The excellent Gareth van Onselen has made one of the most important observations about the recent local government election and was kind enough to allow this newspaper to share it here. In his estimations, the African National Congress (ANC) lost 25 percentage points in predominantly black metro voting districts. These are districts where more than 95% of voters were black. In those same districts, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) lost an estimated nine percentage points.

Van Onselen’s calculation is that about 14 percentage points went to the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), 10 to ActionSA (ASA), 7.5 to other parties, and about five to the Democratic Alliance (DA). These figures represent the growth of those parties in the same voting districts, and the maths is almost exactly spot-on.

According to Van Onselen, “it is likely the EFF’s decline was split between MKP and ASA [ActionSA] …ASA’s anti-immigrant rhetoric probably hurt the EFF, in 2021 it was also the EFF [that] ASA hurt in townships, so a fair correlation”.

The chart below shows the estimate of the ANC’s drop in black urban voting districts and an estimate of the share of that drop seized by its rivals.

What is the meaning of that?

One of the meanings appears to be that the ANC faces a far more serious threat from black-nationalist-type parties allied to its broad ideology than it does from the more centrist DA. Insofar as that is true, it complicates the ANC’s coalition calculations. If it doubles down on the Gauteng “rogue coalition”, the phenomenon of being eaten alive by its rivals should persist, possibly to a point where the broad MKP/ASA/EFF/ANC/United Democratic Movement and related front all become quite small parties with between 5% and approaching 15% or 20% of the vote.

A second factor to weigh is that what underpins the ANC’s collapsing support more than anything else is the economy. The Common Sense will be running a lot of that data this week. Extending something along the lines of the Gauteng “rogue” Government of National Unity regionally or nationally is a non-starter for economic reform, meaning that the deeper reason behind the ANC’s poor showing remains unaddressed.

A third factor to weigh is the excellent point made by this newspaper’s Marius Roodt that the broader Charter parties have seen their support fall to a record low. That may mean that ANC voters who jumped from the ANC to the EFF, for example, a jump from one party to another, but one that kept them within the Charter family, do, after a time, come to think that these splinter options are no better than the ANC was. As that disillusionment rises, which it must, given the broader economic point, those voters may look to jump completely out of the Charter family.

Striking a coalition pact along the lines of the Gauteng rogue deal may therefore have the long-term consequences of splintering the ANC vote share even further into a broad front of small parties whose collective vote share, insofar as that represents the broader Charter family, slips from election to election.