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The decline of the ANC

Wednesday 3 August 2016, the day of the fifth round of municipal elections after South Africa’s transition to democracy, was a watershed in the country’s political history. Although some preceding by-elections had showed that electoral support for the ANC was declining, there was little concrete evidence that large numbers of ANC voters would ever abstain, or vote for any other political party. But on that fateful day in the winter of 2016, the first chinks in the ANC’s armour began to show.

The first sign that the ANC’s support was plummeting came in Cape Town, a bastion of opposition politics after the ANC’s defeat in the municipal elections in 2006. On the Thursday morning after the elections, Capetonians woke to the news that the DA was on its way to securing an overwhelming majority. By midday, it was all but confirmed: the DA had won 66.61 per cent of the Cape Town vote – the highest voting share ever achieved by any party in that city.

By the Friday, it was clear that the ANC had also been roundly defeated in the rest of the Western Cape, where it had only managed to get more votes than the DA in two out of 29 district and local municipalities. The ANC might have reasoned that, while the Western Cape results were unfortunate, they were not entirely unexpected. There was still hope that the damage might be limited to one province.

On Friday afternoon, though, those hopes were shattered when the IEC confirmed that the ANC had also lost Nelson Mandela Bay, home to Port Elizabeth, a major port and the Eastern Cape’s biggest city. It was a momentous defeat for the ANC in its traditional regional heartland. Defeat would have been unthinkable as recently as 2006, when the ANC won Nelson Mandela Bay with 67.61 per cent of the vote. Now, it could only muster 41.50 per cent. By contrast, the DA vote had swelled from 24.14 per cent in 2006 to 46.66 per cent. The convenor of the ANC’s Eastern Cape electoral task team, Beza Ntshona, conceded that this was a ‘painful’ blow in the home of the ANC, where, ‘for the first time since the dawn of democracy, the ANC has not won’.1

By the weekend, the nation’s attention was focused on Gauteng, scene of an epic battle for control of Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, and Johannesburg, its most economically significant city. At midday on Saturday 6 August, the IEC announced that the DA had taken Tshwane. It had garnered 43.10 per cent of the vote, up from 30.70 per cent in 2006, while the ANC vote had declined to 41.48 per cent from 57.32 per cent a decade earlier. The DA forged a coalition with the ACDP, COPE and the FF+, with support from the EFF, which took control of the capital city.2

But the ANC’s most significant defeat came in Johannesburg, where it lost control of the metro despite obtaining 44.50 per cent of the vote – nearly six per cent more than the DA. Because South Africa’s electoral system requires a majority of 50 per cent plus one in a municipal council, the DA was able to forge a coalition with the ACDP, COPE, FF+, UDM and IFP, again with support from the EFF, to take charge of Johannesburg as well. On 22 August 2016, the DA’s mayoral candidate, Herman Mashaba, became the first post-1994 mayor of South Africa’s biggest and economically most important city who did not carry an ANC membership card.

A municipal revolution

When the dust settled, it emerged that the ANC had lost control of four of South Africa’s eight big metropolitan areas (or ‘metropolitan municipalities’) – Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane and Johannesburg. It is hard to overstate the significance of its defeat in the latter two. The combined economy of Pretoria and Johannesburg is bigger than the economies of all but four African countries. Although the ANC retained power in three other metros (Buffalo City, eThekwini and Mangaung) and formed a governing coalition council in a fourth (Ekurhuleni), the party’s combined support in the eight metros had declined by more than 10 per cent since 2011.

Most significantly, four (Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni) of the eight metros are now governed by either majority or minority coalitions. The trend is clear: at the local level, the ANC’s support is rapidly declining and – based on electoral trends since 2006 – will continue to decline for the foreseeable future (see Figure 2). Conversely, the likelihood of metropolitan municipalities being run by coalitions is increasing. Nationwide, the ANC’s support across all municipalities fell by more than 8 per cent between 2011 and 2016 to 54.49 per cent.

Source: Electoral Commission of South Africa.

