South Africa’s ruling party could lose power after 30 years

Semafor Signals

Insights from The Conversation, Bloomberg, and The Africa Report

The News

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the country will hold elections on May 29, in a vote that could see the ruling African National Congress (ANC) lose its hold on power after 30 years in government.

Opinion polls suggest the ANC will lose its majority for the first time since Nelson Mandela led the party to power following the end of Apartheid in 1994, as high youth unemployment, corruption, and power outages continue to plague South Africa.

The election, in which independent candidates are being allowed to run for the first time in an attempt to invigorate apathetic voters, will see South Africans elect 400 parliament members, who will in turn select the president.

SIGNALS

ANC support has dropped due to corruption

The ANC’s plummeting popularity is widely blamed on rampant corruption, including a high-profile case that led former President Jacob Zuma to resign. A recent poll by Ipsos South Africa put its support at well below 50%. While the party came to power claiming the moral high ground and promising change, its graft record has become “a cause of great shame,” one longstanding party member wrote in his resignation letter, stating that “The corruption we once decried is now part of our movement’s DNA.” Young voters have thrown their support behind alternatives such as the self-described anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). South Africa’s third-largest party has gained ground since its founding in 2013 by portraying itself as the “true custodian of the values the ANC espoused during the anti-apartheid struggle,” two political scientists wrote for The Conversation. The EFF’s campaign has enabled Black South African voters to shift the party they support without changing their political orientation, they argued.

Massive unemployment leads South Africa’s youth to seek alternative careers

The ANC’s election prospects have been dented by chronic joblessness in Africa’s third-largest economy, which has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. More than 32% of people are out of work and almost 60% of those aged 15-24 are struggling to enter the workforce, according to official government statistics. “The economy is simply not growing at an adequate rate to sustainably boost long-term employment prospects,” one analyst told Bloomberg. A further three million people are classified as “discouraged work-seekers,” according to The New York Times, who have largely given up trying to find a job after what may be years of failing to secure employment.

Some university graduates are abandoning hope of finding conventional careers and instead working as “drop-shippers” — taking pictures of goods from Chinese e-commerce websites and selling them on social media — but they face risks as tax authorities crack down on illegal imports, Rest of World reported. In a troubled economy, Black women — who have the highest unemployment rate — are the most vulnerable to crime and poverty, The New York Times reported. Society has “normalized the plight" of black women experiencing poverty, unemployment, and gender-based violence, an opinion piece in the Mail & Guardian argued.

Power crisis exacerbates South Africa’s economic and environmental woes

The ruling ANC’s woes come amid a power crisis that is “crippling the economy,” Bloomberg reported. A new national energy plan aimed at addressing the issue has been criticized for not doing enough to address the country’s reliance on fossil fuels. Eighty percent of South Africa’s electricity comes from coal-fired power plants that regularly break down and are subject to frequent load-shedding, causing outages lasting up to 10 hours a day. The outages have led to national news broadcasts focusing on labor rights for employees due to concerns about safety and cut pay during load-shedding. Meanwhile, the country is set to miss its binding 2030 carbon emission targets under the Paris climate agreement, officials told Reuters. While it planned to achieve the goal by decommissioning eight coal-fired power plants, some now see this as unrealistic. “It’s very hard in the middle of a power crisis to be taking working coal-fired plants off the grid,” the executive director of South Africa’s presidential climate commission told the news agency.