Will South Africa Be Okay?. Jan-Jan Joubert
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election. It did the same in the 2016 municipal election, and is in better shape as far as the present as well as the future is concerned. The other noteworthy parties are really just limited niche parties that don’t have a big influence on the ANC’s support levels. The FF Plus in particular probably has no effect whatsoever on their support.
So there are many reasons why people still vote for the ANC, despite the party’s serious failings. It’s not simply an uninformed or mindless vote cast out of habit. But the general trend in ANC support seems downward, as shown by the figures at the beginning of this chapter. The number of people who keep voting ANC is falling, and the ANC’s position has generally weakened. Unless the ANC urgently and noticeably improves its shockingly deteriorating behaviour, people will stop voting for it and the party will probably go down the same ignominious road of collapse as the NNP, for many of the same reasons.
2
What is wrong with the DA?
THE 2019 GENERAL ELECTION saw the Democratic Alliance (DA), South Africa’s second-largest and by far its most multiracial party, losing support and seats for the first time in its existence of nineteen years and seven elections.
The party slipped nationally from 22,3% support and 4 091 584 votes in 2014 to 20,8% and 3 621 188 votes in 2019. Consequently, the DA’s number of seats in the National Assembly dropped from 89 to 84. On top of that, the DA lost its position as the official opposition in two provinces, Mpumalanga (to the EFF) and KwaZulu-Natal (to the IFP), and failed to meet its objectives of pushing the ANC down to below 50% support in Gauteng (by a whisker) and the Northern Cape (by a country mile).
How did this happen, is the decline a lasting trend, and what does the future hold for the DA?
The DA is the only party that attracts significant support from all South African population groups. Interestingly, the party’s Coloured and Indian support, as well as its support among white English speakers, largely remained stable at the previously high levels. In fact, the Indian and white English-speaking support remained the same to an astonishing extent from voting station to voting station, but the Coloured vote in the Western Cape in particular and specifically on the Cape Flats shifted around considerably, with the ACDP and Good (Patricia de Lille’s new party) increasing their share of the Coloured vote – Good, as a new party, naturally off a zero base. The shift of Coloured votes was quite complicated, but the big loser there was the ANC, not the DA.
The DA’s black support, despite mammoth efforts to expand it, also remained largely unchanged, although in many instances it manifested itself in totally different places than had been the case before (more about this interesting and unusual trend a bit later). The difference was that the party’s support from white Afrikaans-speaking voters declined dramatically, specifically in Gauteng and parts of the North West. That support mainly went to the FF Plus, and while it stands to reason that it is impossible to prove whether it is really such a neat sum, it comes as no surprise that the number of seats lost by the DA and those gained by the FF Plus are almost identical.
But before we examine those white Afrikaans speakers’ votes, let’s look at what is happening with the black DA vote. It is quite a strange story. As has been noted, the DA’s share of black voter support remained more or less the same, but especially outside the Western Cape it occurred in random spots, totally different from those of 2014. In many cases the party failed to hold on to black support in areas where the DA had shown encouraging growth in 2014, while new manifestations of significant black growth cropped up in completely different places without any clear geographic pattern.
I sought insight into this phenomenon from DA veterans. They didn’t find it surprising. Their explanation was that the DA’s black support depends to a large extent on individual strong black DA leaders in specific communities; the support follows the leader, and when the leader moves on to another area, the support will again crop up there, or in new places where new strong black leaders join the DA. Hence it is more to do with support of an individual than of a party, with the individual leaders and the party using one another in practice (of course not formally) to canvass support – quite often an opportunistic relationship of a transient nature. So the DA support flares up in certain places, sometimes dies down to a few embers, and then emerges again elsewhere.
This erratic pattern is of course far from desirable for the DA, and it is interesting to explore the difference in places where the DA’s black support is more stable and lasting. A good example is Kayamandi, the predominantly Xhosa-speaking township on the outskirts of Stellenbosch, where the DA’s figures have been increasing slowly but steadily. One of the main reasons for this is the continuous constructive involvement of the Stellenbosch DA in poverty alleviation in Kayamandi. It is not a project here and there before elections that makes the difference, but the knowledge among a growing number of residents that the party helps them keep the wolf from the door.
This isn’t really the usual role of a political party elsewhere, but such community involvement is what is required in South Africa to draw sustained voter support. The political party needs to be present on the ground and to be part of the community, all the time and with conviction. This may be more true in South Africa, but the principle actually applies worldwide. It is known as constituency work, and it is how elections are won – in between elections, not at election time. And it’s not news to the DA. Years ago the party’s former chief strategist Ryan Coetzee already confirmed this with thorough research, and concluded aptly that a councillor shouldn’t just be like a fire engine that comes swooping in with bells clanging after the crisis has already arisen. The councillor should be on the ground and involved all the time.
This is what the DA manages to do well specifically in the Coloured community and the white English-speaking community – the party’s public representatives are truly community leaders, people know who their councillor is and they make that councillor work for them, which is how it is supposed to be. Time and again it is reported in Die Son, the most popular daily among Coloured Afrikaans speakers in the Western Cape, that a family in crisis ‘contacted the councillor’ for assistance, for instance to rush a critically ill child to hospital. My favourite councillor in the country is Maude Goliath from Malmesbury in the Western Cape, who is deputy mayor of the Swartland municipality. For the beloved Auntie Maude, as everyone in her ward knows her, councillorship is a calling. A resident of the ward, the journalist Johann Maarman, is fond of recounting that on days the refuse truck fails to arrive, Auntie Maude drives from door to door in her car and transports the rubbish to the waste disposal site herself. This is but one example of how she serves her community. In my view, she is a model for all municipal councillors.
The DA often also manages to do this successfully at council level in other communities, including predominantly white communities in rural and suburban areas. For several of my friends and relatives, the local DA ward councillor’s WhatsApp group is the quickest source of community news, and people participate in it energetically. It depends a lot on the quality of the councillor, and an outstanding councillor is an asset to any party. Accordingly, in the 2019 elections the DA fared relatively well in many places countrywide where the DA councillor is particularly good. But this is not an absolute rule – the political dynamics of some places make it tough going for a councillor whose party in the first place strives after reconciliation, non-racialism and strict governance. Besides, by 2019 the constant bickering at provincial, national and leadership level in the DA had reached a point where even the most service-oriented local DA representative had to work much harder to convince his or her voters that the DA was still the party of professionalism, reconciliation, good governance and excellence.
As noted earlier, this was more of a problem for white Afrikaans-speaking and black voters than for voters in other communities, so let’s focus on those two electorates. I don’t profess to be much of an expert on the DA’s showing among black voters. In brief, however, as far as I could establish from feedback from DA leaders and news coverage of black township voters from print, electronic and social media sources, as well as anecdotal feedback from black friends and acquaintances, the reasons why the DA failed to reach their envisaged growth in black communities are all too familiar. The biggest challenge is that the DA indeed does reasonably well among the urban black middle class in particular, but has failed to make even modest