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The demise of postcolonial liberation movements is frequently messy — but it is ultimately essential. It may be worth remembering this in the months ahead as South Africa charts a new course in the wake of the shattering electoral setback for the ruling African National Congress. It is a moment of great peril — but also, after a decade and a half of drift and dysfunction, of promise, too.
Whether via force, skulduggery or lack of viable opposition, liberation movements tend to cling on to power long after they have forsaken the idealism of their early days in office. Until recently, this seemed the likely dismal trajectory of the ANC. Long ago it lost sight of the distinction between party and state. So corroded has it become in the 30 years since it took charge at the end of white rule that just about anything it touches seems to wither away.
And yet right at the end of its sixth consecutive five-year term in office it has bequeathed — if unintentionally — something of incalculable value to South Africa: it has overseen an election in which it has taken a pounding, crashing from 57 to 40 per cent of the vote — and accepted the result. Voters in Zimbabwe, Angola and other countries living under the dead hand of effective one-party rule will look on with envy.
It is not yet clear if this presages the party’s long-term decline along, say, the lines of another once lionised ex-liberation movement, the Indian National Congress, which also first lost power after 30 years in office, and is now a shadow of its former self. Exit polls suggest it has just been trounced in a third successive election by the Bharatiya Janata party.
But what is clear is that for South Africa, rather sooner than expected, the second chapter of the post-apartheid story is under way. The country has long, and sometimes vaingloriously, liked to trumpet its exceptionalism. Now is its chance to live up to this. The question is whether it can again defy the doom-scenarios as it did in the early 1990s when it averted civil war.
The looming nightmare this time is the economic implosion that would surely follow if the ANC does a deal with radical breakaway parties to stay in power. Siren voices in the leadership still like the idea of a coalition with the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party of disgraced former president Jacob Zuma, who wants to scrap the constitution, and/or with the Economic Freedom Fighters, a rag-bag of race-baiters and would-be expropriators fond of spouting Marxist-Leninist claptrap.
This would be a calamity. Investors would all but give up, the economy would shrivel and the ANC would deservedly go down in history as just another shabby movement that has betrayed its people, little better than Zimbabwe’s predatory elite.
The only sensible option is a deal with the leading opposition party, the centrist Democratic Alliance, which won 22 per cent of the vote. In part this is a matter of head versus heart. The DA is a market-friendly party with a successful record in running the Western Cape. But with its mainly white leadership and having hoovered up the supporters of the National party, the now defunct party of apartheid, it has struggled to shed the perception that it is out of touch with the Black majority.
The signals from the ANC’s leadership are encouraging. In turn the DA has to ask itself some big questions. It has failed to capitalise on the dire record of the ANC, whose defecting supporters mainly turned to Zuma’s MK. By the time of the next election it also needs a Black leader. In coalition, it may then have a chance of running the show as the ANC is in utter disarray.
South Africa’s prospects remain rocky. MK, which came third with nearly 15 per cent, is a wild card. It may end up running Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal, which would lead to a haemorrhaging of investment there. He has already threatened a resumption of the violence that has plagued the province over the years.
Much of the damage wrought to the national infrastructure will be impossible to repair. It is salutary to note that the ANC sowed many of the seeds of this malaise before Zuma took power in 2009; he just turbocharged it. But there are ways of mitigating the damage and restoring economic growth.
A former ANC grandee reflected recently on the fate of Zambia’s liberation movement, Unip, which ruled for nearly 30 years until 1991 and now doesn’t have a single MP. This could be the ANC’s lot. Or it could stumble on like India’s Congress. Or it could just possibly revive itself. Whichever happens, first it has to make a fateful decision — on which South Africa’s future depends.
alec.russell@ft.com
