LUCKY MATHEBULA | The ANC’s decline is no longer a warning. It is the political reality

New polling does not create the crisis confronting the liberation movement; it reveals how far a long-running loss of trust, state capability and political leadership has advanced.

The latest Social Research Foundation polling is severe enough to tempt sensationalism. The ANC stands at 34% nationally, the DA at 27%, the MK Party at 15% and the EFF at 7%.

In Johannesburg the ANC has collapsed to 18%; in eThekwini it is below 20% and trails both the MK Party and the DA; only in Tshwane, where it records 32%, does it remain within striking distance of its principal competitor.

Yet the most important conclusion is not that one poll has suddenly transformed South African politics. It is that the poll confirms a trajectory that the ANC has repeatedly diagnosed but has not arrested.

Earlier renditions on the movement’s decline argued that the ANC was progressively losing its claim to be the leader of society. The causes were not confined to campaign technique or the personality of a president. They lay in the hollowing out of branches, the displacement of ideas by factional contestation, weak succession planning, deteriorating municipal performance, corruption around the governing centre and an inability to adapt from dominant-party rule to competitive and coalition politics. The new numbers do not displace that argument. They sharpen it.

Structural decline, accelerated by scandal

The point of departure must be a distinction between cause and accelerator. Phala Phala and the daily revelations before the Madlanga commission are accelerators. They compound public suspicion that ethical renewal was a slogan rather than a governing ethic. They weaken the contrast that President Cyril Ramaphosa once represented between reform and the corruption of the preceding era.

But neither episode, on its own, explains why ANC support has been retreating across successive elections, why urban voters have been leaving for a decade, or why economic stagnation and unemployment have become embedded in the political order.

At the 2024 national election, the ANC received 40.18% and lost the parliamentary majority it had held since 1994. The present 34% reading therefore represents a further deterioration from an already historic defeat.

The movement can no longer plausibly present each setback as an isolated interruption before a return to normal. There is no old normal to which it can return. The electorate has already withdrawn unconditional trust and replaced it with contingent, transactional support.

This is consistent with several arguments by analysts that renewal and mere ecdysis are not the same thing. A movement does not renew itself simply by shedding one leadership slate for another while retaining the same organisational incentives, deployment practices and governing habits. Renewal requires a change in institutional character: who is recruited, how leaders are selected, what conduct is sanctioned, whether branches deliberate on policy, and whether deployed representatives are held to measurable standards.

Phala Phala has damaged more than Ramaphosa

The poll’s verdict on the president is politically devastating. Forty-four per cent of likely voters believe that the president is guilty of a crime, against 12% who believe he is innocent. Among black voters the split is 47% to 15%; even among ANC voters it is 37% to 29%. Around four in five respondents say he should be removed if found guilty.

These are perceptions, not judicial findings, and constitutional due process must remain non-negotiable. But elections are decided by political judgment, not only legal verdicts.

The more serious damage is to the ANC’s brand architecture. Ramaphosa was not marketed simply as another leader. He was presented as the proof that the ANC could correct itself. If the public no longer accepts that distinction, Phala Phala creates an equivalence, fairly or otherwise, between the moral claims of successive ANC administrations.

The Madlanga revelations widen the injury by shifting attention from one disputed episode to the condition of the state itself: political interference, criminal networks, compromised institutions and an executive apparently unable to impose ethical coherence.

The proximity of the criminal underworld to senior leaders of the ANC remains the most damaging to its brand. The largesse, conspicuous consumption and celebrity-convention-postures that the annual January 8 pilgrimage of the ANC assumed have attracted the wrong congregants into the proverbial church the ANC has been.

Ministers and senior leaders have accepted that criminals are their comrades, gang leaders gave them money in retail stores branded bags, and senior police generals and prosecutors have been exposed as part of a bigger ring of dishonesty.

The ANC’s danger is therefore not simply that voters may disbelieve one president. It is that they may conclude that the organisation is incapable of producing a qualitatively different governing class. A legalistic defence may protect office, but it cannot on its own repair political authority. Only candour, consequence management and demonstrable institutional reform can begin to do that.

The metropolitan collapse is the decisive battlefield

The metropolitan findings deserve more attention than the national headline. Johannesburg at 18% and eThekwini below 20% point to the potential unravelling of the ANC as an urban governing proposition.

