Rwanda, Kenya, Angola, and Liberia will all hold important national elections before the year is up. But perhaps the most important election on the African continent this year will take place behind closed doors. At its party conference this December, South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party will select its next leader.
Thousands of ANC delegates will meet from December 16 through December 20 in Gauteng, South Africa’s most populous province and the home of Johannesburg and Pretoria. Their objective: to elect the ANC’s leadership for the next five years, including its president. Barring a major fissure in the ANC or a colossal surge from the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), the ANC’s next leader will be South Africa’s next President, succeeding the term-limited incumbent, Jacob Zuma, in 2019.
What’s at stake in the ANC leadership contest? The direction of one of Africa’s greatest political parties and, with it, the future of South African democracy.
A quick aside for readers who haven’t been following South African politics of late: The Zuma years have been disastrous for South Africa. Despite charges of rape and corruption, Jacob Zuma won the ANC presidency at the party conference in December 2007. Born poor and raised by a single mother in one of the miserable Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa, Zuma was able to speak directly, and with considerable charisma, to the concerns of poor black South Africans. It was largely the votes of this still-suffering demographic that delivered Zuma the ANC presidency and two years later the presidency of South Africa itself.
In office, however, Zuma has notched few achievements to benefit his political base (reversing the Mbeki administration’s horrendous HIV/AIDS policies was one of them). While Zuma may have entered office promising “social justice,” his time in office could well be summed up with a different two-word rallying cry: “state capture.” Instead of serving the needs of the voters who elected him, Zuma has occupied himself with renovating his Nkandla homestead with $16 million in public funds and cozying up to the Gupta brothers, a trio of Indian-born industrialists who are accused of having undue influence over Zuma’s agenda. There’s an uneasy sense that South Africa’s democratic norms are being hollowed out from within by Zuma and chipped away from without by the Guptas.
Meanwhile, economic growth has slowed and even gone into negative territory. With two consecutive quarters of economic contraction in the last quarter of 2016 and the first quarter of 2017, South Africa has officially entered a recession. The bursting of the commodity bubble has hurt the South African mining sector, and, despite the calls of prominent South African business leaders to improve the climate for industrialization, it doesn’t look like factory jobs are on their way any time soon. In fact, South Africa’s statistics agency cited declines in manufacturing and trade—not mining—as the principal causes of the current slump. Unemployment stands at 27.7 percent, a 14-year high. Following President Zuma’s reckless firing of his respected and competent Finance Minister, Pravin Gordhan, last December, investors are spooked. The S&P responded by downgrading South Africa’s credit rating to junk status. This lower credit rating raises the cost of borrowing just as the government needs to invest in the electricity grid, which suffers from rolling blackouts.
Lovers of South African democracy might be prepared to breathe a sigh of relief in 2019, when Zuma is constitutionally obligated to step down (whether he will be removed from office before his time is up remains an interesting, but improbable, scenario). But here’s the catch: One of the two frontrunners to succeed Zuma is his ex-wife and political ally, Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. And it looks like she’s in the lead.
It would be wrong to attribute Dlamini-Zuma’s political fortunes entirely to her ex-husband, whom she divorced in 1998. In the 2007 ANC leadership contest, she was Zuma’s principal opponent. Having served as a cabinet minister for each of South Africa’s post-apartheid Presidents, she is an experienced political operator in her own right. Dlamini-Zuma, a medical doctor, has served as Health Minister, Foreign Minister, and Minister of Home Affairs; most recently, she was Chair of the African Union Commission from October 2012 to January 2017. And while it’s not impossible that a hypothetical President Dlamini-Zuma would seek to distance herself from her disgraced and unpopular ex-husband, South Africa’s chattering classes are speculating that she will pardon her predecessor should he be convicted of corruption charges.
