A critical moment in our political history

Summary - ANC victory in the upcoming elections may be a foregone conclusion but there are several imponderables that make these elections both important and intriguing. Will the ANC win two-thirds of the votes? How will the ballot go in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape? And which party will be the beneficiary if, as appears likely, the percentage poll is lower than in 1999 and 1994? More significant than these issues, however, is the still inchoate process of political realignment currently taking place, which could eventually break the racial mould in which our politics has been cast. Whereas previously the major parties seemed to be consolidating along racial lines, with the partnership between the predominantly black ANC and IFP on the one hand and the merger between the white-led DP and NNP on the other, a new configuration is now emerging. The NNP and the ANC are co-governing the Western Cape, while rapprochement between the IFP and the DA has led to the inclusion of the DA in the government of KwaZulu-Natal as well as to the formation by the two parties of a coalition for change. If these partnerships mature into durable alliances, they could transform the political landscape into one in which party allegiance is based on policies rather than on skin colour. This will be a salutary development, especially if the DA/IFP coalition attains enough support to become a viable alternative to the ANC. At present, however, despite the fact that the NNP has become conspicuously browner and the DA has had some success in extending its appeal beyond its traditional white support base, race is still a major – if not the major – determinant of political allegiance. This is partly for historical reasons but partly also because affirmative action and black empowerment have accentuated race consciousness, kindling a sense of entitlement among blacks and resentment among whites. Will the nascent realignment succeed? Much depends on how the ANC deals with unemployment and HIV/Aids. If it fails to tackle these two problems decisively it could alienate a number of its black constituents, who could then be wooed away by the DP/IFP coalition. Thus while this election may seem mundane, future historians may view it as one in which an important shift away from race-based politics gained momentum. ANC victory in the upcoming elections may be a foregone conclusion but there are several imponderables that make these elections both important and intriguing. Will the ANC win two-thirds of the votes? How will the ballot go in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape? And which party will be the beneficiary if, as appears likely, the percentage poll is lower than in 1999 and 1994? More significant than these issues, however, is the still inchoate process of political realignment currently taking place, which could eventually break the racial mould in which our politics has been cast. Whereas previously the major parties seemed to be consolidating along racial lines, with the partnership between the predominantly black ANC and IFP on the one hand and the merger between the white-led DP and NNP on the other, a new configuration is now emerging. The NNP and the ANC are co-governing the Western Cape, while rapprochement between the IFP and the DA has led to the inclusion of the DA in the government of KwaZulu-Natal as well as to the formation by the two parties of a coalition for change. If these partnerships mature into durable alliances, they could transform the political landscape into one in which party allegiance is based on policies rather than on skin colour. This will be a salutary development, especially if the DA/IFP coalition attains enough support to become a viable alternative to the ANC. At present, however, despite the fact that the NNP has become conspicuously browner and the DA has had some success in extending its appeal beyond its traditional white support base, race is still a major – if not the major – determinant of political allegiance. This is partly for historical reasons but partly also because affirmative action and black empowerment have accentuated race consciousness, kindling a sense of entitlement among blacks and resentment among whites. Will the nascent realignment succeed? Much depends on how the ANC deals with unemployment and HIV/Aids. If it fails to tackle these two problems decisively it could alienate a number of its black constituents, who could then be wooed away by the DP/IFP coalition. Thus while this election may seem mundane, future historians may view it as one in which an important shift away from race-based politics gained momentum.

The broad outcome of the pending general and provincial elections is as predictable to the ordinary citizen as it is to the most astute psephologist1, largely because voting in South Africa appears to take the form of a racial poll in which black trumps white decisively.

Identification of the winning party is a simple exercise for a related reason: one party, the African National Congress (ANC), has won the allegiance of a preponderantly large proportion of the decisive indigenous black2 vote, while the minority white vote, and that of the smaller coloured and Indian communities, is split between three or four parties. It is difficult to precisely quantify the share of the black vote that is pledged to the ANC. But, excluding blacks of voting age who for one reason or another abstain from voting, extrapolation from opinion polls puts the proportion of politically committed black voters who have attached themselves to the ANC over the past decade or more in the 80-90 per cent bracket3.

The apparent inevitability of another resounding ANC victory after its triumphs in 1994 and 1999 does not, however, deprive the forthcoming election of all interest, still less divest it of all importance.