This deterioration did not begin with the current scandals. The ANC lost control of major cities in 2016; by 2021 Johannesburg had already become a fragmented political market, with the ANC at 33.6% and voters dispersing among several alternatives. The present poll suggests that the urban retreat is acquiring a different quality: the party is no longer merely losing majorities but risks becoming structurally secondary in cities central to economic life and national political power.

This is where the migration issue becomes politically combustible. Public anxiety about undocumented migration, competition for work and pressure on municipal services is real. So too is the danger of vigilantism and xenophobic mobilisation.

The ANC is trapped between voters who believe the state has lost control and constitutional obligations that prohibit collective punishment. Its answer cannot be denial, moral lecturing or opportunistic imitation of anti-migrant parties. It must demonstrate lawful border administration, credible documentation systems, enforcement against exploitative employers and improved local services. Xenophobia flourishes where the state is absent and scarcity is politically weaponised.

Fragmentation does not mean a new hegemon

The ANC’s decline should not be mistaken for the rise of a replacement dominant party. The DA is broadly stable nationally and stronger in the Gauteng metros, but it has not yet converted administrative claims into a compelling cross-class national majority. Its growth remains constrained by social geography, leadership conflict and the uneven record of coalition government.

The MK Party is the principal beneficiary of ANC losses, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, but its appeal is concentrated and heavily personalised. The EFF remains flat despite the vacuum. The result is not alternation between two governing blocs, but deeper fragmentation.

This confirms another argument from our previous essays: coalition government is not a temporary inconvenience waiting to be outgrown. It is becoming the operating system of South African democracy. Yet the parties continue to approach coalitions as extensions of factional bargaining.

If November produces hung councils across the major metros, another cycle of unstable mayors, opaque agreements and administrative disruption will further damage trust in democratic government itself. The immediate obligation is therefore larger than partisan advantage. South Africa needs enforceable coalition rules, transparent agreements, professional appointments, budget continuity and mechanisms for resolving disputes without collapsing councils.

Motsepe’s lead is a message before it is a candidacy

Patrice Motsepe’s 37% lead over Fikile Mbalula’s 17% in the ANC succession preferences must be interpreted cautiously. Public polling does not elect an ANC president; branches and conference delegates do.

Motsepe has also publicly disavowed political ambition. Even so, the persistence of his lead matters. It reveals what voters believe the existing field lacks: competence, economic credibility, distance from factional warfare and the ability to restore confidence beyond the ANC’s traditional base.

The temptation will be to treat Motsepe as a personality-based rescue. That would repeat the error of investing organisational renewal in the perceived virtues of one leader; it seems not to have worked with Ramaphosa. Any eventual candidacy would raise legitimate questions about conflicts of interest, democratic accountability, organisational experience and proximity to the incumbent president.

More fundamentally, no successor can repair an institution that refuses to repair itself. The significance of the poll is therefore less that it predicts the outcome of 2027 than that it indicts the current leadership supply.

The real points of departure

Five propositions should frame the debate that follows from these results. First, the ANC’s decline is structural; scandals accelerate it but do not originate it. Second, the crisis of trust is inseparable from the crisis of state capability: voters experience the party through water interruptions, unsafe streets, unemployment, billing failures and deteriorating infrastructure. Third, urban decline is now the central electoral battlefield and cannot be reversed by rural majorities or liberation memory alone. Fourth, no opposition party has yet established a national hegemony, making coalition governance unavoidable. Fifth, succession without institutional renewal will merely redistribute responsibility for decline.

These propositions also clarify what should not be done. The ANC cannot communicate its way out of a performance crisis, litigate its way out of a legitimacy crisis or campaign its way out of an organisational crisis. Nor can the country afford parties that celebrate the ANC’s retreat while remaining unprepared to govern fragmented institutions. The polling is a verdict on the governing party, but it is also a warning to every contender that public patience with instability, impunity and municipal failure is running out.

The ANC still has agency. It can choose transparent accountability over reflexive protection, capable appointments over factional deployment, economic reform over ideological immobility, functioning municipalities over slogans and a disciplined coalition doctrine over improvised deals. But the available time is narrowing. At 34%, decline is no longer a future tense. It is the environment in which the movement now operates, and the electorate will judge whether it has finally understood the difference between losing support and losing its historical purpose.