TOM EATON | ANC vs MKP: who’s punishing who? Those pollsters may know this one too

Votes are still being counted, but it’s becoming clear that the three biggest winners in the 2024 election are Jacob Zuma, the pollsters who saw this shock result a month ago, and the property market in the Western Cape.

Yes, it’s all still a bit up in the air right now, but it does seem that South Africa has decided to escape out of the frying pan of ANC rule by plunging itself into the fire of — well, let me not pre-empt the coalition horse-trading.

Media hot takes spoke of voters “punishing” the ANC by voting for Zuma’s MK Party in large numbers, an angle repeated by the party itself in a press release late on Thursday in which MKP claimed “KZN people are punishing the ANC of Ramaphosa for mismanaging the country”.

If this is true, it seems very odd to punish the ANC for years of misrule by flinging yourself into the arms of a man who was central to that misrule, but then again if one person can vote EFF in Orania, then anything is possible.

For the rest, however, these elections have been a spectator sport, and the DA and even the EFF have been made to look flat-footed and stagnant by the explosive arrival of MKP.

What also seems clear is that South African politics is a game played between factions of the 2008 ANC, with everyone else watching from the sidelines.

If the projections are correct, then about 42% want the ANC of Ramaphosa, perhaps in the vain hope that it might somehow return to being the ANC of Thabo Mbeki or even Nelson Mandela; about 13% want the more populist, traditionalist version embodied by Zuma’s administration; and about 8% want the radical rhetoric and militarism of the old Youth League, currently called the EFF.

For the rest, however, these elections have been a spectator sport, and the DA and even the EFF have been made to look flat-footed and stagnant by the explosive arrival of MKP.

Certainly, Julius Malema will need to engineer a spectacular coalition deal for his party if he is to silence murmurs of anxiety and dissent about his leadership. John Steenhuisen’s position is probably safer, but it is getting harder for the DA to explain to the South African public (at least the public that doesn’t live in the Western Cape) what exactly the party is for.

One notable exception has been the Patriotic Alliance which, if the projections are close, has doubled since the last election. Gayton McKenzie is on the up, which means South Africa is about to get a big dose of a brand of politics that’s still relatively new to us but all too familiar in the US, where QAnon conspiracy saturates the far right. McKenzie has already claimed to have been approached by the Illuminati, and made (and broken) at least one promise that would make Donald Trump blush, but a large number of South Africans clearly want what he's offering, so here we are.

Speaking of where we are — and the people who tried to tell us we were going there — I can’t end this without bending the knee to the pollsters. When groups like the Social Research Foundation told us a month ago that MKP was going to get more than 8% and that the ANC was going to fall below the mid-40s, I thought they were smoking their algorithms, but at the time of writing I was wrong and they were impressively — some might even say spectacularly — right.

The last word, however, should go to economist and author Antony Altbeker, who, in a throwaway tweet on Thursday, cut to the heart of what has happened and what is likely to happen in the coming months.

“MK,” wrote Altbeker, “is an organised faction of the ANC that has re-established the importance of its constituency to the mother ship and will expect to be reintegrated on favourable terms. CHANGE MY MIND.”

I don’t think I will, because I don’t think I can. The last results will probably trickle in for days, but for me, that’s the election done and dusted.