South Africa’s ANC has Declined!!! (Part I)

The once prevalent party since 1994 is no more. Major elections in South Africa saw a decline for Nelson Mandela’s ANC. After all the votes had been counted in South Africa, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) received only 40.18 percent votes in elections, well short of a majority.

For the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994, the once-dominant party will need to make a deal with other parties to form a coalition government.

So the ANC has now formed a centrist coalition government with its main rival, the Democratic Alliance (DA), and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP).

This unexpected change for South Africa should maybe serve as a warning not to take ‘traditional’ voters for granted.

Syriatimes took this opportunity to interview South African political analyst Reneva Fourie on some of her thoughts

ANC’s flirting with the DA imperils SA’s foreign policy

A significant battle for control over the country’s policy-making  arena is underway. The ANC’s underwhelming 40 percent performance at a national level means it needs to form a coalition to govern. The business sector strongly advocates for the ANC to form a coalition government with the Democratic Alliance and some signatories to the multi-party pact. However, within the ANC and its alliance partners, there is a preference for a coalition with political parties that share similar pro-poor policy positions.

The situation may be more complex than it appears. South Africa may have experienced a soft coup attempt. This attempt at regime change carried out through the electoral process, aimed to oust a political party that supports workers and the poor and replace it with a government amenable to rolling back the progress regarding worker rights and public services. The outcome of the coalition will determine the success of regime change efforts.

Facilitating a popular insurrection or getting people to turn against their governments rather than financing military coups, is the new preferred method of regime change. The two-pronged approach is usually championed by pro-Western political parties in alliance with seemingly progressive non-governmental organisations. Such an approach entails discrediting the governing party (negative campaign) while pushing the people to the polls (positive campaign). The hope is that people will become sufficiently disillusioned and vote for the opposition party in large numbers. Should achieving power through the ballot fail, civilian disobedience and mass defying of legitimate government structures and processes are advanced to create an illusion that the government has no control.

While acknowledging the subjective factors that have contributed to the ANC’s demise, such as corruption, past ongoing power outages and deteriorating water quality, there are also factors outside of the ANC’s control that underpinned its downfall. International and domestic capital invested significant resources into discrediting the governing party. “Rescue South Africa” or similar phrases were punted by opposition parties, the media, and intellectuals despite the tremendous gains since 1994, the successful navigation of COVID-19, governance being relatively effective and business operating as usual. Furthermore, millions were poured into the election campaign to elevate the opposition, particularly the DA, despite its dismal failure in municipalities under its control and its pro-white skewed service delivery practices in the Western Cape.

The strategy worked relatively well. The ANC lost a whopping 71 seats in Parliament. However, the regime change effort was only partially successful. It was intended that, as openly declared by the DA’s leader, John Steenhuisen, the multi-party pact would collectively get more than 50 percent. Steenhuisen even confirmed that the DA facilitated funding for the smaller parties, hoping they would garner more votes. Given the failure, regime change now wants to enter via the back door through a coalition.

One fundamental aspect that drives the regime change effort is the hope that the ANC’s coercion into coalition politics would dilute the country’s key foreign policy objectives. The country’s foreign policy will likely stay the same if the ANC forms a coalition with policy-aligned parties. However, if the ANC enters into a coalition with the DA, the government’s non-aligned stance and positions on issues such as Palestine and BRICS+ might be sacrificed on the altar of expediency.

Despite the DA only having 87 seats in Parliament compared to the ANC’s 159, its financial backers hold significant sway, necessitating flexibility by the ANC. There is little convergence between the foreign policy of the DA and that of the ANC. When the DA refers to “building relationships with all mutually beneficial countries and not being paralysed in historic loyalties”, it implies alignment with our historical colonialists, now current imperialist countries.

Due to its non-aligned position, our government has successfully maintained relations with the US and countries in Europe while sustaining a posture against imperialist domination and promoting fairness at an international level. However, the DA values the US above the UN and serves as its mouthpiece in South Africa.

The US has a long history of attempting to influence South Africa’s foreign and trade relations. In the past, the US government supported the apartheid regime and political parties like the Inkatha Freedom Party. Consequently, the US was one of the last countries to impose sanctions, and this only occurred due to significant domestic pressure from its citizens. During our negotiated transition, the US unsuccessfully attempted to impose a federal state. Since then, the US has continued to try to influence our policy trajectory.

South Africa is regarded as a pivotal state due to its mineral wealth, strategic location, position as the largest economy in Africa, and being one of the most influential countries in the global South. In its 2022 “US Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa”, which represents a reframing of Africa’s importance to US national security interest, it advocates for free market economies (that is, no regulation by government to, for example, curtail high-prices, ensure quality control or impose fair worker conditions). Having identified Africa as a major site of “great-power competition”, it also states limiting China and Russia’s influence over Sub-Saharan Africa’s countries as a critical objective. Accordingly, the US has applied many soft and hard tactics to goad South Africa’s compliance.

Last June, the Brenthurst Foundation hosted an international conference in Poland titled ‘Rolling Back Authoritarianism’. Several key South African figures were in attendance, including the DA’s John Steenhuisen and Gordin Hill-Lewis, the Mayor of Cape Town and the IFP President Velenkosini Hlabisa. Other attendees included delegates from the US-backed RENAMO, which destabilised Mozambique after independence, and UNITA, which led the counter-revolution in Angola.

At that conference, they adopted the 21-point Gdańsk Declaration. The declaration promotes the establishment of coalitions to remove sitting governments and instructs political parties to ‘accentuate common interests between opposition groups and seek to find common ground over differences’. It underpins the content of the DA-led coalition of the right’s multi-party charter. Thus, though the charter is silent on international relations, it can be certain that they are committed to reversing the progressive path of South Africa’s foreign policy.

The DA and its multi-party charter partners have fundamentally endorsed the US’s long-standing advocacy of a free-market economy and federalism for our country. However, beyond being one of five Western countries that wrote to President Ramaphosa in 2019 to dictate our governance approach, the US most aggressively tried to influence South Africa’s stance on the Ukraine/ Russia matter. This matter also best illustrates how deeply the DA is ingratiated with the US.