South Africa: the ANC punished at the ballot box as taps run dry and the power goes off

According to the Guardian, South Africa was voting this Wednesday in local elections that look set to be tough for the African National Congress. The party, the former liberation movement that Nelson Mandela brought to power in 1994, at the end of apartheid, would remain the country's leading force. But polls credit it with less than a third of the vote, against 45.6% in the 2021 municipal elections and 40.2% in the 2024 general election. In the background: water cuts, power cuts (load-shedding) and crumbling infrastructure.

What the dispatch does not say, at this stage, is who will win the councils, or how the lost votes will be redistributed. We won't invent anything on that score. What remains is the structural question, and that is what interests us: how does a liberation movement end up being punished because the taps are dry?

Our reading, which commits only us: the answer lies partly in what Fanon and Cabral had anticipated. A national liberation without social transformation leaves a local elite inheriting the colonial apparatus. The flag changes, the structure stays. In 1994, political power passed to the Black majority; ownership of the economy, however, did not move at the same pace. A state that inherits a system built to serve a few, and then has to finance it under the watchful eye of the markets, struggles to make it a service for all.

One can add what Marxists call accumulation by dispossession: privatisations, service contracts, and the marketisation of water and energy turn common goods into sources of profit. Nothing in the dispatch documents this chain of causation in the South African case, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. But our editorial line is clear: when water and electricity become management problems rather than rights, it is the poorer neighbourhoods that pay first, with buckets and candles.

We should also beware of easy moralising. The ANC bears political responsibility, and its voters are drawing that conclusion with their ballot. But reducing anger to a quarrel over management would miss the heart of the matter. In 1984, at the UN rostrum, Thomas Sankara called for support for the ANC and for intensifying the campaign to free Mandela. That support rested on the idea that the end of apartheid would open up something more than a change of government. Forty years on, the promise is measured by the flow from the tap.

There is a trap: that disappointment be used to set people against one another, city against countryside, public against private, or to sell "the market" as the remedy for what it helped create. Who benefits from division? The question deserves asking before we celebrate the fall of a party.

The results will show the scale of the punishment. On their own, they will not tell us who will take back control of the water and electricity networks, or in whose service.