South Africans will go to the polls on Wednesday, May 29, in what may be the last chance to save their country from the ruin wrought by the so-called party of liberation, the African National Congress (ANC).
The ANC led the struggle against apartheid, and swept into office, with Nelson Mandela, in the country’s first fully democratic election in 1994. Since then, but especially since Mandela left office in 1999, the ANC has been running South Africa into the ground.
Crime is soaring. Corruption is rampant. The country’s infrastructure is collapsing. Electricity is often unavailable, thanks to “load-shedding,” which are scheduled blackouts designed to save the grid from total failure. Water is also scarce in Johannesburg, the country’s economic hub.
The only part of South Africa that is run reasonable well is the Western Cape, which is governed by the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) and includes beautiful Cape Town.
Rather than addressing the country’s problems — and its own failures — directly, the ANC has found distractions, notably the conflict in the Middle East.
The ANC openly supports the Hamas terrorists in Gaza, and South Africa leads the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. Its lawyers cite phony claims and false quotes en route to arguing that Israel actually has no right to defend itself against mass murder and rape.
South Africa’s treatment of Israel is a warning sign, much the way Zimbabwe’s treatment of white farmers in 2000 was a signal of imminent political collapse. Just as President Robert Mugabe used racist “land reform” as a way to appeal to “war veterans” from the country’s liberation struggle and to deflect challenges to his power, the ANC uses the Palestinian cause to revive the romanticism of the anti-apartheid years by inventing a new “apartheid” enemy.
This time, it may not be enough. Early polls suggested that the ANC could fall below a majority for the first time. While South African polls tend to undercount the ANC’s support, since it has a formidable turnout machine, and it seems to have revived in recent weeks, there is a chance — however slim — that South Africans will finally have had enough. Black voters, in particular, may have decided that their debt to the ANC is paid, and they deserve better.
If the ANC fails to win 50%, there are two possibilities. One is that it will form a coalition government — not with reasonable opposition parties like the DA, but with extremist parties like the racist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), who openly campaign for white farmland to be seized by the government. The other possibility is that the opposition, led by the DA, will form a coalition of small parties to oust the ANC, as they did in Cape Town in 2006.
The outcome will depend on who shows up at the polls. There is no large-scale absentee voting; there is certainly nothing like vote-by-mail, in a country where fraud is a daily hazard of economic life. Voters will have to present a government-issued photo ID. (None of this is considered “racist.”)
The question is really whether South Africans believe enough in the possibility of change, or whether nostalgic attachment to the failing ANC is still too strong.
Time is running out. Every day, South Africa loses the skills it will need to rebuild, as educated people emigrate. Perhaps, like the apartheid regime, the ANC government will linger for a decade or so until South Africans feel confident enough to abandon it.
Until they do, the great experiment in democracy that Mandela launched in 1994, with hope for reconciliation and prosperity, will feel incomplete. To many observers, it will have been a failure.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa, now available as an audiobook form from Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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