South Africa: the ANC at its lowest ebb, the liberation party running out of steam

According to France 24, the African National Congress (ANC), in power in South Africa since 1994, is heading for the worst electoral result in its history in the municipal elections. This trend emerges from the scores after half of the votes were counted, late on Thursday. Still according to the channel, a little over one voter in two went to the polls on Wednesday, according to the electoral commission. We know no more at this stage: neither the final score, nor the split of votes among the other parties, nor the possible coalitions in the municipalities.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

A liberation party collapsing at the ballot box is not just an accounting blip. In 1994, the ANC embodied the end of apartheid and the promise that the country would finally belong to those who had made it run. Three decades later, part of the electorate appears to be answering: and then what? The anticolonial thinkers, from Fanon to Cabral, had warned us. A national liberation that does not transform social structures leaves a local elite inheriting the state apparatus, its routines and its alliances. You change the flag, not the machinery. Our hypothesis: the ANC has become a governing party that manages, with the courtesy of a veteran, an economic order whose ownership remains largely concentrated and whose mines, land and finance have never been genuinely redistributed.

This is where the mechanics of dependency matter. An economy shaped to supply raw materials and cheap labour to the centre does not reform itself with speeches, especially when power first seeks to reassure the markets. A municipality, however, is where the result is concretely visible: water, electricity, waste, roads. The local vote is the moment when the promise of 1994 collides with the tap that does not run. We have no data from the dispatch on these services; that is precisely the question to put to the final results.

Then there is the politics of the apparatus. The ANC's decline puts at stake the future of Cyril Ramaphosa and the battle for his succession. We have no element on this point in France 24's reporting: this is a reading, not an observation. But the risk is well known. A weakened party splits, looks for a scapegoat, and divisions between workers, nationals against migrants, formal against informal employment, become a convenient bargaining chip. One should always ask who benefits from the split.

Abstention, finally, deserves as much attention as the score. Nearly one voter in two who stays at home is not apathy alone; it is also a verdict. The real question is not which party will pick up the votes lost by the ANC, but whether anyone will finally propose to touch the structure rather than manage it.