There is, of course, the intriguing question of whether or not the ANC will win two-thirds of the votes, having failed to do so by the narrowest of margins in 1999, when it won 66,35 per cent of the vote. The result is, moreover, in doubt in the two provinces where the ANC has not yet won an outright majority of the votes, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape. ANC determination to make itself the dominant party in both provinces is matched by a countervailing resolve by the Democratic Alliance (DA) and its newly acquired coalition partner, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), to thwart it. Another imponderable is whether the election will be characterised by a lower percentage poll than in 1994 and 1999 (when Focus went to press nearly 8 million out of an estimated 27 million eligible voters had not yet bothered to register, indicating substantial voter apathy). If that turns out to be the case, will the major beneficiary be the ANC, as predicted by a Markinor poll4, or the DA, as anticipated by the Human Science Research Council (HSRC) poll5?

More important than all these as yet unresolved issues is a still inchoate process of political realignment, one which, if consolidated by the election results and the campaign that precedes them, has the potential to break the racial mould into which, metaphorically speaking, South African politics has been cast. Instead of the alignment that appeared to be developing in the immediate aftermath of the 1999 election, in which the main adversaries were identified by race, a new configuration is beginning to rise on the political landscape. Far from a consolidation of the rapprochement between the predominantly black ANC and Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) - which have been coalition partners in central government since 1994 and in the provincial government of KwaZulu-Natal since 1999 - and of the merger between the white-led Democratic Party (DP) and the New National Party (NNP), there has been a major reshuffle. Following the NNP's withdrawal from the DA in late 2001, the NNP has signed a co-operative governance pact with the ANC, and the two parties are now co-governing the Western Cape. At the same time there has been growing estrangement between the ANC and the IFP, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, and a concomitant entente cordial between the IFP and the DA, leading to the inclusion of DA in the IFP-led provincial government in KwaZulu-Natal and - even more important - the formation between the parties of a coalition for change.

If these two rival nascent partnerships between black and white-led parties mature into durable alliances, they have the potential to create a political divide between adversaries whose ranks include people of all colours and creeds and whose differences are about policies and the means used to implement them, not skin colour. If that happens, it will be a salutary development for South Africa. If in the process the coalition for change attains the critical mass necessary for it to become a viable alternative to the ANC as the governing party in post-apartheid South Africa, that will be an added bonus. The last point should not be interpreted to infer that the ANC is a malevolent political force: far from it, considering the ANC's central role in liberating South Africa from apartheid. But if South Africa's fledgling democracy is to grow, the emergence of a viable opposition coalition is indispensable. The peaceful transfer of power from one party to the next is the hallmark of democracy. Too much power concentrated for too long in the hands of one party is inimical to democracy, irrespective of whatever past benefits the party may have contributed to the nation. Power does not sanctify the holder of it, as Lord Acton observed during the reign of Queen Victoria. On the contrary: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely"6.

Before assessing the prospects of the emerging concords between the ANC and the NNP, and the DA and the IFP consolidating to become the catalysts of a reconfiguration of the existing political order, it is necessary to reflect on the present political situation, particularly in relation to these four parties. The political status quo is, as observed in the opening paragraph, one in which there is a strong - though not absolute - convergence between race (and/or ethnicity) and political allegiance.

The ANC, the Freedom Charter with its non-racial vision notwithstanding, is still predominantly a party rooted in the black indigenous community whose interests it represents and serves. Deconstruction of the racial identity of the citizens who voted for the ANC in the 1994 and 1999 elections shows that 94 per cent and 90 per cent of its votes respectively were drawn from the indigenous African community, meaning that the combined contribution of whites, coloureds and Indians was a relatively small 6 per cent and 10 per cent respectively7. The overriding importance to the ANC of the vote of black indigenes is self-evident from these figures. For those who believe a wider racial spread in the ANC support base would be a beneficial change, the present situation is disconcerting. The slight diminution in the indigenous black component of ANC support between 1994 and 1999, and a correspondingly small increase in support from non-black minorities mollifies but does excise the perturbation. A Markinor poll conducted in October and November of 2003 indicates that the racial breakdown of ANC support has not changed markedly since 19998. The ANC support base is still skewed in favour of the indigenous black majority. It does not represent the racial profile of the South Africa population as a whole, which should be the case for a party that stresses the importance of demographic proportionality in private corporations as much as public institutions. It is pertinent to note en passant that the blacks constitute 78 per cent of the total population, whites 10 per cent, coloureds 8,6 per cent and Indians 2,5 per cent9.

