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By Patrick Laurence
A speech by Nobel Peace prize laureate Desmond Tutu at the University of Stellenbosch
last week invokes thoughts of the birth and death, and the rise and fall, of
political parties.
In his speech, delivered in memory of Beyers Naude, the Afrikaner
anti-apartheid activist, Tutu reflected on the once apparent invincibility of
the National Party and its repeated triumphs at the polls under the old
dispensation.
Yet today the NP has been ingested by the ANC. If the NP exists at all it is as
a parasite in the intestines of the ANC, waiting to be excreted into the
historical repository of extinct institutions.
Further
cogitation on the decrepitude that eventually befalls all institutions created
by humankind leads us to the ANC. Like the NP in its heyday, the ANC exudes a
sense of its own indestructibility but, as events in the past fortnight show,
it is beset by internal strife.
In 1977 prime minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster led the NP to its greatest
electoral victory but, in retrospect, 1977 stands out not only as the zenith in
the NP’s history but also the beginning of its irreversible descent.
One of the important causes of its decline was the breakaway from the NP of
right-wingers under Andries Treurnicht, and the formation of the Conservative
Party in 1982.
A period of broedertwis (fraternal conflict) set in for a decade between
Afrikaner supporters of the NP and the Conservative Party, leading seemingly
inevitably to further fraternal friction between president PW Botha and FW de
Klerk, the leader of the NP, and to the premature retirement of Botha and his
replacement by De Klerk in late 1989.
With the advantage of hindsight, the point at which De Klerk won worldwide
acclaim for initiating settlement talks with the liberation movements marks the
beginning of his own demise as a politician.
The convergence of a zenith with the beginning of a decline until death,
whether of people or the institutions they recreate, might be termed the law of
parabola – the highest point of its trajectory is simultaneously the start of
its inexorable descent.
The question that now arises is whether the ANC has reached its zenith. This is
not to assume that it has, since the zenith of political parties is clear only
in retrospect. But the postulation is interesting and perhaps instructive.
From one perspective, the ANC may seem to have been in power for too short a
time to have begun its descent, though there is some evidence that the speed
with which liberation movements in Africa lose
their charisma is accelerating.
It took 30 years or more before the Kenya African National Union lost its
glitter, but only 20 years for the same thing to happen to Zanu-PF and,
arguably, less than 15 years for the ANC to generate an analogous
disillusionment in the electorate.
It must be conceded that nothing is written in stone. The liberation movements
in Angola and Mozambique are
still in power though more than 30 years have lapsed since they took control of
the two former Portuguese colonies.
An analysis of the 2004 national election results in South
Africa offers an elucidating prism through which to view
the situation in South
Africa today.
From one perspective, the result was a resounding triumph for president Thabo Mbeki but a closer examination offers a
different perspective.
· The ANC won nearly 70 percent of the votes
cast, an improvement on its performance in the 1994 and 1999 national
elections.
· Against that, only 57 percent of the
voting-age population turned out to vote, meaning that 43 percent either failed
to register to vote or, if they did, were conspicuous by their absence at the
polling booths.
· Calculations by emeritus professors John Daniel and Roger Southall show that the ANC garnered
a mere 40 percent of the total number of eligible voters. Put differently, of the
roughly 27,5 million eligible voters, less than 16 million voted, which means
11,5 million did not.
These figures point to declining participation in elections by eligible voters,
which, in turn, points to disillusionment with the ANC as the ruling party.
Historical analysis identifies diminishing participation of eligible voters in
Zimbabwean elections from the mid-1980s onwards as a pointer to the decline of
poplar support for President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF and, in the longer
term, to Mugabe’s defeat and that of his party in Zimbabwe’s elections in March
this year.
Developments in South Africa
have moved rapidly and dramatically since the 2004 national and provincial
elections.
Important markers include: Mbeki’s dismissal of Jacob Zuma from his post as
South Africa’s deputy president in June 2005; the subsequent surge of support
for Zuma within the ANC and its alliance partners; the triumph of Zuma over
Mbeki at the ANC’s national conference at Polokwane in December; and – after
Judge Chris Nicholson invalidated the indictment of Zuma for corruption for
failing to comply with the law – the “recall” of Mbeki from the
presidency by the Zuma-led ANC.
A common theme runs through these events: debilitating political warfare within
the ANC between pro-Mbeki and pro-Zuma factions, accompanied on occasion by
attacks by Zuma zealots on the judiciary and threats of violence if Zuma was
tried for corruption.
Zuma has tried disingenuously and unconvincingly to present the conflict in the
ANC as “normal contestation” compatible with, and indispensable to,
internal democracy within the ANC.
But there have been too many ugly episodes for that to wash, including the
exchange of insults, fist fights, baring of buttocks, gun battles and at least
one stabbing – that of Mcebisi Skwatsha, the secretary of the ANC in the
Western Cape.
The rivalries and machinations within the ANC bring to mind the dictum of
Abraham Lincoln, the 19th-century president of the United States: “A house
divided against itself cannot stand.”
But the ANC is not merely a house divided. It is one that is increasingly under
siege by ordinary South Africans, the vast majority of them black, protesting
against poor or even the non-delivery of social services. Protests are
currently running at a rate of well over 6 000 a year and rising. This
reinforces the silent protest of those who abstain from voting in elections.
· Patrick
Laurence is an independent political analyst and a contributing editor to The
Star
This article was originally published in
the Sunday
Independent on September 28, 2008
September 29, 2008
Democracy