The ANC’s losses in Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane and Johannesburg, as well as in a handful of rural municipalities, signalled a fundamental shift in the country’s municipal politics. Up to the 2016 elections, the ANC had controlled 82.10 per cent of South Africa’s R287 billion municipal operating budget (the budget used to pay salaries and other regular expenses). Now, its share of the budget had dropped by a staggering R116 billion to only 41.73 per cent.3 At the same time, the share of the municipal budget controlled by municipalities where the DA was in outright control had increased from 14.95 per cent in 2011 to 15.63 per cent.4

So where did the rest of the money go? Crucially, after the 2016 elections, the share of municipal operating funds managed by councils run by coalition governments shot up from just 2.63 per cent in 2011 to a massive 41.31 per cent.5 In other words, municipalities governed by coalitions – whether formal, such as the DA-led multiparty coalition in Nelson Mandela Bay, or the minority coalitions supported by the EFF in Johannesburg and Tshwane – now control about R118 billion in municipal public funds.

The amount of money controlled by non-ANC municipal councils now roughly equals the combined budgets of all ANC-led municipalities. To underscore the ANC’s fall from municipal grace: following the 2016 elections, 58.27 per cent of South Africa’s local government budget is not controlled by the party.

Accelerating decline

A gradual trend away from one-party dominance is also visible at the provincial and national levels. At the provincial level, the ANC seems set to lose power in at least the Western Cape and Gauteng, which together account for half of South Africa’s total economic output (and provincial budgets). After the 2019 elections, the share of provincial government budgets controlled by non-ANC coalitions will probably be at least as great as the share controlled by the ANC.

The national trend is equally pronounced. While the ANC’s support seems to have remained remarkably stable between 1994 and 2014, hovering between a high of 69.60 per cent and a low of 62.15 per cent, we need to note that the most recent national data come from 2014. There is ample evidence that the party’s support has declined significantly since then, as the Zuma administration has lurched from one scandal to another. Although it can be misleading to draw firm conclusions from comparing different types of elections, it is still useful to include, alongside the national results, a national rollup from municipal elections.6 Figure 3 reflects the results of a statistical model in which national and provincial electoral trends from 1994 to 2016 are projected up to 2021. It shows that support for the ANC could drop below 50 per cent as early as 2019.

Source: Electoral Commission of South Africa.

Another indication that the ANC is in trouble at the national level comes from public opinion polls, which have consistently shown growing dissatisfaction with the ANC-led national government since 2009. In a poll conducted in March 2017, Ipsos found that 53 per cent of South African adults felt the country was moving in the ‘wrong’ direction (another 16 per cent were undecided, while only 31 per cent were satisfied). Significantly, there was almost no difference between the number of dissatisfied people who received social grants (51 per cent) and those who did not (53 per cent).7

The polls show that dissatisfaction cuts across economic divides, bolstering the notion that the ANC is facing an electoral revolt. The most authoritative proof comes from Afrobarometer, a pan-African research network that publishes public opinion polls on a wide range of topics related to democratic governance. In its most recent poll, Afrobarometer found that South Africans’ overall trust in the ANC had plummeted from 61 per cent in 2011 to 43 per cent in late 2015 – a massive 18 per cent.8 Another Ipsos poll conducted in May 2017 found that 65 per cent of South Africans (and 54 per cent of ANC supporters) wanted Zuma to resign as president. At 2.8 out of 10, Zuma’s presidential approval rating was the lowest recorded since polling began in 1993.9

Nonetheless, disapproval of the Zuma administration may not automatically translate into abstentions, or votes against the ANC. But this is where the 2016 municipal results become even more significant, as they provide the first solid evidence that ANC voters are changing their voting behaviour in order to register their dissatisfaction with the party. Before 3 August 2016, no one could definitively say that a significant number of ANC supporters would ever abstain en masse, or vote for someone else. But they did, and now we can. While trends can be misleading, and it can be risky to project municipal election results onto the provincial and national level, it seems at least clear that the ANC’s national support will not increase in 2019. This means it is almost certain to decline – the only question is by how much.

An interesting hint appears when we compare municipal results with national ones. Between 1994 and 2009, the ANC’s results at different electoral levels moved in a narrow band – its national results were about 8 per cent to 10 per cent better than its results in the preceding municipal elections. For example, while the party received 59.92 per cent of all votes in the 2000 municipal elections, this increased to 69.69 per cent in the 2004 national poll. But this pattern ended abruptly in 2009 when Zuma became president, as the ANC barely improved on its total in the preceding municipal elections. What’s more, in the 2014 national and provincial elections, the ANC vote actually declined by 0.78 per cent compared to its vote in the 2011 municipal elections – a telling reverse of the trend during its first 15 years in power.