The DA - formed through a merger between the DP and the white-led NNP in mid 2000 - is still a largely white-led party. Psephologist Andrew Reynolds, of the University of Notre Dame in the United States, calculates that whites constituted 77 per cent of those who voted for the DP in 199910. Since then the DA, which consists of the DP and those members of the NNP who remained loyal to the DA instead of following the NNP leader Martinus van Schalkwyk when he withdrew from the DA to reconstitute the NNP at the end of 2001, has sought to increase its appeal in the black, coloured and Indian communities, with some success. The white component of its support base is smaller than that of its DP progenitor, 66 per cent11 against 77 per cent. It is still disproportionately larger than the brown or black components, however. Thus, if the incremental blackening of the DA is gradually changing its hue from white to greyish, white is still the dominant ingredient of the grey.

The NNP, the linear descendant of the old National Party (NP) of apartheid infamy, though still white-led, has undergone a conspicuous process of browning in the past decade. Its decline from the party that ruled South Africa for 46 long years to one that won less than 7 per cent of the vote in 1999, and which is now hardly more than a regional party concentrated in the Western Cape, has been marked by a steady decrease in its share of the white vote. But by winning coloured support in the Western Cape and, its political foes in the DA contend, by attaching itself as an appendage to the ANC, it has managed to survive. Today the biggest racial component in the NNP support base is coloured. Half of its supporters (as distinct from its leaders) are coloured folk, against a third who are white, according to a recent Markinor survey12. Its indigenous black support is infinitesimal.

The IFP draws its support almost exclusively from indigenous blacks. Its black support is overwhelmingly Zulu-speaking and concentrated largely in KwaZulu-Natal. The black component of the IFP is even larger than that of the ANC, 95 per cent against 94 per cent13. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the IFP since the rise of the ANC as the indisputably dominant political force in South Africa has been its ability to confound the political pollsters and analysts who have predicted its disappearance as a political factor to be reckoned with. It has twice confounded psephologists who predicted that it would win a mere 2 per cent of the vote, winning roughly 10 per cent instead and twice emerging as the biggest single party in KwaZulu-Natal.

To sum up, there is a distinctive racial profile to each of the four largest parties. The ANC and the IFP are overwhelming black. The DA is largely white, though less so than in the past. The NNP - whose NP progenitor placed a law on the statute book in 1968 compelling multiracial parties to segregate on racial lines and prohibiting "interference" by one race in the political affairs of another - is more coloured than white, though its leadership is still mainly white. To record these facts is not to infer that political allegiances, like skin colour or hair type, are transferred genetically. They are not immutably attached to one race rather than another. They are in part a heritage from the apartheid past, when the dominant legal party, the NP, sought to mobilise whites in defence of the status quo, while the mainly black extra-parliamentary opposition, spearheaded by the ANC, sought to rally blacks in resistance to white hegemony and the concomitant consignment of blacks to the lowest rungs of the racial hierarchy.

South African history is, however, littered with accounts of people on both sides of the racial divide who broke ranks to either side with the "racial enemy" or to proclaim their loyalty to a cause that was beyond race and to seek to persuade their fellows to do the same. The missionary John Philip comes to mind. So do Bram Fischer, the Afrikaner communist leader who was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Albert Lutuli, a former ANC president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who was persecuted in his own country. Another of these political luminaries is former president Nelson Mandela, who in his statement from the dock in 1964, defined himself as an African patriot opposed to black domination as well as white domination. The statement contains a sentence of great relevance to the theme of the present article: "Political division based on colour is entirely artificial"14.

Yet that artificiality has endured. Today, a decade after the first fully democratic election of 1994 and nearly 15 years after Mandela was released from prison, race appears to be a major - if not the major - determinant of political allegiance. It contradicts Mandela's proud assurance that the once rigid distinction between white and black is passé in contemporary South Africa, that, in his words, there are neither white nor black South Africans, only South Africans15. The anomalous persistence of race as an important factor in the political equation in post-apartheid South Africa demands explanation.

Part of the answer is that the heritage of the past still weighs heavily on South Africa. Centuries of racial discrimination and its adverse effects have scourged deeply and destructively into South Africa's collective psyche. South Africa cannot be transformed overnight any more than Rome could be built in a day. There is more to it than that, however.

The ANC-led government's policy of affirmative action and black empowerment has sustained and even magnified the race consciousness inherited from the past. It has kindled a sense of entitlement among blacks and stirred resentment in the minds of whites. Racial head-counting does not excise race consciousness from the public mind. It accentuates awareness of race as a determinant of one's position in the social order. These policies are justified by the ANC as essential if the injustices of the past are to be redressed. That may be so, though it is arguable that if it persists too long it leads to new injustices. The Freedom Front Plus articulates that fear when it pleads, in vain, for affirmative action not to be applied to the latest matriculation graduates, who, it bears reminding, were pre-pubescent children when Mandela was freed from prison.