President Zuma, after all, has made it clear that Dr. Dlamini-Zuma is his chosen successor. He endorsed her candidacy in May. He has even provided her with her own security detail, drawn from the Presidential Protection Service (South Africa’s Secret Service)—a move that has provoked considerable public scrutiny, as the force is only supposed to protect high-level elected officials and their spouses. Dlamini-Zuma’s term as Chair of the AU Commission ended in January, and she is no longer the spouse of the President. Yet she retains her own security detail, at public expense, and the government is stonewalling. The Police Service refuses to comment, for “security reasons.” This is only the latest sign that the Zumas remain close political allies and think themselves above the law.
Dlamini-Zuma’s main competitor for the ANC presidency is Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, one of South Africa’s richest men and Nelson Mandela’s handpicked successor (suffice it to say that Ramaphosa, beaten by Thabo Mbeki in the 1997 ANC leadership contest, has been waiting for the ANC nomination for a long time now). Ramaphosa is a skilled negotiator whose contribution to the negotiated end of apartheid is the stuff of legend.
In his years out of government, Ramaphosa built up a business empire. Among other board positions and business interests, he served on the board of Lonmin, a platinum mining company. This position became a political liability for Ramaphosa in 2012, when he pressed a hard line during a strike by Lonmin’s workers, characterizing the strike and events around it as “dastardly criminal acts.” Police Services later opened fire on a crowd of striking workers, 34 of whom were killed and 78 injured in what was immediately dubbed the Marikana Massacre. It was the most lethal use of force in the post-apartheid era. Ramaphosa has since apologized for his language, but because of his association with Marikana, the Deputy President’s star has dimmed.
The competition between Dlamini-Zuma and Ramaphosa is shaping up to be a contest between jostling factions in the ANC and competing visions for South Africa. Calling for expropriation of white-owned land as part of a broader campaign for “radical economic transformation,” Dlamini-Zuma appears to be consolidating the core ANC party structures behind her candidacy; the ANC military veterans, Women’s League, and Youth League have all endorsed her. Nothing about Dlamini-Zuma’s candidacy indicates she is serious about making a clean break from the corruption, sluggish growth, and lack of policy ambition that have characterized her ex-husband’s years in power. More gravely, one ANC veteran has even alleged that state capture funds are now being used to buy the votes of local ANC branches in the lead-up to the December conference to “make sure that the corrupt (read: the Zumas) remain in power.
Ramaphosa, on the other hand, has made corruption a central issue of his campaign, vows to investigate state capture, and is expected to enact pro-business policies. He has won the support of the South African Communist Party (SACP), the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)—an organization Ramaphosa founded in the 1980s and that continues to support him despite the controversy over Marikana. For many of South Africa’s “born-frees” (members of the generation born after the end of apartheid), however, deciding between Dlamini-Zuma and Ramaphosa is akin to a choice between state capture and Marikana. Ramaphosa faces the difficult task of persuading them that he is the lesser of two evils.
Should Ramaphosa win the nomination, he is likely to consolidate the ANC faithful and work for two years to distance himself from President Zuma, which will help to restore some trust in the ANC. Such moves are likely to blunt the momentum of the center-right DA, which won several major urban centers for the first time in last year’s municipal elections, but is still struggling to shed its image as the party of the white minority. Dlamini-Zuma, on the other hand, is somewhat less likely to consolidate the ANC’s factions. Running against her, the DA has a more plausible path to the presidency, especially if it succeeds in framing the election as a referendum on state capture.
It’s also possible the ANC will choose a consensus candidate when it meets behind closed doors this December. Baleka Mbete, Speaker of the National Assembly, appears to be the most likely to emerge as ANC President under this scenario. Like Dlamini-Zuma, she is a close ally of President Zuma.
Twenty-three years after Nelson Mandela’s election, South Africa remains a democracy with a strong independent judiciary and vibrant civil society. The Zuma years have enabled rampant corruption, seen moribund growth, and threatened to erode the rule of law. Whether the ANC picks a reformist candidate like Ramaphosa, or settles for dynastic succession with Dlamini-Zuma, will have profound consequences for South African democracy in the years to come.