Asser Ntinda
South Africans went to the polls on 29 May 2024 to elect their leaders for the next five years.
The results are telling.
The African National Congress (ANC) support base has potentially declined, which now forces it to marry one or two of the strongest leading parties to ensure a coalition and govern South Africa.
Whichever way things go, it will not be an easy marriage.
It comes with competing demands that define the mission and reasons for the existence of each party in that coalition.
Marrying the Democratic Alliance (DA) will defeat the reasons the ANC was formed for 112 years ago. It is like urging the Pope to share a podium with Karl Marx.
It is an unpalatable supper, which neither side will eat and swallow.
But with Cyril Ramaphosa in charge, and given murmuring within the circle of ANC comrades that he is a product of white monopoly capital (WMC), he may entertain that.
It will, however, divide and polarise the ANC further.
Many ANC hardliners, already throat-stuffed with Ramaphosa’s shenanigans, will not allow that.
Marrying both the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) may bring the ANC back to its former self.
That obviously means Ramaphosa has to go. His love with Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema is irreparably broken and irretrievably lost.
Someone else must be in the driving seat of the ANC to successfully manage that coalition.
Lindiwe Sisulu may be a kingmaker and fixer in this equation. She is a respected veteran of both the ANC and MK when the two were one.
She can still reconnect their severed blood veins and save the ANC.
There are not many ideological and economic differences amongst the three. Such differences can easily be harmonised to bring about a coalition that speaks to South Africans in their diversity.
But will the Stellenbosch mafia, like Johan Rupert, Christo Wiese and Jannie Mouton, still lurking and pulling strings behind Ramaphosa, allow such a coalition?
They still wield massive influence, often conducting the orchestra behind the scene.
If Ramaphosa steps aside, and the ANC, MK and EFF find someone with the credo of the late Chris Hani amongt themselves, the Stellenbosch Mafia’s influence will decline.
How the market reacts to this coalition is another issue, which may come with its own consequences. But we all know that the markets are manipulated to fit a narrative they seek to vindicate. Back home,
as expected, several local and international analysts and political gurus are now sharpening their pencils, predicting a similar fate for Swapo in November this year when Namibians, too, go to the polls to elect their president and members of the National Assembly for the next five years.
In their analysis, however, many of them missed factors that influenced South Africans to vote the way they did.
Our problems with our neighbour may be similar, but South Africa has its own unique patterns. It is erroneous to copy and paste that template here.
Our president is directly elected by the people. It is a winner-takes -all.
In South Africa, the president is elected by Parliament. The ANC needs a two-thirds majority to form a government as it pleases. It has lost that majority now. Hence, the talks about a coalition.
Swapo lost its two-thirds majority in 2019, but it still formed its government as it pleased. Therefore, to predict the demise of Swapo in November, based on what the ANC suffered in their elections, is nothing but an elementary piece of academic nonsense.
We do not have a Jacob Zuma here. Independent Patriots for Change
(IPC)’s Panduleni Iitula might have exaggerated his popularity with the votes he got in 2019 when he stood as an independent presidential candidate while he was still Swapo.
The game is different today.
In 2024, Iitula is IPC. Voters will treat him as such – not as the Swapo he was in 2019.
After all, he only returned to Namibia in 2013. That is 23 years after independence.
He only voted for the first time in 2014 at all if he did. He lived in Britain from 1981.
He only returned home after his dental practice in Britain fell on hard times.
Questions still hang over his head. Is he still British or Namibian or both?
The Namibian Constitution does not allow dual citizenship. That is is so much about him.
That, of course, does not mean Swapo should sleep comfortably in its slumber. We have biting problems on our shopping list to solve.
Unemployment, especially among the youth, poverty and inequality, poor health facilities, an ill-designed education system that produces graduates to look for jobs, instead of creating jobs, as well as an economy whose industrial base is still non-existent.
Thankfully, we have a new president coming in next year.
Swapo’s presidential candidate, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, embraces a multi-pronged economic agenda – one that seeks to grow our economy that will result in shared prosperity and wealth.
Her sure-footed anti-corruption stance will seal loopholes long exploited by the greedy in our midst.
In her economic agenda, Namibia is our shared business. Its destiny is our collective responsibility – rich and poor, and young and old.
A common thread that runs through all these economic framework measures is that tomorrow must be better that today. Swapo’s election manifesto, still to be released, fundamentaly speaks to that clarion call.
Swapo performed poorly in the 2019 elections because it went into such elections with its political heavyweights devouring and viciously feeding on themselves as if they had not known one another for years.
It was a sad movie to watch.
Such infighting caused Swapo to lose its revered two-thirds majority.
