Continuing our pledge at Andelman Unleashed to report and comment on every national election everywhere in the world, this week we have South Africa….
Early indications are that the unassailable hold of the party formed by Nelson Mandela at the end of the apartheid era and that has held an absolute majority in Parliament, hence its grip on the presidency for the entire 30 years of black majority rule, may be coming to an end.
The African National Congress has fallen below 50% of the vote for the first time ever, an extraordinary break with the past that bodes ill for the future stability of this core African democracy.
But first, a stroll down memory lane...
It was a memorable, indeed history-making tableau—Liberty Hall, Philadelphia the Fourth of July 1993. President Bill Clinton welcoming South Africa's last apartheid president, F.W. de Klerk, and Nelson Mandela, the bright hope of all Black Africa but especially the nation whose government had imprisoned him for 27 years, just for being black and too outspoken in his understated way.
Mandela had refused to allow any official photos of this moment. "Would George Washington have wanted his photograph taken with George III?" he asked in his own inimitable fashion. But I was standing there and could not resist.
Just as I snapped the shutter, though, Mandela's beloved daughter stepped in front to capture the identical, historic scene. We were all traveling across America to raise money for his African National Congress political party, campaigning in the election they would win handily the next April.
I'd been recruited by Ted Sorenson to accompany Mandela across America as speechwriter, a role that Washington Post columnist Lally Weymouth (daughter of owner/publisher Katherine Graham) immortalized (somewhat more grandly than reality) in her column:
Chaperoned by a member of the top-rung New York advertising firm Burson-Marsteller, the ANC chief traveled about the United States, fund-raising zealously for the ANC. He was hosted by the elite of corporate America: Mandela met with Tony O'Reilly, the CEO and chairman of H. J. Heinz Co., while Peter Guber, the chairman of Sony Pictures, hosted a gala Hollywood dinner in Mandela's honor, at which the guests included actress Barbra Streisand and Michael Medavoy, chairman of TriStar Pictures.
Moreover, Kennedy speechwriter and New York lawyer Theodore Sorensen is heading an outfit called SAFE to raise $10 million for "voter registration" in the South African election.
Mandela was indefatigable and so low key that he simply could not say 'no.' Which sometimes fell to me. At that Peter Guber gala in the sumptuous gardens of the Sony Pictures Studios lot in Los Angeles, le tout Hollywood turned out—more than 100 strong. (I was particularly taken by the army of secretaries Guber had, each scurrying about in those pre-cellphone days plugged into wireless headsets that allowed them to telephone from wherever they wanted in his suite of offices lined with more than 100 Oscar statues Sony had snagged.) The gardens were festooned with twinkling lights throughout, divans and tables scattered across the carefully manicured lawn.
Mandela, patiently, had individual photos taken with every guest. The plan was to have those quickly developed. Back at his hotel, he would inscribe each personally. They would be framed in silver and hopefully lead to substantial donations to the ANC from each recipient. The problem was that he needed to arise at dawn the next morning to fly to Atlanta to meet Ted Turner and CNN's leadership. Midnight arrived and Mandela was nowhere to be seen. I approached Guber and explained the problem. Mandela was 75 years old. He'd survived 27 years of harsh imprisonment and had been crisscrossing America at a furious pace. He needed some rest. Where was he? Guber nodded to a distant cabana where Mandela was sitting, patiently listening as Barbra Streisand leaned forward haranguing him.
"Do you want to be the one to tell The Streisand she's had enough?" he grimaced. Not me.
Early most mornings, Mandela would call home to his wife, Winnie, from whom he'd been separated the year before. (They would divorce three years later). Inevitably after this call he was morose, but brightened as I presented the schedule for the day and suggestions of what he might want to say. The reality is that Winnie embodied the worst of what would mark all too much of the next three decades of ANC rule in South Africa—corrupt, at times even violent. All of which Mandela fought to counter with every fiber of his being. Weymouth, in that same column, suggested the hard road ahead:
If South Africa's President F. W. de Klerk and African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela are meant to be a happy couple on their way to the altar—in this case, power-sharing in a new democratic South Africa—their recent trip to the United States does not bode well for their ostensible joint vision. During what was intended to be a congenial, mutually beneficial visit to America, Mandela spent much of the time sniping at de Klerk and—on occasion—actually humiliating the South African state president. South Africa watchers wonder whether this signals a loss of interest on Mandela's part in genuine reconciliation.
White judge swears in Black president 1994
South Africa is holding its first universal franchise general election next April 27. Observers worry about how a government of national unity will work out in practice and about how much unity will really obtain. Moreover, absent that unity, what sort of stability can South Africa be expected to enjoy?
Those words might well have been written on the eve of Wednesday's 2024 election. Indeed, I sensed 30 years ago that Mandela had already recognized quite clearly the principal problem facing South Africa, then and now. There was no thoroughly competent and utterly upright individual in any position to take over the nation's leadership—other than himself. Both Cyril Ramaphosa and Jacob Zuma, two of the top leaders of the ANC then, future successors to Mandela as president and this time again candidates for that same office, are corrupt or somewhat incompetent especially at dealing with the nation's manifold problem…or both.