This shows that the ANC will soon be in big trouble. In the 2016 municipal elections, the ANC vote dropped to an all-time low of 54.49 per cent.10 If the recent trend – with the ANC failing to increase its vote in national elections relative to municipal elections – persists, its share of the vote in the 2019 national and provincial elections will be smaller, and could even drop to below 50 per cent of the total.

This likelihood grows when one digs a little deeper into the national and provincial results. Even if the ANC ‘only’ loses the Western Cape (26.83 per cent in 2016) and Gauteng (46.38 per cent in 2016), this may already be enough to push its national support below 50 per cent. This is because more than one of every three South African voters lives in one of these two provinces.

If the ANC is hammered in the Western Cape and Gauteng, and its support drops only marginally in the rest of the country, it will be out of power by 2019.

A wildcard province in all of this is North West, where the impact of the EFF was strongly felt in 2016, causing ANC support to plummet to 59.04 per cent. North West, Gauteng and the Western Cape house 42 per cent of the country’s population. They hold the key to whether South Africa will be governed by a national coalition as early as 2019.

Simply put, the decline in ANC support in South Africa’s vital metropolitan areas is accelerating rapidly, and seems set to continue into the 2020s. While the evidence is more equivocal at the provincial and national levels, the 2016 municipal elections clearly showed that growing numbers of ANC voters are willing to abstain or even change their votes in order to express their dissatisfaction with the governing party. Therefore, the ANC’s slide seems set to continue in the 2019, 2021 and 2024 elections. If this happens at current rates, South Africa will soon be governed by a multitude of political coalitions at the municipal, provincial and national levels.

When the crew panics

But don’t just take it from the data. In an extraordinary turn of events, some of the most vocal supporters of the theory that the ANC will soon lose its grip on political power are key role players within the ANC itself. Although some party bigwigs started whispering after the 2016 municipal polls that the ANC’s majority could be in danger in 2019, it took Zuma’s controversial cabinet reshuffle in March 2017 – widely interpreted as a move to consolidate the infamous Gupta family’s hold over the country – to open the floodgates of panic in the party. Suddenly, a succession of senior party figures started talking about an imminent electoral disaster.

One of the first to sound the alarm was Pravin Gordhan. During a CNN interview conducted one month after his dismissal as finance minster which was broadcast worldwide, Gordhan stated: ‘There are many of us who are extremely worried that if we continue as we are in the African National Congress, we are likely to lose the 2019 elections.’11

Soon afterwards, the ANC’s Parliamentary chief whip, Jackson Mthembu, dramatically declared: ‘We’re not sure if we will continue to be free after 2019.’12

Former Mpumalanga premier Mathews Phosa also warned that the ‘ANC will have to perform a miracle to obtain 50 per cent in 2019’, while Gauteng ANC leader Paul Mashatile cautioned that ‘muddling along as before might see us lose Gauteng in 2019’, and that party leaders would ‘only have themselves to blame’ for such an outcome.

Other ANC leaders, including Zweli Mkhize and Lindiwe Sisulu, also warned starkly that the party’s majority was in danger.13

But the most astonishing statement of all came from former president Kgalema Motlanthe. In April 2017, when asked in the course of a BBC interview whether he would vote for the ANC in 2019, he responded as follows: ‘I don’t know yet. It is not a given, because … we are forever snowed under in an avalanche of wrongdoing, and at some point there will be a tipping point.’14 If a former president’s vote for the ANC can no longer be taken for granted, millions of others must also be having second thoughts.

Squandering dominance

Why, at this precise moment in our political history, is the ANC facing the prospect of losing its political dominance? While the rhetoric about the party’s decline burst into the open following the 2016 municipal elections, and especially after the cabinet reshuffle in March 2017, the reasons for voter dissatisfaction with the ANC go back further.

In fact, the 2009 election result provided the first hint that the ANC was losing electoral momentum. As noted earlier, this was the first time that the party’s support at the national level did not increase significantly compared to the preceding municipal election. Take a close look at Figure 3 (page 37) between 1994 and 2006, you can see a clear see-saw pattern. It shows that the ANC consistently received 8–10 per cent more votes during national elections compared to the preceding municipal elections.

Now look at the trend between 2006 and 2016. The see-saw is gone, replaced by a steady downward curve. The pattern was broken with the election of Zuma in 2009 when, for the first time, the ANC barely managed to increase its national vote compared to the previous municipal election, and this new trend accelerated in 2014. It is this trend that should worry party leaders most, because it suggests that the ANC vote in 2019 will drop below the historic low of 54.49 per cent that the party got in the 2016 municipal election.

