The highly anticipated political year of 2019 is upon us, promising the most unpredictable elections yet.
The ANC's invincibility in national and provincial polls is a matter of record, but the two big opposition parties, the DA and EFF, fancy their chances.
Will the ANC be held to below 50% of the vote for the first time? Will it retain the country's economic hub? Will SA see the first coalition government at national level? All are burning questions.
The ANC has gradually shed national support since 2004, but its nose was bloodied the most between the 2014 national elections and the 2016 local government elections, when it lost support in all provinces. It maintains its grip on rural provinces such as Mpumalanga, where it won 78% in 2014. But in the Western Cape its support dropped from 33% in 2014 to 26% in the local government polls.
In Gauteng the opposition continues to grow and the ANC suffered a drop of eight percentage points there between 2014 and 2016. If the 2016 elections had included provinces as well, the ANC would have lost Gauteng to a DA-EFF coalition.
What may exacerbate the ANC's woes are the internal divisions since Cyril Ramaphosa's narrow win against Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma at Nasrec last December. The losing faction has not embraced Ramaphosa, as seen in the "plot" to oust him, apparently involving former president Jacob Zuma and his close allies.
Ramaphosa cannot afford to go to the elections with a divided ANC: if he does, a further drop in support at the polls is inevitable.
The only way for the ANC to regain lost ground is to stick with the "radical economic transformation" (RET) rhetoric favoured by the anti-Ramaphosa faction. It is a message that appeals to the working class and unemployed youth, a voting group that most parties will target. Land expropriation without compensation, which the Ramaphosa faction was forced to embrace by the other grouping, remains a huge victory for proponents of RET.
This also represents the ANC's best chance to weaken its offspring, the EFF, which has dominated this issue since its formation. But can the party shed the image of corruption, patronage and state capture that has become entrenched under Zuma?
Ramaphosa has tried hard to cleanse the ANC of the ghost of state capture. He got rid of tainted ministers, removed rotten boards of state-owned enterprises and fired heads of government entities.
But to bag the all-important youth vote, he will have to do more than morning walks and endless summits. With youth unemployment at close to 60%, he needs to assure young people that he's doing his best to bring them into the mainstream economy.
His Youth Employment Service scheme that aims to create 1-million jobs in the next three years is a good start. But can he deliver on this ambitious project? The drive to attract R1-trillion in investments should assist, if the golden envoy tasked with this mission produces results.
The black middle-class vote is another fiercely contested terrain and this group has grown disillusioned with the governing party, particularly in Gauteng, thanks to corruption during the Zuma years and e-tolls.
It is important that the ANC retains Gauteng if it is to quash the notion that it is becoming a party that appeals mainly to those in secondary towns and rural areas. However, its hounding of Zuma could come back to haunt it in rural KwaZulu-Natal where the IFP and the National Freedom Party will be on hand to pick up the pieces.
But the ANC's woes do not necessarily represent a gain for the official opposition, the DA. It faces a similar, if not worse, challenge, despite the growth in support that its record of fairly stable and clean governance has earned it up till now. Its fumbling of the Patricia de Lille saga is a self-inflicted wound that is undoing many of its gains.
The poor handling of the De Lille fallout, especially by leader Mmusi Maimane, has exposed the DA's internal factions and left a void it must now desperately fill if it is to maintain a majority of the working-class coloured vote.
Furthermore, adding three metros to its stable - Tshwane, Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay - has only resulted in even bigger headaches for the DA. Controlling two of the metros with the support of the EFF has proved a poisoned chalice.
After a public fallout with its coalition partner the UDM in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, the DA's Athol Trollip was ousted as mayor, denying the party the opportunity to demonstrate to the city's electorate its ability to effectively govern and change lives.
For the DA to grow it needs to appeal to the black majority, a mission that often pits the old-guard liberals against so-called progressives. A fight over whether the party had abandoned the principle of BEE spilt into the open this year. Its opposition to land expropriation without compensation will further alienate those black voters who still view the DA as a white party.
For the EFF, its second bite at national elections could benefit from the greater experience it now has. It grew its support by 2.5% between 2014 and 2016, but that is only good enough to keep it at No 3 in terms of national support.
However, the EFF can draw confidence from its increased growth in support of 6% in Limpopo in 2016.
The main issue for the red berets is to differentiate themselves from the ANC in terms of what they can offer the electorate. The ANC has state power; they do not. The governing party has already hijacked the land battle right in front of their eyes.
Moreover, the EFF's politics of racial polarisation and populism are off-putting for sections of the population, so it can largely forget about the middle-class vote. Its association with corruption in the VBS bank scandal has tarnished its image with parts of the working class and the unemployed, but it still commands support within these groups. It will probably dominate the youth vote, if it can convince enough young people to vote.
Elections in SA are no longer as predictable as they were for the first 20 years of democracy; the 2019 edition will have us on tenterhooks...