South African politics: How the ANC and the South African government are intertwined

SOUTH AFRICA - Report 24 Jun 2019 by Iraj Abedian

​South Africa’s African National Party (ANC) came into power during the country’s dawn of democracy in 1994. The ANC was a liberation movement. 1994 had marked the end of apartheid, with all eligible citizens of South Africa being able to vote for the first time, irrespective of race or gender. The party had won the elections with 62.65% of the votes, and has since won the majority, the latest being the recent May 2019 general elections during which it won the majority vote by 57.50%. South Africa’s main opposition party is the Democratic Alliance (DA), which received 20.77% of the votes, followed by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), with 10.79% of the votes.

Despite the recent slight drop in voter support, the ANC remains a prominent political party in South Africa, and its internal workings determine much of how the country is governed. President Ramaphosa was elected by the ANC as its president, which in turn, was voted into power once again by South Africans. As such, the current administrations’ policies and policy implementation will still be influenced heavily by the ANC, with factionalism within the party threatening the governance of the country. The extreme case of such a threat is exemplified when the NEC invokes its powers to recall the country’s president and nominate someone else in his place. Since 1994, two of the five presidents have been recalled. President Mbeki was recalled in 2008 and a decade later, President Zuma was recalled.

President Ramaphosa presides over a fractured party, and his opponents in the ANC have a checkered history of careless governance riddled with corruption and fiscal looting. Whereas at present, his opponents do not enjoy the majority needed to recall him, they nonetheless have sufficient powers within the party organization to frustrate his objectives and slow down his pace of reform and renewal. Time will tell whether Ramaphosa will succeed in cleaning up enough of his fellow ANC opponents to secure stability within the ANC, and hence firm up his hold on the levers of power without having to watch over his own shoulders.

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