Knowing that the 2009 campaign represented a turning point, we can begin to look at some of the reasons for the party’s decline. Let’s be guided by the opinion of South Africans themselves: in every Afrobarometer survey between 1999 and 2015, citizens have consistently said they are most concerned about three issues: corruption, unemployment and poverty, and crime. Above, all, the ANC’s declining fortune since 2009 is rooted in its deteriorating performance in respect of these three metrics.

Most visible of these is undoubtedly the scourge of corruption, which has long plagued the ANC. Some of the earliest scandals date back to the presidency of Nelson Mandela; the first high-profile corruption case, known as the Sarafina scandal, surfaced less than two years after the ANC came to power. In 1996, then health minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (who lost to Ramaphosa in the ANC’s 2017 leadership race), gave a close friend a R14 million tender to produce a theatre performance about the dangers of AIDS. In the months that followed, the ANC repeatedly chose to protect Dlamini-Zuma after she was caught lying to Parliament, and even after the funder of the production, the European Union, revealed that it had not approved the contract. As the New York Times reported: ‘ … after more than two years in office, the ANC is developing a poor record on handling charges of corruption and misconduct within its ranks’.15

ANC leaders with a penchant for dodgy deals and access to the national piggy bank then kicked it up a notch with what became known as the ANC’s ‘original sin’: the notorious arms deal. In early 1999, the ANC-led government rushed through a deal to purchase military equipment from a range of global suppliers. Despite the fact that the country had opted for social development over armed conflict just five years previously, the government insisted on buying new fighter jets, submarines, warships and military helicopters costing more than R90 billion (in 2017 rands).

International investigators from Britain, Germany, Sweden and France soon implicated ANC heavyweights, including Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma, Tony Yengeni, Fana Hlongwana, Chippy Shaik and Jacob Zuma’s financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, in bribery by arms suppliers totalling more than R1 billion.16 Only Yengeni and Schabir Shaik were held even partly accountable: Yengeni served a mere four months in prison for receiving a luxury vehicle from one of the contractors, and Shaik was released on medical parole after serving only two years and four months of a 15-year sentence for one charge of fraud and two of corruption. The first corruption charge related to payments by Shaik to Zuma in order to further what the state described as a ‘general corrupt relationship’. The second involved payments to Zuma by a French arms company, which Shaik had solicited. At the time of Shaik’s release in 2009, the state alleged that he was ‘terminally ill’. By 2017, however, he was still working at improving his golf handicap on some of South Africa’s smoothest fairways.

The farcical pretend-investigations into the arms deal, including the findings in 2015 that there had been no wrongdoing17 by a commission of inquiry set up by President Jacob Zuma, opened the gates to a flood of corruption surrounding the government and parastatals such as Eskom and Transnet that would eventually threaten to consume the ANC.

The year 2005 brought the ‘Travelgate’ scandal in which 40 MPs – 10 per cent of MPs in the National Assembly – were charged with benefiting from false travel claims to the value of R18 million. All 14 MPs who were eventually convicted were members of the ANC.

Two years later, in 2007, national police commissioner Jackie Selebi was charged with corruption, fraud, racketeering, and defeating the ends of justice for accepting bribes from drug dealers totalling more than R1.2 million. Soon after Selebi was fired (after spending months on suspension with full pay), his successor, Bheki Cele, irregularly awarded an inflated R500 million lease for South African Police Service headquarters in Pretoria and Durban to a billionaire businessman, Roux Shabangu.

Zuma’s name had repeatedly cropped up during the fraud and corruption trial of his financial adviser, Schabir Shaik. In his judgement on 2 June 2005, Judge Hilary Squires referred to a ‘mutually beneficial symbiosis’ between Zuma and his adviser. On 14 June, President Thabo Mbeki dismissed Zuma as deputy president, pending an investigation into corruption charges. In December 2005, Zuma was also charged with raping the daughter of a close friend (he was eventually acquitted). In December 2007, after numerous delays engineered by Zuma (a strategy he would continue to use to good effect after becoming president), he was finally charged with 783 counts of corruption, money laundering, racketeering and fraud.

