Twenty years ago, the ANC won Joburg with a majority of 62%. Today, the party is polling at less than 20%. How the mighty have fallen.
Social Research Foundation (SRF) and The Common Sense data released last week showed the ANC drawing a meagre 18% support in the metro, against the DA’s 42%, MK’s 13% and ActionSA’s 10%.
That’s 12 percentage points down for the ANC from the 30% it reached in the first quarter, by the SRF’s count.
It must be a huge wake-up call for a party whose history is so deeply intertwined with the city. Joburg, after all, holds no shortage of significance for the ANC. It’s the site of the signing of the Freedom Charter; of the preliminary hearings for the 1956 treason trial; of the raid on Liliesleaf; of the law firm of Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo; of the homes of Mandela and Walter Sisulu; of Shell House — its first headquarters after the party’s unbanning in 1990 — and later of Luthuli House; and of the Soweto uprisings, which reshaped the party’s armed struggle.
The city was a core of resistance during apartheid and a bastion of party support thereafter.
It is, if you will, the moral centre of the party. And, at the same time, symbolic of its moral decline.
This is poor leadership writ large; a failure to govern effectively, or indeed at all. At best, the ANC in Joburg has abdicated responsibility for the running of the city. At worst, many of its own cadres have been active participants in, and beneficiaries of, grand-scale looting.
So it’s no surprise the city’s residents have turned on it. When taps run dry, lights don’t work, refuse goes uncollected, street lights and traffic lights are on the fritz, pockmarked roads swallow car tyres whole, crime is endemic, billing is a disaster, unemployment is rife, hijacked and abandoned buildings abound, the staunchest of supporters would question their loyalty.
When it’s accompanied by a shrug from the government, empty handwaving, the raising of rates and the passing of yet another unfunded budget, alienation spills over into anger.
Make no mistake, the residents of Joburg are angry. And the current polls make clear precisely who they blame for the state of the city.
Of course, the 18% figure comes with some caveats — not least that the ANC election machine has yet to grind into gear and that support will likely increase once the party eventually finalises its mayoral candidate and campaigning, and political spin, begin in earnest.
But that may be too little, too late. Certainly, it won’t be enough to win it anything approximating an outright majority. If it is not saved by a governing pact with the DA, it will have to cobble together an unwieldy coalition of the compromised.
There is so much to read into this moment. But for the ANC to have lost Joburg so ignominiously is a damning statement that reveals much of why South Africa finds itself where it is today.
