Opinion A different election

Twenty years after South Africa finally liberated itself from the stranglehold of Apartheid to hold its first multi-racial election, the party identified with the struggle for political equality, the African National Congress, registered a comfortable victory. According to South Africa’s election commission, the ANC and President Jacob Zuma garnered 62.2 per cent of the votes cast in last week’s elections, clearing the 60 per cent mark that many analysts identify as crucial for a win to be deemed a political success.

While the ANC was widely expected to be re-elected, the scale of its triumph was less certain, even though its share this time around was 3 percentage points lower than in 2009. It was thought that concerns over South Africa’s sputtering economy, particularly a lack of jobs, and poor schooling and corruption, as well as the scandal-hit and controversial Zuma, might have prompted voters to switch to the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA). But though the DA did improve its vote share by almost 6 percentage points over 2009, it amounted to only 22.2 per cent of the vote, well short of genuinely challenging the ANC.

Advertisement

Attention will now turn to how the ANC proposes to use such a decisive mandate. Zuma has promised that the government will push through economic reforms in line with the National Development Plan, which also aims to bring down the unemployment rate from 25 to 14 per cent by 2020. Political manoeuvring within the party to lay the ground for Zuma’s eventual succession has already begun, threatening to distract it from the business of governance. History still casts a long shadow over South Africa’s present, but the ANC will find it increasingly difficult to convince the “born free” generation — made up those who never lived under Apartheid — to continually and faithfully vote for the past.