Amid a series of lengthy back-and-forths in court between Zuma and state prosecutors, the ANC held its 52nd national conference in Polokwane in December 2007. Despite the controversies swirling around Zuma, party members still thought it wise to elect him as party president, and a coterie of his most ardent supporters to other top positions. This led to the recall of Mbeki as South African president in September 2008, with Kgalema Motlanthe replacing him as placeholder president until the 2009 general elections, when Zuma would ascend to the national presidency.

In early 2009, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) removed the final obstacle on Zuma’s path to the presidency when it dropped all 783 counts against him. The decision was taken after prosecutors had obtained a set of ‘spy tapes’ that allegedly contained evidence of a political conspiracy against Zuma.18 The decision to drop the charges was taken despite the fact that no judge or anyone outside the top echelons of the prosecuting authority had ever listened to the tape recordings. Soon after, on 9 May 2009, Zuma was sworn in as president.

The ascent to power of a deeply compromised group of leaders turned the stream of corruption into a torrent. The seemingly endless list of politicians and officials who took to plundering state resources include several of Zuma’s own ministers.

In early December 2013, the then Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, found that communications minister Dina Pule had ‘persistently lied’ and conducted herself ‘unethically’ after she had used state funds to give her boyfriend a R6 million government tender. In the same week, Madonsela also found Zuma’s then agriculture minister, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, guilty of maladministration as well as improper and unethical conduct in the irregular awarding of a R800 million fisheries tender.

Another star in this firmament is the minister of social development, Bathabile Dlamini. She grew up in Nkandla, seat of Jacob Zuma’s infamous private compound in rural KwaZulu-Natal. She later helped to build the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) in that province. In 2006, Dlamini was one of 14 ANC MPs convicted of fraud in the ‘Travelgate’ scandal, and lost her position as an MP. However, at the 52nd National Conference of the ANC in December 2007, she was elected to the ANC’s national executive committee and national working committee, allegedly because she campaigned for Zuma’s election as ANC president. She was appointed as deputy minister of social development in May 2009, as minister of social development in November 2010, and became president of the ANCWL in 2015.

In 2017, Dlamini brought the country’s welfare system to the brink of collapse when she failed to put in place a plan to pay social grants after a corrupt R10 billion contract with a private company had been nullified by the Constitutional Court. Instead, Dlamini obfuscated, and forced the court to extend the corrupt contract for another year.

In March 2017, Cosatu called on her to resign, failing which it would mobilise a ‘massive countrywide worker protest’ aimed at forcing her to vacate her position.19 Later the same week, Corruption Watch joined a growing list of organisations and individuals calling for her dismissal. Despite this, Dlamini remained in Zuma’s cabinet, allegedly because she supported Zuma’s ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, in her bid for the ANC and eventually the national presidency. Indeed, in November 2017, Dlamini announced that the ANCWL had ‘nominated’ Dlamini-Zuma as its preferred candidate for the ANC presidency.

The list goes on. Land reform minister Gugile Nkwinti was accused of handing a R97 million farm meant for land redistribution to a friend; Pule’s successor as communications minister, Faith Muthambi, lied to the SABC board about the appointment of the deranged Hlaudi Motsoeneng (a Zuma pick) to head the public broadcaster; mining minister Mosebenzi Zwane allegedly flew to Switzerland to facilitate a mining deal on behalf of the Gupta family; and small business minister Lindiwe Zulu was linked to a R631 million tender that was improperly awarded for the construction of toilets in the Amathole district municipality in the Eastern Cape.

Then there were the scandals surrounding Jacob Zuma himself. They include the aforementioned 783 corruption counts, which still need to be thoroughly investigated. There is also the Nkandla fiasco, with the Constitutional Court ruling in 2016 that Zuma had violated his oath of office when he defied an order from the Public Protector to pay back a portion of the R246 million in public funds spent in upgrading his private palace at Nkandla in impoverished rural KwaZulu-Natal. Although Public Protector Thuli Madonsela only ruled that Zuma should pay back a relatively small portion of the total costs, her report on Nkandla revealed a disturbing string of irregularities.

Zuma also treated one of South Africa’s most sensitive military installations, Waterkloof Air Force Base in Pretoria, as his personal taxi rank when he allegedly arranged clearance for his partners in crime, the Guptas, to land a passenger jet at the base. Police then escorted the Guptas and hundreds of guests to a family wedding at Sun City.

