Election 2014: The ANC glacier holds fast

There are two apparent truisms to be discerned in the still steaming entrails of the 2014 general election, and they belong to President Jacob Zuma. The first is that “the ANC will rule until Jesus return”‘. The second, is that “it’s cold outside” the governing party.

Taking a cross-section of the democracy sapling and counting its rings, one can see it has taken 20 years for the ANC to drop about seven percentage points from its 2004 high-tide of 69.7% of the vote. At that glacial rate, one theoretically wouldn’t expect to see the descent of heavenly chariots, or a political changing of the guard, anytime before the 2034 election.

Then there’s Zuma’s warning of the icy environment faced by those who leave the party. This election shows that not a single breakaway from the ANC has yet thrived.

The United Democratic Movement, formed in 1999 out of the ANC and that fossilised relic of a previous age, the National Party, has shrunk from 3.4% of the vote to 1%. The Congress of the People (Cope), born just months before the 2009 election out of the bitter “recall’ of former president Thabo Mbeki, has been reduced to two-thirds of a percent, after garnering 7.4% to be the third biggest party.

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), comprising expelled ANC Youth League firebrands and led by commander-in-chief Julius Malema, has fallen short even of Cope’s hasty debut performance. While the EFF has just pipped the Democratic Alliance (DA) to form the official opposition in North West and Malema’s home province of Limpopo, even there it still has barely broken 10%, while the ANC vote is a solid 79%.

It was Malema who Zuma was obliquely addressing, when he warned against the cold. While Malema will continue to be a thorn in Zuma’s flesh if he personally makes it to Parliament – an array of fraud, corruption and racketeering charges, as well as a South African Revenue Service bankruptcy application, are all impediments – this was surely his best shot at sticking it to the ANC.

The EFF, after all, had hoped to draw all the anti-Zuma votes of disaffected former ANC supporters, ranging from in imploded Cope to the likes of former intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils, who urged ANC supporters to “vote no” by supporting any opposition party other than the DA, or spoiling their ballots.

As for Agang SA, created by Mamphela Ramphele who came from the Black Consciousness tradition rather than the Congress tradition, what a train smash. It turned out to be less a gang than a lonesome pensioner toiling uphill, with barely a quarter percent. It sends one person to Parliament.

In short, this is Zuma’s revenge, a personal triumph despite the declining ANC vote in both percentages and absolute numbers – almost six percentage points and a couple of hundred thousand down on 2009’s 11.65-million – putting to rest speculation that Zuma would face a humiliating Thabo Mbeki-like recall in the wake of the ANC getting a bloody nose.

Zuma is clearly going to be in charge of South Africa, for good or ill, for another five years. The upside of that is that there might be a coherent attempt to implement the National Development Plan, the downside is more corruption and increasing authoritarianism.

The fortunes of the left in the election should give pause to the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa’s plans for workers’ party. There is little evidence of socialist sentiment in the South African electorate: The Workers and Socialist Party (Wasp) campaigned hard in the platinum belt and the killing fields of Marikana to get fewer than a thousand votes there and a total of 8 331 nationally. Wasp, the Azanian People’s Organisation, the African People’s Convention and the Pan Africanist Congress racked up a cumulative total of less than 100 000 votes, or barely half a percentage point.

The election is a personal triumph, too, for DA leader Helen Zille. The Western Cape, captured by the opposition in 2009 by the narrowest of margins, was held by with over 58% of the vote. It seems that the black Eastern Cape “education refugees” of whom she was so dismissive a few years back, might actually be voting for her.

The DA also not only increased its percentage of the national vote from 16.7% in 2009 to about 22%, but it gave the ANC a big skrik in Johannesburg and Tshwane metros. In doing so, it uncovered clearly the future fracture lines in South Africa’s political glacier: the country is urbanising and ANC support is melting away in the cities.

The DA should temper its exuberance, though. The killer statistic comes out of the past: in 1994 the National Party drew 3.98-million votes. It has taken the DA 20 years to reach 4.09-million.

ANC opponents can, however, seek solace in another historic fact. As we know from the National Party years, when a political glacier eventually does crack, it can quickly turn into an avalanche.

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