They may just have been local elections but South African voters have delivered a very sharp message to the African National Congress (ANC) of truly national significance. The party which brought liberation from apartheid two decades ago has been resting on its laurels for too long. It has become fat and complacent on the trappings of power and a presumption – expressed explicitly by one leader – that it has a God-given right to rule.
Its leader and the country's president Jacob Zuma is a byword for corruption, cronyism and economic mismanagement who must bear a considerable share of the blame for this historic low for the party. Three years from a general election, his rivals in the ANC will have been emboldened and his future must be in doubt.
The ANC ran a racially charged campaign in last week's local elections, tarring the centrist opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) with being a whites-based party and labelling its supporters "black Boers". Although black people make up 80 per cent of the 54 million population, the ANC under Nelson Mandela prided itself on its non-racialism. Yet, even pandering to anger about continuing racial inequality, the party saw support fall nationally from 62 per cent five years ago to 54 and lost control of three major conurbations, home to more than eight million people – Johannesburg, the capital Pretoria and Port Elizabeth.
The decline in the ANC vote in these urban areas was even more dramatic than the national trend – a low turnout in impoverished townships, mirrored by significant defections to the DA in middle class areas. One such suburb of Pretoria, Chantelle, saw the ANC’s share of the vote plummeted to 40 per cent from 69 percent in 2011.
Coalitions will now rule the three cities, while Cape Town, already DA-controlled, saw the latter's position reinforced. The DA, rebranded in the last two years with its first black leader, 36-year-old part-time preacher Mmusi Maimane, has successfully shaken off its "white party" image and seen support soar, significantly in black communities where there is a sense of betrayal at the failure of the ANC to deliver.
The ANC retains solid support in rural areas and a national majority, but rampant youth unemployment has exposed it on the left as well. The success in the townships of far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) – 10 per cent nationally – led by expelled former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema is particularly galling.
ANC chief whip Jackson Mthembu admits the party has been chastened. “We need to have a serious introspection,” he says. At the very least. ANC chairman in Gauteng, Paul Mashatile, said the close races indicated that South Africa’s “democracy is maturing”. The key challenge will be to convince its traditonal supporters that the party feels their pain and disillusionment.