This is Part One of a four-part series. 

Can there really be anything worthwhile still to say about the 2024 South African elections? Only a fool or the foolhardy would say so. There’s already a mountain of newsprint and media coverage given to the build-up to the election, its aftermath leading to the Government of National Unity (GNU), and now the GNU Cabinet. While hopefully belonging to neither category of the foolish, I maintain there’s a lot still waiting to be said.

Election positives insufficiently recognised

Illustrative image, from left: ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa. (Photo: Leila Dougan) | Former president Jacob Zuma,(Photo: Felix Dlangamandla) | DA leader John Steenhuisen. (Photo: Gallo Images / Darren Stewart) | ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba (Photo: Gallo Images / Brenton Geach)

We are so deep inside the darkness of despair that we can’t recognise the few rays of light. They merit emphasising. Well, there are only two, actually, but let’s not be greedy.

The first is the ready acceptance by the ANC of its (overdue) defeat. This gracious acceptance by the party of liberation and Nelson Mandela – in Richard Poplak’s words: “the greatest electoral loss for the oldest and most celebrated liberation party in Africa” – is cause for celebration, particularly in Africa where the spoils of government are often violently fought over, regardless of whether or not the elections were free and fair.

The second is that if ever the conditions of a country were ripe for the rise of the extreme right, it is South Africa.

Despite being the most unequal country on the planet, with world-beating unemployment; collapsed water, electricity, education and health systems; unthinkable hunger, unspeakable violence and endemic corruption; an apology for housing provision and an exaggerated perception of millions of “foreigners” to blame, we have robustly rejected the congested right-wing route taken in Europe, the US and elsewhere.

Our 2024 election signalled the defeat of the parties whose main appeal is race, religion, rabid nationalism (euphemistically called ethno-nationalism) and xenophobia.

For many, Jacob Zuma – our Donald Trump – was additionally their saviour, regardless of the corruption he both practised and made respectable throughout all organs and levels of the state. But these anticipated magnets to prejudices didn’t have much appeal among us, whether or not we voted.

Take the Patriotic Alliance (PA), for instance, with its explicit appeal to both coloured voters and xenophobes of any colour as exemplified in its Zulu slogan, abahambe – they must go. By any measure, the PA is a prime example of right-wing populism. Pre-election projections were that it would win more votes than the IFP and become one of South Africa’s biggest parties. We’ll shortly see just how wrong these projections proved to be.

The election results underscore the failure of the openly ethno-nationalist – or more specially coloured – appeals of MK, the Patriotic Alliance, the National Coloured Congress (previously the Cape Coloured Congress) and Al Jama-ah, which expected to take Muslim votes from the Democratic Alliance (DA) because of the horrors of Israel’s mass-inflicted deaths and destruction in Gaza.

The DA is a useful barometer of both racist appeal and rejection. Both opposites stem from the DA – mistakenly, when not opportunistically – being seen or presented by virtually everyone as a white, racist party. That it not only held its share of the vote but increased it is positive for South Africa.

Our undisputed population statistics indicate that the DA is much more than just a white party. Currently, “whites” constitute just 7.7% of the population (down from 25% at the time of Union in 1910). Because, constitutionally, non-racist South Africa still uses the once-despised apartheid “races” – and does so contrary to current legislation – it is known that 58% of those who supported the DA would have been classified as “white” under apartheid.

Considerably more straightforward is that six weeks before the election, Gayton McKenzie, who presented the PA he led as the natural home of coloured people, announced: “The Western Cape is about to change. We are taking back the Western Cape.”

In the event, the PA has nine MPs to the DA’s 87.

Similar claims were made by xenophobic Herman Mashaba, with Indians and coloureds still largely marginalised in post-apartheid South Africa: “We’re bigger than the DA. I don’t see the DA as competition for us.”

He has had to make do with six seats in the National Assembly.

Similarly worth emphasising is how badly what remains of the self-styled “Progressive Alliance” (originally Progressive Caucus) performed. With the PAC, UDM and Al Jama-ah having left the alliance to join the GNU, the combined vote of the now even smaller alliance – MK, the EFF and ATM – received only 24.51% of those who voted (the 0.4% being the ATM’s vote) and 99 seats in the National Assembly. (Not without significance, MK lost seats in the post-election by-elections in KZN where it did so well in the general election.)

No less telling is that MK’s 14.58% of the vote was less than 6% of South Africa’s electorate.

The fact that the MK and EFF describe themselves as the “Progressive Alliance” alerts us to a much bigger issue that needs clarification before any attempt is made to understand the 2024 election.