However, self-corrective measures taken at the 2022 Swapo ordinary congress and shortly afterwards are bearing fruits.
The people are responding accordingly.
Old members are coming back. New ones are joining Swapo en masse. In a nutshell, November 2024 will be 2004 and 2014 playing themselves out when former presidents Hifikepunye Pohamba and the late Hage Geingob were overwhelmingly ushered in as new presidents, respectively.
Today, too, we have two new faces leading us as we move towards the November elections – Nangolo Mbumba and Nandi-Ndaitwah.
They project a picture of unity and purpose, unburdened by past divisions, but massively buttressed on the principles of solidarity, freedom and justice.
The ANC went into last week’s elections torn apart by its own political heavyweights in its leadership.
No South African president before and after apartheid has left the Union Building smiling, except Nelson Mandela.
Piet Botha suffered his own fate before apartheid ended, and so did those who followed after Mandela.
Frederik W de Klerk simply managed the transition from apartheid South Africa to democratic South Africa.
But the ANC’s infightings over the years, and the lessons learned and unlearned, had a heavy bearing on how South Africans voted the way they did last week.
Yes, South Africans went to the polls with high unemployment, a surging crime rate, corruption scandals and many other economic hardships and ills, fuelled and worsened by biting power cuts still hanging over their heads.
These ills could have spelled the total demise of the ANC.
They were hot campaign issues opposition parties fed on, but their influence on the outcome of the elections was limited.
If, for example, corruption was one of the determining factors, Zuma could not have fared very well.
Ramaphosa had his own unsightly Phala Phala skeletons in his cupboard, but the ANC still survived as a leading party, though with less majority to dictate the menu.
That, of course, does not mean South Africans celebrate corruption. They do not.
They simply looked at the bigger picture, punished the ANC for its wrongdoings, but kept it only powerful enough to seek a coalition to govern and keep it in check.
It is still difficult to figure out how the DA continues to grow its voters base – even in black communities, despite the fact that its genesis was apartheid.
Many black South Africans still bear unsightly scars of apartheid brutality. Have they all forgotten those scars?
Not really. Perhaps Mmusi Maimane’s tour of duty at the helm of the DA still has some multiplier effects on how some black South Africans look at the DA. But, still, it defies logic.
But, be that as it may, the ANC’s poor performance can be partly explained in the context of the Jacob Zuma factor.
The ANC went too far in flogging Zuma – even when he was literally finished politically.
You cannot flog a dead man endlessly.
A general who does not know when to stop the war often ends up incurring foolish and costly losses.
This was the worst mistake the ANC had made.
In the end, people simply came to sympathise with the repeatedly flogged Zuma as one of their own, and voted accordingly.
Zuma was not an ordinary man in the ANC.
Zuma, like Nelson Mandela, was and still is one of the true representatives of an injured and humiliated nation.
He was jailed for it, and fought in battles to set it free.
It is in that context that many South Africans have come to understand him. The pain he was going through became theirs, and they have also most certainly forgiven him for some of his past grave mistakes and scandals.
To be frank, Ramaphosa was not the best to succeed Zuma.
He still has to explain how that ANC congress was manipulated to get him into the Union Building.
The answers to that vexing paradox are sealed and locked up in CR17.
Ramaphosa has gone to every length to ensure nobody sees what money there is, and who contributed how much in the kitty.
CR17 is what has made Ramaphosa what he is as we know him today, to the irritation of some ANC hardliners.
He was, thus, not the right person to succeed Zuma.
He was most likely simply the first among equals.
In daylight, he was the “boss” of the ANC, but the real bosses were under him.
These “real ANC bosses” were fighting against WMC, which was unANC, but which Ramaphosa was pushing through.
Among them was Zuma. For this, both Ramaphosa and Thabo Mbeki before him, did not like Zuma.
In the end, they had Zuma smeared with corruption allegations to get him out of the way.
It was not an easy battle.
Even Mbeki, himself, as president then, could not easily get rid of Zuma, despite those “damaging allegations of corruption” against him.
But, Mbeki, unlike Ramaphosa, cut his teeth in the ANC and perfectly understood well the influence and residual power of the ANC nomenclature.
He knew and understood his limits. The ANC, under Ramaphosa, is now paying for that costly mistake Mbeki had long avoided. There is no wisdom and honour in flogging a dead man.
The ANC can still pick itself up, dust itself off and self-correct.
So far, an ANC/MK/EFF coalition is the only option on the table that can save the ANC.
But that coalition needs a safer pair of hands to manage it post these elections, and Sisulu should not be far from that table.
*Asser Ntinda is the former Editor-in-chief of Namibia Today.