ANC: Dominant and Dynamic

It might seem counterintuitive that South African politics are so intensely fought. After all, South Africa is and will continue to be a de facto one-party state. In national elections the African National Congress (ANC), the party of liberationist hero and global icon Nelson Mandela, has never failed to garner at least 62 percent of the vote, with no opposition party ever earning more than 21 percent. Yet to think of South Africa as a one-party state, thereby linking it with the 'Big Man'-dominated politics that prevail in much of the rest of the African continent, would be to miss the dynamism inherent in South African politics.

This dynamism is an important factor to consider in South Africa, where detractors of the ANC, neutral observers, and in their most honest moments even party supporters, tend to fret about the nature of the country's political dynamic. The country is going the way of its shattered neighbor to the north, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, say the detractors. Neutral observers worry that the country has fallen so short of its promise in the early Mandela years to be the 'New South Africa', the 'Rainbow Nation of God' that had overthrown the shackles of Apartheid without descending into civil war. And even honest ANC stalwarts will look back wistfully at Mandela's one term, which ran from 1994 to 1999 before 'Madiba' defied the tradition of leaders across the continent and stepped down from office, cementing his virtuous legacy and giving way to Thabo Mbeki, a more star-crossed leader.

While the promise of the 1990s was probably unrealistic for a country that continues to deal with the after effects of white supremacy that privileged some 10 percent of the population at the expense of the masses, South Africa is not going the way of Zimbabwe. While there is lots of work yet to do and there are certainly some worrying signs emanating from the ANC, the reality is that South Africa's democracy is strong, and the seeming power of the ANC is mitigated by a strong and vibrant tradition of internal disagreement. Looking at South African politics and seeing a country dominated by the ANC is to miss the brunt of the country's political dynamic.

The opposition

The country's opposition groups pose little serious challenge to the ANC. The current official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), won just over 16 percent of the vote in the last election, much of that in the Western Cape province where the party's Cape Town base is situated. Perceived (not inaccurately) as a predominantly white party, the DA under the leadership of Helen Zille may have consolidated its role as the main voice of opposition in the country, but a viable challenge exists from the white right (or even center), no matter how far removed from the old National Party (NP) and its various post-1994 permutations it might want to see itself. (The Nats, the party of Apartheid, managed to win just over 20 percent of the vote in the epochal 1994 elections, but within one election cycle had morphed into something called the New National Party, now on its way to obsolescence.)

The DA recently announced to much fanfare that it is going to merge with the Independent Democrats (ID) and that party's respected leader Patricia de Lille. The ID are seen as a more multi-racial party, having emerged from the old Pan African Congress, but given that they also managed less than one percent of the vote in the 2009 elections, down from less than two percent in 2004, the much ballyhooed merger is more sound than fury, and the party that emerges is still going to represent a challenge from a predominantly white party.

A seemingly more promising political coalition emerged in 2008 from a breakaway faction of the ANC, the Congress of the People (COPE). Headed by Mosiuoa Terror' Lakota, Mbhazima Shilowa and Mluleki George, longtime ANC stalwarts, and representing a potential populist bent and a frustration with corruption and the sense of privilege with which many in the ANC seemed to govern, COPE had high hopes heading into the 2009 elections. The new party even had the ANC running scared, as indicated when the ruling party tried to challenge COPE's name in court, believing that the insurgents were trying to hijack some of the ANC's history. That challenge failed, but so too did COPE's election campaign, sputtering out at 7.42 percent of the vote. COPE still holds long-term promise if it can develop an electoral infrastructure, a coherent platform that moves beyond simply challenging the ANC and sound, trustworthy leadership. In the past 18 months or so, however, the party has descended into internal bickering and fiscal uncertainty.

So that would seem to leave the ANC, triumphant if a bit battered from criticism about corruption, economic ineffectiveness, seemingly intractable crime and a general sense of malaise that has descended over much of the country's political class, which is to say, seemingly much of the country. Yet to succumb to such fatalism would be to miss out on much of the promise of South Africa, even if that promise seems to be couched in infighting, chaos and self-inflicted wounds.

One-party machine, many working parts

For if South Africa appears to be a one-party state with the ANC destined to dominate for the foreseeable future, it does not mean that ANC rule is monolithic. After all, this is a party that effectively overthrew President Thabo Mbeki from within, replacing him with the flawed populist Jacob Zuma. Both men came from the liberation struggle in which they were central figures. Both had served as vice president - Mbeki under Mandela and Zuma under Mbeki until Mbeki removed him from office when corruption allegations swirled. Both are deeply flawed as leaders - Mbeki largely because he always came across as technocratic, arrogant and distant, Zuma because the taint of personal malfeasance never seems to escape him, given that he has been charged with rape and corruption in recent years, charges he has escaped even as their stench has trailed him. And, perhaps most important, their very human failings are particularly stark when compared with the sainted Mandela.

But the divisions that doomed Mbeki and gave way to Zuma also reveal something else about the ANC. The party might seem like a disciplined machine, but some of the country's most intense divisions take place within the ruling party. Keep in mind that the ANC is actually a governing coalition that is made up of the 'tripartite alliance' of the ANC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and the South African Communist Party (SACP). The ANC proper has the lion's share of power within the coalition, but the leftist trade unionists and Communists are vocal in their discontent with what they perceive as the ANC's embrace of neoliberal economic policies; they hope to drag the ANC leftward toward more distributionist economic policies.

Such a shift is unlikely to happen within the ANC, which means that COSATU and the SACP will eventually have a decision to make: Will they continue to remain in the ANC coalition knowing that while the perks of access to power are great, their voice will always be relatively marginalized? Or will they follow the path of COPE, break away from the ANC and try to forge their own opposition? If they did so the left party would have wide support from labor and strong organizational capacity for a modern political party. They would almost certainly displace the DA as official opposition upon formation.

But the new alliance would also undoubtedly have to make the conscious decision to give up their access to power. The party that would emerge would be a formidable opposition force, to be sure, but it would still find itself in, a possibly distant, second place to the ANC. This break is likely to happen someday. But given the current South African political situation, it is not likely to happen easily.

COSATU and the Communists might find themselves with one other ally. Back in the 1940s a group of young ANC cadres found themselves increasingly at odds with an older, more moderate generation of ANC leaders, who they saw as unwilling to challenge the increasingly draconian tenor of white supremacy. These young people, who included legendary liberationist stalwarts Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, formed the ANC Youth League in 1944 and by 1948 had wrested the ANC from the hands of their elders, changing the course of South African history.

Today's Youth League is a pale imitation of its historic self, but that does not mean that it does not have pretensions of past grandeur. ANC-YL President Julius Malema sometimes comes across as a clown. He once insisted he and his young cohort would "kill for Zuma," and at rallies he has insisted on singing liberation songs with lyrics about killing whites - songs that are still popular among many millions of South Africans and share a specific historical context that should not be overlooked. Malema has since appeared to turn against Zuma, and the Youth League seems determined to have a stronger voice in national politics. It is possible, depending on the direction the ANC takes, that the Youth League might find its voice moving forward in a breakaway alliance, rather than within the ANC.

What seems like unchallenged ANC dominance, then, is instead a situation where within the seemingly dominant political culture there exists a dynamic and hard fought politics. After the 2004 elections, the ANC had enough of a majority to be able to change the constitution without resorting to alliances with other parties. It is telling that the party never seriously considered doing so, which speaks both to the strength of the post-1994 constitution, but also to the fact that the ANC is far from monolithic.