In mid-2017, a trove of leaked emails from the heart of the Gupta empire added fuel to the fire. During months of exposés in the media, the emails provided evidence of the ‘shadow state’ that Zuma and his wealthy benefactors had constructed since his ascent to power. Some of the more startling emails revealed how the Guptas had helped the Zuma family to obtain residency and multi-million-rand properties in the United Arab Emirates.20 The cache also revealed how their relationship with Zuma helped the Guptas to seize informal control of state-owned enterprises like Eskom and Transnet.21

Zuma’s anointment as party leader at Polokwane and the growing trail of scandals in the wake of this decision is the logical culmination of the corruption cancer that had metastasised and grown in the party ever since it came to power in 1994. Zuma and his patronage network did not create the culture of corruption in the ANC – but they perfected it and made it their own after Zuma became president in 2009.

Although the most visible, corruption is not the only long-term cause of the ANC’s decline. Despite laudable efforts in the 1990s to help South Africa escape a debt trap, and further halting progress in the early 2000s, the ANC has also recently presided over an economic implosion. Economic underperformance, particularly since 2009, has led to a steady increase in poverty and unemployment, consistently identified in Afrobarometer surveys as the single most important issue facing South African society.

Between 1994 and 2006, the economy grew at an average of 3.5 per cent a year. Since then, the annual average has dropped to less than 2 per cent, falling to 0.3 per cent in 2016. And in late 2016 and early 2017, the ANC plunged South Africa into its second recession in a decade when GDP growth declined during two successive quarters. Since the country’s population is increasing by 1.5 per cent a year, the simple reality of this economic collapse is that, during the past decade, South Africans have rapidly become poorer.

The ANC government’s destruction of the economy is reflected in the unemployment rate. After slowly falling during the early years of democracy, in the decade since 2008, the percentage of people without work has rapidly increased (Figure 4), reaching its highest level in 14 years in 2017. Even in terms of a narrow definition of unemployment, which excludes people who have given up on trying to find work, almost three in every ten adults of working age could not find a job. In 2017, more than half of South Africans were living below the poverty line, on an income of R779 or less a month.22

Source: Statistics South Africa.

In early 2017, poor economic growth, uncertainty about the ANC’s economic policies, and fears about escalating corruption prompted the international credit ratings agencies Fitch as well as Standard & Poor’s to cut the country’s rand-denominated sovereign debt rating to sub-investment grade – commonly known as junk status. For the first time since the turn of the century, South Africa was no longer regarded as a safe destination for international investors.

The ratings downgrade is one of the key reasons why the ANC will probably not be able to reverse its decline in coming years. According to Afrobarometer’s latest round of surveys, two thirds of South Africans already believe the government is managing the economy ‘very badly’, or ‘fairly badly’.23 If the ANC wanted to reverse its current downward trajectory, changing voters’ overwhelmingly negative sentiment around the economy should be at the top of its to-do list.

But Zuma’s 2017 cabinet reshuffle that triggered the downgrades effectively tied a ball and chain around the party’s ankles. Junk status means that it will be much more expensive for the government to borrow money, significantly reducing the funds available to spend on poverty alleviation and on kick-starting economic growth. Even if it wanted to, the downgrades mean that it is now almost impossible for the ANC to fix the South African economy any time soon. It takes an average of seven years for a country to recover from junk status.24 With negativity around the economy already at historic highs, and with the government unable to raise the money necessary to fund any kind of recovery, the ANC will probably lose power long before South Africa eventually recovers from junk status.

The ANC’s performance on the third key metric identified by South Africans – crime – reflects a similar pattern. On the whole, crime rates first declined slowly but surely after the ANC took power. This was also true for some of the crimes most feared by South Africans, including murder, housebreaking and car-jacking. However, this trend reversed about a decade ago. Today, the number of murders, housebreakings and car hijackings per 100 000 people are far higher than they were ten years ago.

Given that the ANC inherited a country that already had one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world, it was perhaps understandable that voters were initially patient. Nobody could have turned the country into a peaceful paradise overnight. But citizens did want to see a gradual decrease in crime. Between 1994 and 2006, this was largely true, and the ANC could claim that it was making progress. However, as in the case of corruption and economic growth, the government has rapidly lost ground in the battle against crime during the past decade.

