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The biggest loser at Elections 2024 was the ‘grand non-racial social compact’ of 1994, with the ANC alliance at the centre of this project.
by ASHRAF PATEL
ELECTIONS 2024 lived up to its expectations to be the milestone election – and it was that and more.
The IEC, that bastion of independence and competence, was also tested to the limits and seems to have dropped the ball by not doing community outreach and crucial voter education, especially following the introduction of the three-ballot system.
The silent majority
Let’s begin with stats. Of the registered 27.8 million voters – and with voter turnout of 58.64 percent – 16.3 million voted. Added to the 11.5 million that did not vote, there are an estimated 13.7 million people – majority of them being youth and the rural population – that not even register to vote. This suggests a large-scale disillusionment with the current political system and points to a general crisis of electoral democracy.
Return of race-based apartheid party political values
The biggest loser at Elections 2024 was the ‘grand non-racial social compact’ of 1994, with the ANC alliance at the centre of this project.
In this vacuum, ethnic race-based regional parties were the big winners. The great disrupter, MK Party with 14 percent of the vote, is virtually the bulk of the ANC’s Zulu voter-base.
The Patriotic Alliance (PA) galvanised the grievances of the coloured community to win a sizeable portion of that vote.
Even the DA’s ‘3 percent growth’ is essentially a transfer of votes from the Freedom Front Plus (who went down 3 percent), suggesting that the ‘Steenhuisen factor’ attracted these votes, a base that Musi Maimane would not have managed to attract. So, South Africa circa 2024 is back to the old raw race-based, ethnic politics – peppered with bouts of populism.
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Parties with largesse from big-money and corporate interests failed dismally. RISE Mzansi, BOSA, Action SA – despite huge coffers and public visibility – failed to attract chunks of voters to their ranks.
The role of big money in politics is another feature of Elections 2024 and one that needs further research and critique.
The EFF’s stagnant growth was mainly due to the MK factor, but to its credit it showed remarkable maturity, and its embracing of non-racialism and reaching out to all communities, as well as having a detailed manifesto (over 240 pages), was a silver lining of this election.
At the end of the day the ANC-led alliance should take responsibility for its weak and chaotic electoral outcome. Being in government for three decades it has on balance been generally mediocre in almost all areas of governance. Added to the state capture years are SOEs under-performing, the dire economic effects of the hard COVID lockdown, the COVID PPE tenderpreneurship scandals and the mega loadshedding crisis
The ANC-led alliance has presided over the most neoliberal programme in the past several years, with a mega COVID-19 IMF R500 billion loan and its myriad of conditionalities. These include privatisation and deregulation which has led to mass retrenchments, weakening state capacity and the inability of the majority government to deliver quality services where it mattered most: to its core social base. This has collectively brought about the rise of populism and discontent in our politics, leading to a death knell of the grand social democratic compact.
Alliance partners SACP and COSATU should also take the blame for happily riding the gravy train benefits of patronage, without any critical discourse within the ranks, and those who questioned this were marginalised.
What a future government should prioritise
Coalition governments are now a reality. However, the vast philosophical and policy differences of leading parties will make governing chaotic, with trade-offs likely to further erode the public interest and entrench elitist pacts; the very system that has put South Africa in this political-economic-social crisis in the first place.
A future government should prioritise the following
- Economic CODESA
The mass disillusionment and rise of populism is a result of the failure of substantive economic and social transformation. Key themes of an economic CODESA should cover areas such as land reform, redistribution, energy policy and systems, health insurance, basic income grant, unemployment, skills for the new economy and a competent state, especially at local level. A new social transformation compact is required
- Social cohesion summit and council
With race-based parties now entrenched in the body politic at legislative level, there is a need for new social cohesion. Government and civil society partners should convene a social cohesion summit, perhaps annually, and set up a council to address myriads of race, gender and other exclusions that have led to the rise in ethnic-based populism
Failure to deal with these would mean that neoliberal apartheid and race-ethnic Bantustanism will dominate the state and societal narrative for years to come.
- Ashraf Patel is research associate at the Institute for Global Dialogue (IGD) specialising in areas of digital economy, trade and development justice in the global south.
