[imagesource: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg]

The ANC stopped being the party of Nelson Mandela a long, long time ago.

As is evident from their dwindling voter numbers in the past national elections (sadly, still enough to remain the ruling party), the ANC’s reputation has taken a serious knock after years of looting and corruption, perhaps best embodied by the term ‘state capture’.

There are those of a certain age who will never turn their backs, or votes, on the party that ultimately liberated them from Apartheid, but an “increasingly young and urbanised electorate” is now threatening their hold on power.

That’s according to Bloomberg, who earlier today published a pretty interesting look at the matter:

“I loved the ANC since I was a child and when the elections were there I just checked in and voted for the ANC—I didn’t think too much,” [Lordwick Nxumalo, below] said. “But the ANC that I’m voting for gives me nothing: We have no jobs, no housing and we’re struggling for electricity.” He said he won’t vote for them again, because “nothing is changing for us.”

A quarter of a century after the end of the repressive system of institutionalized racism that made South Africa a global pariah, the same forces that freedom unleashed—the right to free movement and a thirst for education—threaten to bring down the party that won black South Africans their liberty.

Facing the tide of an increasingly youthful, urbanized and educated electorate that cares more about pressing daily needs than tales from the struggle era, the ANC looks vulnerable. But it’s also accelerated its own decline.

Where to start?

For those who prefer their takedowns barbed and bitter, see Richard Poplak’s recent stab at ‘SA’s dying democracy’, but let’s stick with Bloomberg.

The article focuses on Kliptown, Soweto, “once a heartland of ANC resistance on the outskirts of Johannesburg”, where patience with the ruling party has now run thin:

Nhlanhla Ngobese, 34, sells bead animals at a stall outside a museum in Soweto’s Orlando West district, where Mandela once lived…

An ANC member, Ngobese [below] doesn’t have much respect for the party now. “Too much corruption and fighting for position, that’s all what it’s about today,” he said. The youth don’t vote now, he said, disillusioned by “dirty games” and the fact “they’ve been waiting for promises for two decades.”

…While the ANC under President Cyril Ramaphosa won 57% of the vote in general elections in May, that was its lowest total in the six national votes since apartheid. What’s more, its support among young people was about 50%, dropping to 25% of all those people with a university degree. Its base is largely rural in a country where two-thirds of people now live in urban areas, compared with just over half in 1994…

“On demographic trends alone there is now enough to justify bringing the prospect of an ANC electoral defeat in 2024 onto your strategic planning radars,’’ the Johannesburg-based Centre for Risk Analysis said in a recent report. “What seems apparent, though, is that the political structure that has defined South Africa since 1994 is crumbling and that a new political order will come to replace it.”

That sounds like a good thing until you consider who could be taking over the mantle from the ANC.

We’ll stop there, but it’s worth reading the article in full to get the full picture.

[source:bloomberg]