One of the key reasons for worsening personal safety in recent years is the chronic instability of corporate governance of the state’s police and prosecuting services. As the Zuma cabal sought to avoid prosecution, crippling the investigative and prosecutorial independence of law enforcement agencies was one of its key survival strategies. As a result, South Africa has had no less than five police chiefs since Zuma became president, four of whom were eventually involved in corruption scandals themselves. The Hawks, supposedly South Africa’s equivalent of the American FBI, also remains in a state of chaos, with an acting head in place since a Constitutional Court ruling that Zuma’s appointment of the totally unqualified Berning Ntlemeza was irregular. Then there is the NPA head and Zuma sycophant Shaun Abrahams, who, in 2016, was embarrassingly forced to climb down from a political witch hunt against former finance minister Pravin Gordhan, and who failed to prosecute any members of the Zuma-Gupta cabal after hundreds of thousands of leaked emails exposed their brazen corruption.

The logical consequence of this maladministration is that the security services have lost what little ability they had to protect South Africans. For example, since 2011, the number of roadblocks organised by the police have declined by 74 per cent.25 In 2016, the police were only able to identify suspects in a quarter of all murder cases, and in 18 per cent of robbery cases.26 The implication is staggering: three out of every four people who committed a murder in 2016 have never been identified. The number of convictions obtained by the supposedly elite investigation unit, the Hawks, has also dropped by 83 per cent since 2011.27 In short, the country’s security services have been gutted.

For many South Africans, this is a matter of life and death. The murder rate has spiked by 20 per cent over the past five years. In the same period, cases of aggravated robbery have increased by 31.5 per cent (Figure 5). Statistics South Africa’s 2016 Victims of Crime survey put it bluntly: ‘South Africans feel that violent and property crime is increasing to the extent that the majority of households don’t feel safe to walk alone in parks or allow their children to play freely in their neighbourhoods.’28

Source: Crime Stats SA.

By 2009 – precisely because it had made some progress in raising living standards during its first 15 years in power – the ANC faced a population with much higher expectations than the society it had inherited in 1994. In fact, the combination of social grants – which sustain 17 million people every month – with increased public sector employment meant that the ANC had succeeded in making sure that more than half of South Africa’s 8.3 million middle-class citizens were black. But the middle-class black South Africans of 2009 had much higher expectations than the impoverished people of 1994 who had just emerged from the apartheid era. While the poorest people worry most about finding their next meal, middle-class citizens tend to care more about fighting crime and corruption, and finding good schools for their children.

Fatally for the ANC, just as the party faced an increasingly modern, wealthy and mobile society with higher expectations for the future, ANC members essentially surrendered any hope they had of meeting these expectations when they elected Zuma as leader. A decade into the 21st century, the ANC chose a semi-literate man mired in allegations of corruption to lead a modern market economy deeply integrated into the global system. The ANC drank poison when it chose Zuma at its Polokwane conference.

But it was a slow poison. As a result, the country’s backsliding over the last decade in terms of mounting corruption, economic decline, and rampant crime is not enough to explain why the ANC is only now in danger of losing its hegemony. Even though the 2009 and 2014 election results showed that the party was slipping, Zuma’s government was still returned to power with an impressive 62.15 per cent in 2014. Why should 2019 be any different? The answer to this question is all about timing and semantics.

Political crises are never triggered solely by failures of governance. Instead, longer-term trends need to coalesce around a visible focal point that encapsulates the broader crisis in the public mind. This is the reason why phrases like ‘the assassination in Sarajevo’, ‘Watergate’, and ‘the Rubicon speech’ became short-hand references to the crisis that triggered the First World War, the corruption of Richard Nixon, and the death throes of PW Botha’s presidency.

On 31 March 2016, the Constitutional Court provided the spark that ignited the powder keg of simmering resentment and unmet expectations when it ruled that Zuma had violated the Constitution when he failed to comply with a report by the Public Protector to pay back a portion of the public funds spent on his private home. Like Sarajevo, Watergate, and Rubicon, the ANC’s impending disaster now had a name: Nkandla.

The Nkandla scandal, involving state expenditure of R246 million to upgrade Zuma’s private compound, quickly became a byword for all that had gone wrong in the previous decade. It illustrated how brazen the new elite had become in stealing from South African citizens. Built on a hill, and surrounded by a sea of poverty, Nkandla also showed vividly how the majority of South Africans remained trapped in poverty while a small group of predators fed off their misery. The scandal even highlighted the collapse of the security services, as Zuma roped in then police minister Nathi Nhleko as his primary defender. During Parliamentary meetings and media conferences, Nhleko sweated profusely as he claimed that an amphitheatre was actually a break wall, and that a swimming pool was a ‘fire pool’ meant to supply fire fighters with water.

