The ANC in the Western Cape is engaged in a fitful internal struggle at the centre of it is poor electoral performance.
For the current and relatively new provincial leadership (elected in 2015), their pronounced vision was to take the ANC back to its glory days, the UDF days, the days when the ANC governed both the province and the City of Cape Town under Ebrahim Rasool.
Now there’s a need for all old and die-hard supporters who once gave everything for the success of the ANC in the province, who had lost their zeal for the organisation for various reasons, to once more rebuild this glorious movement.
The ANC in the Western Cape literally has no footprint in the coloured communities, something that is seen as a result of this reversal of ANC fortunes in the province; the loss of trust, the infighting, but ultimately, at least to some, the lack of coloured representation at Cape Metro structures.
The 2016 August election results seemed to emphasise this, where the ANC took all the wards in the African communities, but took almost nothing in the coloured and white communities.
It would take a much more representative ANC leadership to attract a much more representative electorate. The current disbandment and counter-disbandments seats firmly on these suspicions.
If we are to be cerebral in our analysis however, basing it on cold, hard facts, we may find that we are clinging to a false nostalgia of a past that does not exist and the blame game is merely based on a complete different set of facts.
The first is that the ANC has never ever won the Western Cape. This is the fact that not many people are aware of, a fact I will get to later.
One of the great politicians our province has managed to produce, whatever his faults, Max Ozinsky, punched irreparable holes in the highly overrated history of UDF in the Western Cape. Ozinsky, himself part of that UDF era, pointed out, however, that even in this highly charged era of the Democratic Front, the ANC only managed to get 34% of the electoral vote, almost exactly the same vote the provincial ANC got in 2014 (33%) and 2009 (31%). The years 2009 and 2014 are seen as the worst times in the ANC Western Cape.
According to Professor Cherrel Africa, who researched the voting patterns in the Western Cape: “The 1994 provincial result in the Western Cape, which put the National Party (NP) into power under the leadership of Hernus Kriel, shocked many activists and, indeed, many analysts, who had presumed that coloured voters, scarred by the effects of apartheid, would secure an ANC government in the province.” Of course, some of the same UDF leaders are now leading the ANC 101 veterans, still over-estimating their reach.
The 1994 results were labelled a racial/ethnic census with the coloured community feeling happier with Afrikaner rather than African nationalism (Johnson, 1996, pg 310).
Another explanation related to an “affinity” or “closeness” between coloured and white voters who share Afrikaans as a language (Reynolds 1994). Both race and cultural affinity were refuted by other researchers and authors, such as Giliomee & James (1996) and Eldridge & Seekings (1995). Africa said, “the 1994 election results in the Western Cape make sense if one considers the underlying fears of voters revealed by opinion polls conducted in the province in December 1993.
“The NP took advantage of these fears and ran a campaign that plays into these fears.”
A provincially representative opinion poll of respondents conducted for the Institute for Multi-party Democracy in December 1993 revealed a significant concern over violence. Overall, 53% of respondents cited violence as their primary concern.
Importantly, 27% considered that the ANC was likely to initiate violence. Furthermore, 34% saw the ANC as being responsible for encouraging political violence compared to 7% who thought the NP was doing so. At the same time, almost half (49%) felt that the NP was discouraging political violence, while 23% felt the ANC was doing so. This points to the power of the apartheid propaganda machine.
So the ANC performed as badly when we had all the UDF activists leading the election campaign as it is doing now with the so-called non-colour representative leaders.
This makes the UDF nostalgia a false and self-indulgent affair and the blame game on the Cape Metro leaders for poor performance not based on any facts.
The ANC did improve on its electoral gains peaking at 45% in the 2004 elections, managing to secure a coalition government, something that many people consider the best time in the ANC, but fail to acknowledge that even at this time, the ANC still did not have a majority vote and depended on desperate coalition partners (Ala DA today in Metros) to run the province.
In 1999, the ANC increased its share of the vote by 9.1% to 42%, then an extra 3% in 2004.
What then accounts for the 9.1% increase in 1999. Research shows that, first, voters in the province could observe the fact that the dire predictions of the NP for South Africa under ANC rule had failed to materialise. In its 1994 campaign the NP had painted a bleak future under an ANC-led government.
Voters in the Western Cape could watch the ANC as incumbents at national level. Instead of descent into chaos, post-1994 South Africa became a beacon of political hope around the world. Magubane (2000, pg 28).
This theme of voters in the Western Cape observing that the ANC as incumbents at national level is seen as the greatest contributor to ANC provincial gains into 2004, with the ANC adding another 3% to its 42% and finally taking over the provincial government in a coalition.
Then 2007 fell on us and took over the republic. It’s not in my capacity to package just what 2007 did to the positive trajectory the ANC in the Western Cape was experiencing for the 10 years prior.
In the Western Cape, 2007 had a very damaging effect on perceptions of the elected leadership.
An Afrobarometer survey conducted in late 2008 revealed that respondents in the Western Cape had very little trust in the newly elected ANC president. It showed that only 13% of respondents in the province, compared to 70% in KwaZulu-Natal and 68% in Mpumalanga, said they trusted Zuma “always” or “most of the time”. Matters of the ANC in the Western Cape have always seemed secondary to a Western Cape voter.
They are important, however. In addition to the national events in 2007, ANC structures in Western Cape were beset by their own problems. They were “in a complete shambles and the NEC (National Executive Council) had to rescue the province after an orgy of defections, expulsions and proliferation of parallel structures” (Butler 2009, pg 70).
Sounds Familiar? Still. The DA in the province saw these gaps and ran a campaign aptly called “Stop Zuma”. So this focus on each other, disbandment and expulsions is a post 2007 thing that is being used again now under some false nostalgia of opening space for racial representativeness and bringing back old ANC members who did wonders.
Most importantly though, as Africa puts it, the Western Cape is a politically unique province where electoral trends stand in sharp contrast to those in the rest of South Africa. While national outcomes have largely been with the ANC returning to power with large majorities, outcomes in the Western Cape have been far less predictable, this has resulted in three different political parties (namely the NP, which later became the New National Party – NNP; the ANC and the DA) running the province.
There is no certainty about the election outcome prior to the election, as is the case at national level.
The DA knows that its latest political fortunes are far from guaranteed; they are new and they will not last, especially if the ANC fixes itself nationally and the province begins to stabilise.
Diko is founder of PR firm YD Media