264 - The Agonies of South Africa

            South Africans head to the polls soon, on May 29, with their country in disarray. Educational attainments are down, electrical power is in short supply, there are major water availability issues, housing is lacking, and crime rates — among the highest in the world — are rising. Formal unemployment reached 33 percent this year. Corruption is rampant. Economic returns are behind the expected curve. (GDP growth last year was less than 1 per cent.) Most politicians and political parties are regarded as self-serving and illegitimate. In short, the post-apartheid independence and peace dividend that President Nelson Mandela inaugurated in 1994 has been squandered.

            Most opinion polls on the eve of the election suggest that Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) will likely lose its majority in parliament. Now it holds 57 percent of the seats, down from a high of close to 70 percent under President Thabo Mbeki in 2004.

            The ANC today is seen as muddled, factionalized, corrupt, and incompetent. Even though President Cyril Ramaphosa is regarded as honest and intent on advancing the interests of the least privileged citizens of South Africa, he has not managed to exert full control over the upper echelons of the ANC or to transform the ANC into an accomplished and competent operative at the provincial and municipal, much less the national levels.  His eloquent grandstanding in international arenas, and his attempt to condemn Israel's war actions, has not helped him with most South Africans.  Moreover, his own legitimacy was clouded by the discovery that $580,000 in cash was strangely stuffed into a sofa at his country estate, and then stolen.

            The ANC's hold on the nation has also been threatened very recently by the disruptive re-emergence of former President Jacob Zuma, dismissed by the ANC as president in 2018 because of a wild corruption scandal regarding a $12 million personal estate in KwaZulu/Natal built with government funds. He was subsequently jailed for refusing a court summons. And he is still on trial for a major corruption allegation from 1996 regarding kickbacks for submarine and fighter aircraft purchases from France and Sweden.

            Zuma is 82 and ailing. But he leads a new political party -- uMkhonto weSizwe  -- that may well attract 10 percent or more votes from the ANC.  It joins the equally disruptive Economic Freedom Fighters Party of firebrand Julius Malema. It has twenty-five seats in the 400-person parliament now, and could gain more. Both parties advocate major changes that would push national policy far to the left.  But they are also both vehicles as well for Zuma's revenge and Malema's search for personal prominence.  Malema was a loyal ANC member before being expelled in 2013.

            Both of these people-first parties draw support from the human underbelly of South Africa's pronounced inequality. Despite having a very affluent post-apartheid black wealthy class, South Africa is the most unequal society on earth (as measured by Gini-coefficients showing the difference between the top 10 percent by GDP and the rest of the population).  According to Statista, "South Africa has the highest Gini coefficient in the world in 2023, at 63, followed by Namibia...The richest 10% of South Africa's population holds 71% of the wealth, while the poorest 60% holds 7%.” Brazil and Colombia are large countries that are almost as unequal as South Africa.

         Furthermore, 26 million of South Africa's 62 million people depend on social grants  -- old age pensions, subsidies of child health benefits, and so on. Poverty is a grinding affair for more than half of all South Africans.

            Only one-party, now the official opposition in parliament, has a reputation for running provinces and cities honestly and efficiently. The Democratic Alliance (DA) has governed Cape Town and the Western Cape Province steadily almost from 1994. Residents and local voters praise its competence.  In this century, the DA also took control of other municipalities and came close to winning in Gauteng, the country's most populace province. It runs the only town in Zuma's KwaZulu/Natal that has a well-praised mayor and deputy-mayor. 

            At the national level, however, the DA can count only on about 22 percent of the total vote. Despite having had a majority African black leader, being thoroughly and demonstrably multiracial, and being the lineal successor to the much-admired anti-apartheid liberal party of Helen Suzman and Frederik van zyl Slabbert, it is again led by a white politician and its popular appeal is capped by its being perceived as a "white" party. It is a centrist party, too. Beyond, to its far right, are two small Afrikaner-derived parties and, in some respects, the ANC. There is a Muslim party as well.

            Corruption is the biggest drag on South African prosperity and the kind of governmental delivery of needed services that would have restored faith in the ANC. According to the well-regarded Corruption Perceptions Index, South Africa was the 83rd least corrupt nation (of 180), ranking it with Burkina Faso, Kosovo, and Vietnam, below Hungary and North Macedonia, and just ahead of Colombia -- hardly reassuring company.

            Not only was Zuma's presidency (2008-2018) subject to the criminalized "capture" of the state by his family in collaboration with three Indian brothers now evading prosecution by hiding in Dubai, but their corrupt thieving stole the revenues of Eskom, the national electrical monopoly, diverted funds from housing construction, sabotaged the schooling system, cut funds from hospitals, and destroyed the police and security services.

            Zuma has many beneficiaries of his regime and largesse still in the upper ranks of the ANC. Ramaphosa has not been able to clean out its Augean stables and gain full control over the ANC executive machinery. Ace Magashule, the former head of the ANC in the Free State Province, for example, is on trial now for corruption and one of his operatives is fighting in a U.S. court to prevent being extradited to South Africa to stand trial.  Magshule's small political party has allied itself with Zuma's party.

            As but one indication of how far South Africa has slipped in this century under ANC rule, official schooling results show that 81 percent of elementary school pupils cannot "read for meaning." Literacy has slipped, too. Urban and rural schools lack trained teachers and suffer fro inadequate facilities and scarce textbooks. Teachers are poorly paid and often do not arrive to give instruction.

            For all of these reasons -- and there are many more -- readers of this newsletter should not be surprised if Ramaphosa's ANC loses its majority on May 29, retaining a plurality that could fall to 40 percent of the total vote. The ANC would then be forced into a coalition that could threaten Ramaphosa’s own presidency and ensure chaos and a lack of real progress for Africa's theoretically most advanced and most developed economy. Mandela cannot be pleased.

Dear Subscribers:  I am heading to Europe without a computer, so this Substack Newsletter will resume shortly after Memorial Day.  I won't be gone for long, so please stay tuned. And please keep subscribing and commenting.