFF and remnants of the “radical economic transformation” faction within the ANC.
The more that looms, the greater the possibilities for a coming together of the constitutional element within the ANC, a progressive bloc within the opposition DA and other parties, the old (IFP) and the new, such as Rise Mzansi, which are committed to the values of 1994.
Never has the future of South Africa’s politics been more uncertain, but the one certainty that holds is that the ANC’s standing as a liberation movement is dead. In effect, there are now two ANCs: the ANC of Cyril Ramaphosa, and the ANC of Zuma and Malema.
They cannot all claim to re-present the people.
- Southall is professor of sociology at University of the Witwatersrand. This edited article was first published in The Conversation
