While corruption and its effects may be what angers South Africans most — watching A.N.C. leaders amass wealth while ordinary citizens beg for loose change at traffic lights — the party has struggled for other reasons too. Intraparty factionalism has kept the A.N.C. from carrying out a smooth transition between leaders since Mandela left office in 1999. The party is often dismissive of its critics and tends to close ranks when its leaders are accused of wrongdoing. When Ramaphosa faced impeachment two years ago, after more than half a million dollars was found stashed in a couch at his game farm, the party ordered its parliamentary members to quash it or risk discipline. (Ramaphosa has denied any misconduct.) “They think they can be in power without representing the people,” Mbatha, a former international relations adviser to Ramaphosa, says. “There’s an element of arrogance, there’s an element of dictatorship.”
The party also maintains allegiance to allies from the anti-apartheid struggle, like Russia, and cheers fellow liberation organizations, like ZANU-PF of Zimbabwe, even when doing so goes against South Africa’s interests. ZANU-PF has been widely accused of rigging elections, human rights abuses and economic mismanagement, prompting many Zimbabweans to cross into South Africa illegally, leading the A.N.C. to blame them for burdening the country’s troubled economy.
What has kept the A.N.C. in power, perhaps more than anything, is the lack of inspiring alternatives. Opposition parties often campaign on anti-A.N.C. messages, rather than giving voters a reason to choose them. To counter this, the A.N.C. has embarked on a public-relations campaign to promote what it has accomplished, and it is not above threatening those who insist on unflattering coverage. A leaked audio recording of a meeting among top A.N.C. officials in April captured Ramaphosa saying that wherever there has been negative reporting, the party would “take that up.” “We want fair treatment,” he said. “Even more than fair treatment, because we are the governing party. The TV stations have no right to be negative toward us and always either not reporting on our activities or just continuously branding us in a negative way.”
Another part of the A.N.C.’s strategy lies in stressing the instability that might result from a coalition government. At the local level, dysfunctional examples — mayors cycling in and out of office after months or even days; angry clashes between parties — abound. But the A.N.C. also leans heavily into South Africa’s fraught racial dynamics, warning that the opposition will take the country back to the days of apartheid. The A.N.C.’s biggest challenger, the Democratic Alliance, has a diverse leadership but also a reputation as the “white party.” Its top officials are white, it has lost some prominent Black members and it sometimes employs its own racially driven politics of fear to cater to the far right. The group has, for instance, warned of a “sharp rise” in murders on farms (most are white-owned), even though there is no data to support that assertion.
It is not, Godlimpi says, that the Democratic Alliance would reinstate racial segregation but that their policies would have a similar effect. We were seated in a restaurant in an affluent suburb of Johannesburg that was once exclusively white. Godlimpi gestured to the tables around us: He and I were two of only a handful of Black patrons.