ANC has two weeks to get its next move right

The people have spoken. Long live the Republic! Never mind the electorate giving the ANC a bloody nose.

They have, like frustrated and unappreciated boxers oblivious of their innate strength, showered the body politic of Africa’s oldest political party with a frenzied flurry of blows, resulting in an inevitable disjointed broken nose and leaving their once-revered cadres punch-drunk.

Since Jacob Zuma’s faction’s ousting of president Thabo Mbeki in September 2008 , the ANC has been on a slippery downward spiral, consumed by the outrageous state capture of assets estimated at more than R1 trillion and wanton self-enrichment, which, in turn, saw Cyril Ramaphosa returning the favour to Mbeki by ousting president Zuma in February 2018.

The supreme irony is the spectacle of Zuma resurfacing like a latter-day Leviathan – the self-appointed saviour of a dysfunctional country reeling from the sheer weight of corruption, cronyism and delivery failure under the Ramaphosa administration. Never mind the fact that the Constitutional Court banned Zuma from becoming an MP because he is a convicted felon for a contempt of court charge.

Zuma taking the moral high ground when he is, in reality, the “Anti-Christ” of South African democracy is a travesty and shows the depth to which political and civic culture have degenerated in a once-proud and confident polity espoused by the likes of Madiba and a roll call of fallen heroes. The hallowed earth must be shaking all over the beloved country as they turn in their graves en masse.

The uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), despite being midwifed out of vengeance against Ramaphosa, had every right to contest the election and probably did the country a huge favour by exposing the true extent of the fault lines between the immediate past two ANC leaders. Instead of spending time with his grandchildren, the octogenarian Zuma might be harbouring the dangerous ambition of a presidential comeback, albeit the electoral maths makes this nigh impossible.

The debutante MKP might be party poopers with its unexpectedly strong showing of 14.58% of the popular vote putting it in third place behind the ANC with 40.18% and the DA at 21.81%, but its 58 seats in the new National Assembly pales into insignificance to that of a depleted ANC with 159 seats and the DA with 87 seats.

Whether the MKP would have fared even better without the baggage and influence of a discredited Zuma and with a new generation at the helm, only the electoral gods would know.

South Africa, unlike the UK or US, is not a two-party system – it is more of a one-party state. The uncanny parallel is that of Malaysia, when the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, which had ruled the country since independence from Britain in 1957, was unceremoniously dumped from office in 2018, thanks to the multibillion-dollar 1MDB fraud scandal which similarly implicated a corrupt prime minister in Najib Abdul Razak who too was convicted and jailed.

The saviour – you’ve guessed it – was the nonagenarian, former BN prime minister Tun Mahathir who served a cumulative 24 years, this time as the head of an interim coalition administration of strange bedfellows from 2018 to 2020. A fragmented Malaysian coalition scenario headed by PM Anwar Ibrahim would be highly unsuitable and ineffectual in South Africa.

For democracy to thrive in a first-past-the-post system, we need a good government and a strong opposition. The DA, as an opposition, is a captive of its own history and perceived, rightly or wrongly, as serving the interests of a remnant white cohort mixed with disaffected black and other minorities of colour beholden to a neo-liberal economic orthodoxy that puts the interests of the private sector above those of most hard-working compatriots. Not surprisingly, it has failed to make any electoral breakthrough, peaking at 22.23% of the popular vote in the 2014 election, albeit its 2024 percentage is 1.04 percentage points better than the 2019 election.

An MKP, sans the influence of Zuma and his family, and perhaps with a much younger leadership, could have given the ANC a run for its money by becoming a much-needed credible alternative for voters. However, it has done the country yet another unintended favour by clipping the strident wings of the radical EFF whose share of the popular vote declined by 1.52 percentage points on the 2019 election, from 10.8% to 9.52%, rendering the EFF’s 39 seats ineffectual in any coalition formula.

The spectre of Zuma and EFF leader Julius Malema posturing as self-proclaimed kingmakers in a new coalition government is comical. Zuma has lost no time in showing his contempt for Ramaphosa, stressing that he would be willing to court a coalition with an ANC if it was bereft of its leader. There are factions within the ANC caucus who would like to see the back of Ramaphosa. Do expect a right royal battle for control of the rump ANC.

While the elections garnered three cheers for democracy, it is far too early to gauge its impact on the country let alone the lives of almost 62 million South Africans. No doubt apparatchiks are contemplating the various possible coalition combos. The reality is that there can be no coalition without the participation of either the ANC or the DA, or both. The ANC must show political leadership by acting in the best interest of the country, not the party.

The smart money should be on a grand coalition between the ANC and DA, which would muster a commanding 246 seats and ensure stable governance. Both sides would have to compromise – after all, that is what coalition politics is all about.

The two ANC red lines of land rights-cum-Expropriation Bill and the National Health Insurance seem intractable but the sheer time it would take to implement them (up to 30 years in the case of the NHI) would give both sides some breathing space. The ANC/DA combo, possibly with the inclusion of one or two smaller parties such as IFP pushing the seat count to 263, could nurture a pragmatic radicalism, given the tortured history of South Africa. The DA must acknowledge this instead of being stuck in a time warp of a strident free market-cum-private-sector-at-any-cost dispensation. An ANC/MK coalition, on the other hand, could be less stable, mustering 217 seats, notwithstanding Zuma’s red line of a no-show Ramaphosa, and could see a battle for ownership of ideological radicalism intensify.

The ANC has about two weeks to decide whether it goes Right or Left in its coalition combo. According to BMI Solutions, the research arm of Fitch Ratings, “while a more leftist government is possible, we expect that the most likely outcome is a deal between the ANC and the DA that sees Cyril Ramaphosa remain in office. By June 16, the ANC must announce the new coalition and Parliament must convene for its first session, at which point, it will swear in members of Parliament and elect a president. If this deadline is not met, the country would need to hold a new election. The first key milestone for the new government will be the 2024/25 budget, which must be passed by the new government by the end of July.”

South Africans, investors, fund managers, rating agencies, ideologues, democrats and other temporal actors will no doubt agonise over the future of the country in the next fortnight. If the ANC gets it right, then the green shoots of hope and redemption could finally sprout. If it gets it wrong, a cloud of doom and gloom would descend on an clobbered nation.

* Parker is an economist and writer in London

Cape Times