The ANC’s implosion was decades in the making

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Zuma squandered Mbeki’s gains, while Ramaphosa’s dithering turned the ANC’s promised renewal into a fight for survival.

South African statesman, former Premier of the Western Cape, ANC National Executive Committee member and two-term Ambassador to the United States.

When the expected implosion of the African National Congress (ANC) came in South Africa’s 2026 local government elections, it was still surprisingly dramatic. The ANC remained the largest political party, but its share of the popular vote declined to 32.5 percent, essentially leaving it a rural party where its governance power is not entirely dependent on coalition partners.

It is now a Black African party without minority voters. Significant elements of the Black middle class and sections of the Black African rural and working classes showed disaffection through defection and abstention.

This leaves an ANC dependent on other parties for coalitions in the urban metros and cities, while facing a confident and emboldened white community, quite surprised at how easily Black power could be diluted so soon after apartheid. But the seeds of this implosion were sown over three nine-year leadership phases.

The first transition in this evolution was after the nine developing years under President Thabo Mbeki, which had their weaknesses – like the HIV/AIDS epidemic – but bequeathed to his successors significant advantages: gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 5.4 percent, unemployment at 25 percent and significant savings for infrastructure expansion.

Significantly, the ANC secured an electoral share of 65.7 percent in the 2006 local elections, with the greatest ever proportion of minority votes. These nine years sowed the seeds of a so-called left-wing impatience with the rate of redistribution of the growth advantages.

These advantages were squandered during President Jacob Zuma’s nine devastating years in both economic and electoral terms. The devastation, disguised as “radical economic transformation”, was in fact state capture.

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