What is not in doubt is that these policies are to the short-term advantage of the ANC's black indigenous constituency. They are also indubitably in the immediate interests of the ANC leadership whose hold on power depends on the loyalty of its constituency. They do not endear the ANC to the majority of whites, the more bitter of whom are increasingly wont to refer to historically disadvantaged blacks as the new South Africa's advantaged citizens. There is even a danger that the policy of demographic representativity as interpreted in the context of the Employment Equity Act will alienate coloureds and Indians, as their "over-representation" is whittled back to make place for "under-represented" indigenous blacks. Once that starts to happen, as is already the case in the SA Navy and SA Airways16, opposition parties will take up cudgels on behalf of the beleaguered minorities and thereby further delay the dissolution of race-based politics.

Whether the emerging political realignment referred to earlier will succeed in dissolving convergence between racial and political divisions is a moot point. Nothing is written in stone. There are too many variables. But a political contest that pits the loosely aligned ANC-NNP duo against the newly formed DA-IFP coalition has a better chance of doing so than the old dichotomy between the ANC-IFP coalition government and the DP-NNP opposition alliance. A commitment by the ANC election manager in Gauteng, Paul Mashatile, to take the ANC message into the predominantly white suburbs will help to realign political divisions. So, too, will the pledge of the ANC provincial leader in the Western Cape, Ebrahim Rasool, to reconcile "coloured insecurity" over affirmative action in favour of indigenous blacks with "African marginalisation"17. The steady if unspectacular growth of indigenous black support for the DA, particularly minority communities in the indigenous majority, is another hopeful sign18. Much will depend, too, on whether the NNP emerges from the pending election with enough support to make continuation of the co-operative understanding with the ANC worthwhile to the ANC. If the NNP holds the balance of power in either the Western Cape or KwaZulu-Natal, the ANC will certainly find it expedient to prolong the understanding. The more recent coalition for change may encourage the DA to push harder for black members, and to pursue more vigorously policies that are attractive to blacks. The psychological impact on the DA leadership of addressing the serried ranks of blacks at a joint rally with the IFP in Soweto last year comes to mind. It may, similarly, offer the IFP an opportunity to regain the white support that it won in the run-up to the 1994 election but subsequently shed when, presumably for reasons of strategy, the IFP appeared to concentrate its resources on consolidating its Zulu power base against the ANC threat in KwaZulu-Natal and, to a lesser extent, in Gauteng.

Much will depend, however, on how the ANC deals with the huge problems of unemployment and HIV-Aids. If it cannot reduce them to manageable proportions, if it is perceived to pander to the rich black elite rather than alleviate the plight of black proletarians, or if it stumbles indecisively in implementing its new commitment to provide anti-retroviral drugs to people living with Aids, it may alienate a significant component of its black constituency. If so, the ANC's weakness will be the DA-IFP coalition's opportunity, especially as the coalition partners have identified unemployment and HIV-Aids, in addition to crime, as issues on which the ANC-led government has failed so far.

The pending election may seem to be a mundane voting ritual compared with the momentous election of 1994. Future historians may, however, see it as one in which an important shift away from the old race-based political order gained momentum.

Endnotes
1 Derived from the Greek word psephos or pebble (as used for voting in the Athenian Assembly), psephology is the statistical study of voting trends.
2 The phrase indigenous black is not meant to infer that members of the minority communities are not Africans in the broad inclusive sense of the term: i.e. people who are born in and/or who owe their loyalty to Africa in general and South Africa in particular, irrespective of whether their forbears came from a different continent or not. It is chosen as an alternative to the exclusive use of the term African by the ANC to refer to indigenous blacks as distinct from South Africans who may be lighter skinned but nevertheless regard themselves as Africans in the inclusive sense of the word.
3 The calculation is that of Lawrence Schlemmer, a director of MarkData.
4 Business Day, 16 January 2004.
5 The Star, 25 November 2003.
6 Alan and Veronica Palmer, A Dictionary of Historical Quotations.
7 Election 99, South Africa: From Mandela to Mbeki. Edited by Andrew Reynolds.
8 The Star, 16 January 2004.
9 South Africa Survey 2002-2003, published by the Institute of Race Relations.
10 Reynolds, Op Cit.
11 The Star, 16 January 2004.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Quoted in Julie Frekderikse's The Unbreakable Thread, Non-Racialism in South Africa.
15 Ibid.
16 Southern Africa Report, 9 January 2004.
17 The Star, 16 January 2004 and Mail & Guardian 16 to 22 January 2004.
18 Focus 32, 4th Quarter 2003.