Misconceptions and misunderstandings

Among many, these are the ones most pertinent for this article:

1 Coalition is the voters’ choice 

An idea surprisingly common to most commentators is that a coalition government shaped the choice of most individual voters, even among most of those who consciously voted strategically. This is a meritless ex-post-facto conclusion. There is no need to provide examples, beyond that of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s re-appointed Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni: “The electorate chose an outcome,” she averred, “that landed us in a government of national unity.”

Lest we be in doubt about this, she continued:

“So South Africans will have to decide again in 2026 with local government elections and also in 2029 with national and provincial elections whether they want an outcome that does not have an outright winner or they are happy with this outcome of collective leadership, with its advantages and disadvantages.”

Deciding how to categorise the “winners” is similarly rich in misunderstandings.

2 The political confusion over right and left

According to two Daily Maverick journalists, the 2024 election is a “swing towards right-wing populism”, which is the headline of the co-written article.

Respected academic Mark Swilling adds a twist to this right-wing designation. For him, it’s only the new government that has turned right; ideologically, the majority vote was for the left within the “broad ANC tradition”.

According to the openly left-wing Dale McKinley, the majority of people voted for right-wing parties because their lives have deteriorated so manifestly over the past 20 years. Right-wing in McKinley’s understanding, means people who hold:

“… dominant ethnic-associated positions where you sort of retreat into an ethnic laager, or a very narrow nationalism… so, for example, blaming foreign migrants and others for all your problems and pushing a sort of false patriotism and narrow nationalism.”

Rekgotsofetse Chikane, a Wits academic, offers a more nuanced approach while noting that characterising South African political parties was “particularly tricky”. For him, MK’s “feudalistic ideas of government” are “definite right-wing”. However, it is “actually quite left” when it comes to social and economic development.

Ismail Lagardien, a regular Daily Maverick columnist and political economist, moves beyond the “quite left-wing” MK party, to the EFF, which for him, is the “standard-bearer of Marxist-Leninism in South Africa”. Or, at least, at a rhetorical level, he recognises that its practice is something else.

Hitler helps us understand the split between the EFF’s rhetoric and reality and the confusing use of right and left. The term Nazi is derived from the full name of the Nazi Party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German for National Socialist German Workers’ Party). The acronym NSDAP was officially used by the Nazis. The socialist part of the name came from the original German Workers’ Party with its rhetoric of being anti-big business, anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist.

The earliest known use of the word Nazi was in The London Times of 1930. The irony is that there would have been no Nazi Germany without the support and protection of big business, the bourgeoisie and capitalists, for whom the Nazis were the perfect counter to the real threat posed by communists, socialists and trade unionists.

The one-time Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction within the ANC has similar echoes of socialism in its factional struggle with the dominant Ramaphosa faction of the African bourgeoisie.

3 The ideological inclusivity of ‘we’, the ‘nation’ and ‘national interest’

President Ramaphosa takes us to the last of the examples I shall be covering here. When going on TV and radio on 30 June to announce his new national executive, he claimed:

“From the results of these elections, it is clear that South Africans expect their leaders to work together to meet their needs. They expect us to find common ground, to overcome our differences, and to act and work together for the good of everyone.”

It is and has been standard worldwide for those with power, wealth and status to project (mostly unconsciously) their needs, values and practices on to the whole of each particular society they happen to be in. This happens even in the most unequal society in the world: South Africa.

Ramaphosa’s “the people”, the “they”, allow for no different – let alone conflicting – values and aspirations. Yet, I make the confident observation that it is impossible to understand the 2024 election without allowing for different class interests.

Indeed, we have already seen intra-class conflicts within the bourgeoisie and will in due course be seeing similar conflicts both among the employed and between those in work and the unemployed.

Being blind to these realities – including the ANC’s use of “race” to promote the class interests of the African rich – is among the main reasons why a recent Business Day editorial described South Africa as:

“… a country that baffles those who live in it, those who observe it and those who invest in it.”

Abandoning principles in the name of pragmatism is neither new nor uniquely South African. In an aptly headlined article, “PraGNUmatism – getting things done for the greater good of all”, Clem Sunter relates that he was invited by Nelson Mandela to visit him in jail a month before his release. One of Sunter’s books, which Mandela had read, was a main reason for the invitation.

Mandela explained that what stood out for him in the book was Sunter’s quoting the then-Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping: “I don’t care if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

Sunter relates that Mandela then intensely questioned him for five hours about what actions it would take to turn South Africa into a winning nation during the 1990s. Foremost among his lessons was that Chinese people should be allowed to become rich, contrary to communist principles.