South Africa's General Election.

On May 7th 2014 South Africa held its General Election. Dubbed the "Born Free Election" this was the first time that South Africans born after the end of apartheid were allowed to vote. If this meant that if they voted without first hand experience of apartheid it perhaps also meant that they voted without first hand knowledge of the vision of a prosperous, democratic and equal South Africa that the people who dismantled apartheid hoped to build.

Sadly it seems that vision has stalled somewhat in recent years with South Africa consistently failing to meet its economic growth targets and in 2014 being replaced by Nigeria as the largest economy in Africa. This under-performing growth has increased economic inequality bringing with it increased crime, racial tensions (against immigrants) and the sort of social unrest seen in the recent strikes by nurses and miners including the very violent Marikana strike. It has also fuelled support for political parties such as Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) who want to introduce radical Zimbabwean style land redistribution and the Afrikaner Freedom Front Plus who want to roll back existing affirmative action and land reform policies and don't yet seem to have come to terms with the end of the apartheid.

The cause of South Africa's current malaise is quite simple. Although it is technically a democracy the overwhelming support of the African National Congress (ANC) means that South Africa functions as a one party state. As always happens in a one party state this has caused the government to become lazy because they know that no matter how badly they do their job they're never going to get punished by the voters. In South Africa this lack of competition also seems to have given the current ANC leadership a taste for corruption as shown in the recent Nkandla scandal, Guptagate and the Thint arms scandal to name but a few.

As such I think that the main objectives of the South African election should have been to reduce the ANC's stranglehold on power and build a coherent opposition to help keep them honest. This would be measured firstly by reducing the ANC's share of the vote to below the 60% that gives them an automatic right to amend the constitution. Secondly it would be measured by increasing the number of opposition MP's in order to help hold the ANC to account and even block some of their more controversial legislation.

In terms of meeting that first objective South Africa more or less completely failed. Although the ANC saw their share of the vote fall from 69% to 62% they remain above the 60% threshold that allows them to amend the constitution. Perhaps more worryingly the majority of the ANC's lost support was lost to the EFF who gained 6% of the vote in their first election but whose radical Marxist agenda doesn't really have a place in the modern world.

In terms of altering the make-up of South Africa's Parliament things were slightly more successful with this main opposition party the Democratic Alliance (DA) increasing their number of MP's from 67 to 89. However with the ANC retaining 249 MP's it seems that any gains the DA made were either the result of better translating support into seats or came at the expense of the other two main opposition parties the Congress of the People (COPE) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) who both also suffered at the hands of the EFF.

So on the basis of that result there seems to be little hope of much improvement in South Africa until after the next General Election in 2019. In the meantime though the DA, COPE and the IFP along with some of the smaller parties such as the United Democratic Movement (UDM) should try working together to form an opposition coalition in Parliament and consider formally merging in order to unify their resources at the next election.

The big hope of course is that the Marxist wing of the ANC formally separate from the centre-left wing and join up with the EFF. That seems unlikely to happen though because even the centrist wing of the ANC wouldn't want to reduce their grip on power by becoming a smaller, more effective party.

(Originally Posted) 17:20 on 20/5/14 (UK date).