Democracy in Times of Trouble and Deep Entrenchment

Democracy in South Africa in the time of my analysis was evolving, through parallelism to the supplementation and substitution of institutions and processes ordinarily associated with constitutional and participatory democracy. Simultaneously, seemingly contradictorily, constitutionally mandated institutions were affirmed by many. The country’s multipartyism was celebrated, even if citizens also found it inadequate. Participation in elections was down, but elections were endorsed as the best way to determine political leadership. ANC rule was being augmented, as if citizens and voters were trying to find reasons to keep the former liberation movement party, turned governing party, in power.

The coronavirus struck and the world and South Africa were affected, severely and adversely. Politics was going to be different. The ANC government would need immense credibility and popular trust to see the way through the economic fallout of the Covid-19 crisis – and yet 2020 onwards was a time in which the ANC’s trust renewal through erstwhile Ramaphoria and new dawn-ism were crushed through the Covid looting crisis on top of state coffers that had been running dry. The presence of the new ANC elite greed was confirmed precisely when the state of poverty, and human suffering, were being re-exposed. Although the ANC promised serially to deliver the purified version of itself, popular cynicism mounted, with reason.

The combination of Covid-19 hardship and ANC cadre corruption evoked a colossal crisis in the ANC and its government. The question was whether the country’s fundamentals, as I have outlined in this volume, would be sufficient to predict the road ahead. Or were the crisis and fallout of Covid-and-corruption (or even just Covid-19 on its own) so severe that known political life would also be a thing of the past? The reality falls in-between. The fundamentals of ANC tenacity and resilience would be affected, and the effects were likely to unfold along the lines mapped in this volume. The ANC would bleed further trust and support, partially redeemable by the time of the next set of national election campaigns. Opposition parties were unlikely to be embraced as alternatives. The ANC, organisationally and as government, was likely to remain in a volatile but symbiotic relationship with popular forces that extracted and bartered policy and delivery on their own terms. ANC perseverance would depend, more than in the past, on the actions of supplementary and parallel institutions that helped it to govern. This was a fragile stability, and it would last for as long as the ANC held the resources to afford such delivery and simultaneously keep content its vast public sector and its grant recipient constituency.