Dramas in the ANC

I RECENTLY went on an imaginary voyage to a desert island where I came across a South African who had been stranded since 1980.

 Naturally, she wanted to know what had become of her country over the past 32 years.

"When I left," she said. "I didn't give apartheid long. They may have suppressed the 1976 uprisings, but the official unemployment rate had just hit 10%, and in reality it was probably a whole lot worse. An illegitimate regime can't handle that much discontent."

"Unemployment actually escalated," I replied. "By 1994, when power was transferred to the majority in a peaceful election, the unemployment rate was 17%, and one in three young people was out of work."

"No wonder apartheid ended," the desert islander mused.

"Yes," I said. "In a nationwide poll conducted just after the ANC came to power, more than half of respondents said that they would measure democracy's success primarily by how much work was created." There was an awkward pause.

"Well then, what happened to the unemployment rate?" asked the islander.

"Well, by 2003, it was 27%. More than half of people under the age of 24 had never worked."

"That's extraordinary," the marooned South African exclaimed.

"Yes, democracy didn't even slow the rate at which unemployment was growing. The situation just slipped out of everybody's control, whether black or white, whether elected by a minority or the majority."

"That's such a sad story. How long did it take for South Africans to reject democracy?"

"Actually," I replied, "it's still going strong. About 56% of the adult population voted in the 2009 elections. That's pretty high for any country."

"But they couldn't have voted the ANC back in. Who runs South Africa now?"

"Well," I replied, "support for the ANC has slipped. They got almost 70% in 2004, and then 65.9% in 2009.

"And if that's confusing you, let me throw in this titbit: that 4% decline in support for the ANC; it wasn't poor people who stopped voting for the ruling party, it was middle-class people. Many of them voted for this breakaway party called COPE."

"What is it with poor South Africans?" she asked. "Have they forgotten what it was they wanted when they voted the ANC into power?"

"They're not as crazy as you make them sound," I replied. "You've said yourself that nobody has been able to create jobs in more than three decades. There isn't an opposition party that has come close to convincing the poor that it can create work. And, with the ANC, the poor know what they are getting. When it realised that it couldn't stop the jobs haemorrhage, the ANC poured money into welfare.

"More than a quarter of South Africans now receive state grants. People don't trust anybody but the ANC to maintain those grants."

"That's ridiculous," the islander said. "People didn't get rid of apartheid to go onto welfare."

"There are other things that make the ANC popular," I said. "I hope I can explain. We have this president, Jacob Zuma, who fought a terrible battle to get to where he is now. He was investigated for corruption, fired from his job, then stood trial for allegedly raping a woman half his age. Through this saga, he sang an old hero's song about an exiled soldier returning home to fight. The middle classes, black and white, condemned him as a barbarian. But he became very popular among the poor. This son of the soil, winning his battles against all odds: in his story, many poor people saw the story of what had happened to them since the end of apartheid."

The desert islander maintained a polite silence.

"The ANC is still the only force that can produce the sorts of dramas in which the poor recognise themselves," I continued. "There is this other figure, Julius Malema, a fiery young man who talks of confiscating white land and killing his enemies. Many poor people loathe him for speaking like a gangster. But he also expresses an urgency about being black that nobody but the ANC can do.

"The middle classes worry about all these dramas in the ANC. They think the ANC is dragging their country to the dogs. Yet these ANC dramas are actually binding the poor to democracy."

"But for how long can the ANC run a country on dramas?" the desert islander asked. "The poor will surely lose interest in them soon."

"Perhaps," I replied. "We can only hope that, by then, another party will have convinced the poor that it can create jobs."