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The future starts in South Africa

1 comment

  1. skybrian
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    From the article: ... ... (The writer goes on to speculate that something like this might happen in other places. I'm a bit dubious about that.)

    From the article:

    Thirty years after South Africa’s first democratic election, the country is on the verge of the most important ballot since the end of apartheid. The ruling African National Congress (ANC), which has won every election since 1994, is confronting the prospect of losing its 50 per cent majority for the first time. This would mean that the country may be governed by a coalition. This is concerning. The coalition governments that have governed many of the country’s largest cities over the last five years or so, such as Johannesburg and Durban, have proved largely calamitous because coalitions have tended to focus on dividing the spoils at the expense of governance. The result has been the collapse of basic services in these places.

    ...

    Given the array of morbid symptoms in South Africa it is not hard to understand why the ANC can no longer take a commanding victory for granted. The unemployment rate hovers dangerously close to a third of the population and there is a murder rate of 45 per 100,000 persons (significantly higher than Colombia and Mexico). There are scheduled blackouts dubbed “load shedding” that can last up to 12 hours a day, as well as weeks-long water outages in major cities. South Africa is one of a handful of countries along with the United Kingdom that is significantly poorer than it was a decade ago: its GDP per capita has declined from $8,800 in 2012 to $6,190 in 2023. An incredible 47 per cent of South Africans rely on social grants as their primary source of income, a measure of both the relative success of the government’s welfare programme and the economic disasters of the past decade.

    Perhaps more shockingly, given this state of affairs, is the absence of any energised opposition parties to the ANC. Polling is still an inexact science in South Africa, but there seem to be several clear trends emerging. The largest opposition party, the centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA), is predicted to win somewhere between 20 and 25 per cent of the vote – roughly the same as in the previous election in 2019. The second-largest opposition party is the radical nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which is made up of expelled leaders of the ANC’s Youth League and is best thought of as a faction of the ANC in exile rather than a true opposition party. Polling suggests that it is likely to get somewhere between 10 and 15 per cent of the vote.

    The old political order may be unravelling, but nothing new will replace it. Spectres from the past are instead returning as political alternatives in the form of ethno-nationalism, apartheid nostalgia and the romanticisation of the darker moments of the anti-apartheid struggle. A host of new ethno-nationalist parties are coming back to life, including the Patriotic Alliance, which was formed by a former convict and dubious tycoon known as the “sushi king”, and which seeks to “build a wall” to keep foreigners out. There is also former president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe party (MK Party), which means Spear of the Nation, named after the armed wing of the ANC during the anti-apartheid struggle. Older ethno-nationalist parties such as the Afrikaner nationalist VF+ (Freedom Front Plus) and Zulu nationalist IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) are re-emerging from their relatively moribund status.

    ...

    MK’s platform is a mix of Zuma’s sense of personal victimhood, Zulu nationalism, opposition to constitutional rule, nationalising strategic industries, ending South Africa’s green energy policies, the creation of a new upper house for indigenous kings and queens (a decolonial House of Lords), as well as the expropriation of all land without compensation by the state and for it to be under the custody of traditional leaders. MK Party leaders have also repeatedly threatened armed insurrection if they do not win the election. This has so far proved effective in terms of intimidating the judiciary, who have on several occasions been shy to rule against MK Party, fearing a repeat of the July 2021 riots.

    (The writer goes on to speculate that something like this might happen in other places. I'm a bit dubious about that.)