South Africa's voters have now apparently at least begun to recognize that as well.
The Economist believes this year's contest is its "most important since 1994" when Mandela became its first black president. As the magazine's editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes observed, the election….
"….comes at a terrible time for the country. The African National Congress has presided over economic stagnation, rampant crime, failing public services and epic corruption. The next five years will test whether South Africa’s young institutions can withstand yet another assault from its predatory politicians. Most South Africans say they would do away with democracy if an unelected government could provide safety, jobs and housing….
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% this year. Corruption is rampant…GDP growth last year was less than 1%. 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….
The ANC today is seen as muddled, factionalized, corrupt, and incompetent. Even though President Cyril Ramaphosa is regarded as honest….[his] 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….
Some observers suggest that the ANC might simply form a coalition to allow Ramaphosa to continue his rule. But that is a solution easily proposed with little apparent path to success. The largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, is still seen largely as the white man’s party. Indeed, effectively confirming this, it named a white politician as its leader, vowing to “rescue” South Africa, as the BBC reported:
South African opposition leader John Steenhuisen believes he has what it takes to eventually become president.
That is despite coming up against the thorny issue of race and the African National Congress's 30-year grip on power. For decades he has argued that his party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), is the key to South Africa's progress.
The centre-right movement emerged from the liberal white benches of the old apartheid parliament, positing itself as a liberal alternative to the ANC….
The DA has long been perceived as a party that promotes the interests of white, Asian and coloured (as people of mixed race are known in South Africa) people, in a country where they make up just 7%, 3% and 8% of the population respectively.
So, partly in an attempt to diversify its appeal, the DA appointed its first black leader. The charismatic Mmusi Maimane was viewed as the party's best shot at the presidency, but he quit just four years later.
As the DA reeled from his exit, Mr Maimane said the party was the wrong "vehicle" for uniting a South Africa that remains divided along racial lines 30 years after the end of white-minority rule.
Mr Steenhuisen was appointed as interim leader the following month—but…social media pointed out DA leadership was now all white….As South African political analyst Richard Calland says: "He comes across as someone who is privileged, but unconscious, unaware of the context, unaware of the lived reality for most South Africans."
Not surprisingly, the ANC is unlikely to turn to the DA to form a coalition. Which leaves the new MK (uMkhonto weSizwe) party of Jacob Zuma. But Zuma is 82 and ailing, with the taint of corruption, his party eking out a fourth-place finish, a narrow margin behind the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters Party of leftwing firebrand Julius Malema who’s advocated nationalizing South African mines and forcibly redistributing land and wealth to the black majority. Beyond these four candidates, results drop deeply into the single digits divided among 60 other parties some with barely a handful of votes.
With more than half of the vote tabulated, it’s clear the rankings are unlikely to change substantially in the final returns promised for this weekend by the official Electoral Commission of South Africa:
The 15-percentage point decline for the ANC is clearly going to parties most likely to embrace change or at least banish corruption and incompetence. The DA party picked up nearly a third of that number, Zuma’s new MK most of the rest.
The Times, South Africa’s leading newspaper based in Johannesberg, described the vote as “the most dramatic political shift since the end of apartheid. As The Times concluded:
….The ANC would be forced to make a deal with one or more other parties to govern—a situation that could lead to unprecedented political volatility in the coming weeks or months….
Under the constitution, the newly elected National Assembly will elect the next president. With the ANC still on course to be the largest party, Cyril Ramaphosa is likely to remain as the country's president, although a poor showing could make him vulnerable to a leadership challenge from within party ranks.
How does The Times explain this dramatic shift?
The ANC has won national elections held every five years since the landmark 1994 election, which marked the end of apartheid and the ascent of Nelson Mandela as president. But since those heady days the ANC's support has declined because of disillusionment over issues such as high unemployment and crime, frequent power blackouts and corruption.
But there is also another reality: only 10.5 million of South Africa’s population of 60 million were alive and of voting age as apartheid ended or were in a position to recall the horror the small white minority imposed on vast mass of their fellow black countrymen.
The vision of South Africa’s future is now more clouded than ever.
TWTW: The Week That Was
An abbreviated version will appear this weekend as the author travels to Chicago to celebrate the high school graduation of his grand nephew Charles Wise.
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So VERY true, Greg …. But sadly the Black community has never found an individual of the level of Mandela to succeed him. Still, apartheid was nothing but a horror for the vast mass of South Africans disenfranchised and perennially abused !
It is so sad, because as I know firsthand from covering South Africa on and off both before and after Apartheid, people's hopes with black majority rule were so high. I once asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu why things had gone so wrong and he said, in so many words, "How naive we were, to think that just because of the color of our skin, all the ills of human nature would disappear."
So VERY true, Greg …. But sadly the Black community has never found an individual of the level of Mandela to succeed him. Still, apartheid was nothing but a horror for the vast mass of South Africans disenfranchised and perennially abused !
It is so sad, because as I know firsthand from covering South Africa on and off both before and after Apartheid, people's hopes with black majority rule were so high. I once asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu why things had gone so wrong and he said, in so many words, "How naive we were, to think that just because of the color of our skin, all the ills of human nature would disappear."