Ramaphosa’s strategic blunders

On Wednesday, SA’s political firmament shifted. The new landscape is not, at least at first view, promising.

The extent to which we have descended into disenchantment and disillusion since 1994 is reflected in the poorest electoral turnout yet. Only 59% of registered voters cast ballots.

The ANC has crumbled, delivering – with two-thirds of the voting districts counted – as poor a performance as the worst of the pre-election surveys predicted.

With its loss of control of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, on top of the 2009 loss of the Western Cape, it has been relegated to the economic periphery of the nation.

There is, however, little comfort for those who hoped that the end of ANC dominance – down from 70% in its heyday 20 years ago to around 42% now – would usher in an era of greater economic pragmatism. Instead, the electorate has become more populist, more tribalist and more socialist, shifting its allegiance to the left, not towards the moderate centrists.

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Among the likely casualties of the electoral shift are President Cyril Ramaphosa and the Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen. It’s difficult to see either of their political careers surviving their unimpressive performances.

At the centre of the political earthquake is the implosion of the 112-year-old ANC as engineered by Ramaphosa’s nemesis, former president Jacob Zuma and his uMkhonto weSizwe party (MK).

Written off as simply another device to pressure his former ANC colleagues and retard Zuma’s prosecution for state looting, to everyone’s bemusement, MK now finds itself the third-biggest party with 12% of the national vote.

That’s marginally ahead of that other ANC offshoot, the Economic Freedom Fighters, stuck on 10% after its third general election, but well behind the DA, which retains its spot as the official opposition with about 23%.

But it’s in KZN that Zuma sealed Ramaphosa’s fate. MK got 44% of the vote, more than double the ANC’s pitiful 19%. The size of the drubbing is a measure of Ramaphosa’s appalling strategic blunders.

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Ramaphosa’s primary objective, as he repeatedly and unapologetically explained from the first day he was elected leader in 2018, was to preserve ANC unity.

Any efforts to address the devastating effect that the Zuma era had on the country would be secondary to that mission. However, as the election starkly reveals, he failed at both.

Steenhuisen, too, has failed. Mmusi Maimane was forced to resign as leader when the DA in 2019 shed 470 000 votes to win 3.6 million votes. This week, it will get about 3.5 million, according to the projections.

Aside from MK, the only other sign of new political life was from Gayton McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance (PA) which got about a quarter of a million votes nationally, equivalent to 2.6%.

That’s only 10 seats in the National Assembly but McKenzie’s big contribution has been to expose another great Ramaphosa strategic blunder – embracing the terror organisation Hamas and making Palestine a strong electoral plank in the ANC campaign.

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The commentariat consensus was that this would cost the DA dearly with the Muslim vote in the Western Cape. As it turned out, the DA was only a couple of points down at 53%, the ANC got 20%, and the PA – which is unabashedly pro-Israel – got a solid 9%.

For the moment, with all the glib assumptions and brash assertions of the ANC turned to dust, the political tumult has subsided to a strange stunned silence.

Ramaphosa, omnipresent before the election, has not been seen in public since, although he is “jovial and fine”, an ANC spokesperson assured a media briefing.

There’s not much time for him to spend licking his wounds. Time to gird his loins.

It’s going to be a frenzy.

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