Unlike any previous event in modern South Africa, the Nkandla ruling squarely focused the public mind on the ANC’s failings. Ignited by the scandal, the suffering induced by years of corruption, economic decline and crime finally started showing its face at the polling booth, five months after the Constitutional Court ruling. But the 2016 municipal elections were just the beginning. As if the Nkandla scandal wasn’t bad enough, Zuma’s corruption again focused the public mind on the ANC’s failings when, from late 2016 onwards, the term ‘state capture’ was introduced into the public lexicon. This time, the damage went much further than just Zuma.

The release of Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s State of Capture report in November 2016, and the stream of exposés in the media following the massive Gupta email leak, implicated more than half of the ANC’s cabinet ministers in a systematic attempt to plunder state resources in South Africa’s new order. This includes everyone from President Jacob Zuma and finance minister Malusi Gigaba, public service minister Faith Muthambi and co-operative governance minister Des van Rooyen, communications minister Ayanda Dlodlo, and Eskom CEOs Brian Molefe and Matshela Koko to ANC Youth League president Collen Maine. To top it all, the Gupta emails revealed how the family had drafted ANC media statements and enlisted the help of the UK public relations firm Bell Pottinger to prop up their predatory conduct.

Built on the foundation of a failing economy, endemic corruption, and increasing violence, the Nkandla and state capture scandals are the trigger moments that have caused the ANC ship to start sinking. Even with hundreds of thousands of leaked emails, we almost certainly haven’t seen the full extent of the state capture scandal yet, and the bad news is likely to keep coming in the lead-up to 2019. In the meantime, we have at least one piece of evidence that shows just how bad the damage to the ANC could be.

The first full municipal by-election since the state capture scandal broke took place on 29 November 2017 in the Metsimaholo local municipality in the northern Free State. The 2016 election had already produced a hung council, with an ANC-led alliance and a DA-led alliance holding 21 seats each. When the council deadlocked, and failed to pass a budget, the national government disbanded it and called for new elections.

In 2016, the ANC had received only 45 per cent of the vote in the municipality, down from 62 per cent in 2011. But things went from bad to worse in the November 2017 by-election when the SACP decided to contest the by-election on its own. In the wake of the ANC’s latest scandals, the SACP got 8.7 per cent, while support for the ANC imploded, with the party garnering only 34.6 per cent in what was once a municipal stronghold. The collapse was particularly pronounced in the townships, where support for the ANC plummeted from 82 per cent in 2011 to only 45 per cent in 2017.

Given that Metsimaholo is demographically similar to large parts of Gauteng, the by-election result should set alarm bells ringing in Luthuli House, the ANC’s head office. Following the ANC’s slide in 2016, Metsimaholo confirmed that the party was on a one-way path to losing power.

It occurs slowly, then all at once

While it may seem as if the ANC has suddenly lost its dominant grip on political power, its decline has been a long time coming. At the most basic level, the party operates within an electoral system actively geared towards promoting coalitions and making it difficult for any one party to become dominant. It was always unrealistic to imagine that the ANC could swim forever against the tide.

But the ANC has also not done itself any favours on other levels during the past decade. It has driven the national economy to the edge of an abyss, inflicting growing hardships on many citizens. It has also looked on as South Africa has become an ever more violent society, with daily news of brutal crimes. Most visibly, amidst the suffering of most of its citizens, the party has allowed corruption to become endemic. Like a perverse version of King Midas, the ANC has reached a point where everything it touches becomes infected with corruption.

But it took the outrageous Nkandla and state capture scandals to finally galvanise our deeply divided society into action. Voters took the previously unprecedented step of punishing the ANC during the 2016 elections, and thousands of protestors flooded the streets in the wake of the Gupta cabinet reshuffle. Whatever remedial steps the ANC may aim to take in the run-up to 2019 are unlikely to overcome the depth of voters’ disillusionment, which has built up slowly but surely during the past decade.

South Africa has entered a phase of rapid change that will soon see blind loyalty to the ANC replaced by a fractured political landscape dominated by coalitions. It is already far too late for the party to self-correct in the hopes of hanging on to its dominant position. Instead, the ANC will soon find that it has tried to close the stable door after the horse had bolted.