In spite of claiming celebrity endorsements from Jesus Christ and the tribal ancestors, the ruling African National Congress took a klap from city dwellers in this week’s local government elections.
Yet while a significant number of its voters stayed away compared to the national elections of two years ago, there is some perverse solace for the ANC in this. Since these voters appear to be merely sulking in hibernation, rather than actually trekking to pastures new, they can more readily be wooed back.
The big winner was the Democratic Alliance, despite its failure to win control of any additional metropolitan councils. It took one in four votes — almost 50% more than the 17% that voted for it in the 2009 general election and two-thirds more than its 16% in the 2006 municipal elections.
Importantly, more than half of those who voted DA are Coloured, Indian or black African, scotching the cynical mantra that SA will always be confined in a template of racial nationalism. The DA estimates that its share of the black African vote is up from 1% to around 5%, which translates to around half a million votes, and its claim is lent credibility by the detailed breakdown the DA has made public of its performance in exclusively black wards.
The DA came to within a single ward of winning the Nelson Mandela Bay metro in the Eastern Cape, heartland of the ANC. It retained control of Midvaal with an increased majority, in the face of an ANC onslaught that in the final week included Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Deputy-President Kgalema Motlanthe, and youth leader Julius Malema.
If one strips out the clutter of vanity parties, the electoral divide was stark: some 8.4-million who voted ANC on one side, and 3.2-million who voted DA on the other. It is a divide also between a rural SA that is unquestioningly loyal to the ANC and an urban SA where the trendsetting, educated and relatively prosperous black African urban elite are for the first time beginning to show doubts.
There is now not a single metro that the ANC can view as unassailable. Johannesburg, Pretoria, and of course Port Elizabeth, are all vulnerable, especially if the trend towards the opposition is accompanied by another ANC voter stayaway.
The power of efficient, clean government to sway voters can be seen in Cape Town metro. In 2006 the DA got 43% of the vote and squeaked into power with a creaky seven-party coalition. This time round it cruised home with a massive majority and 61% of the vote. On those trends the only way that the ANC is going to regain Cape Town in the foreseeable future is to annex it by executive fiat.
What should worry the ANC is the speed of its reversal. In 2009’s national elections more than 11.5-million voters delivered it 66% of the vote. Just two years later this has dropped on a lower turnout of 8.4-million to some 62%. The DA, in comparison, boosted its numbers by an extra quarter of a million votes and its share by eight percentage points.
The DA’s new black voters appear to have come largely not from the ANC but from Cope, which dropped to barely 2% from over 7% of the last national vote (it was not around for the 2006 municipal election). This virtual obliteration was the price of the bitter Tweedledum and Tweedledee battle between Mbhazima Shilowa and Mosuioa Lekota.
Whatever the DA breakthroughs, this is by no means the tipping point punted by some analysts. The ANC has formidable systemic advantages, especially in national and provincial elections, with a proportional vote system that blunts local voter accountability in favour of the party bosses.
The DA has reached saturation point among the minority groups — how it must rue the loss of all those potential votes sitting in London, Toronto and Sydney. While the DA has made a modest breakthrough to the black African community — 5% might be exciting for the DA leadership but it is still minuscule — and the hard yards remain to be made. And not only is it far more difficult to demonstrably deliver benefits to these new voters but already there have been grassroot ANC threats in Johannesburg to burn down the houses of those township dwellers who voted DA.
This was, nevertheless, the first post-democracy election in which there has been a real contestation for power. The skrik might just encourage the ANC to up its standard of governance.
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