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The data published by The Common Sense over recent days will make for difficult reading at Luthuli House. The African National Congress (ANC) has surrendered half of its support over the past 20 years. President Ramaphosa’s favourability has been cut in half too. Four times as many voters think he is guilty of a crime than those who believe he is not guilty. Beyond the middle classes, the ANC has lost its majorities amongst black, poor, rural, and township voters. The uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) is on the march and now commands two thirds of the support the ANC commands among black voters. The ANC trails the Democratic Alliance (DA) by half in Johannesburg. On current numbers, the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) and the DA will form a government in Tshwane. In Durban, the ANC is in third position behind the MKP and the DA. But there is a way back – and that begins with understanding why ANC support has fallen so very far.

Unlike what is common to read and hear, three decades of ANC rule have not been one unmitigated disaster for South Africa. On the contrary, between 1994 and 2008 the party did better in government than it was ever credited with.

On the economy, as confidence lifted so did the fixed investment rate and this in turn lifted the rate of job creation. By 2008 there were twice as many people with jobs as had been the case in 1994.

On service delivery and welfare, its successes were remarkable. In 1994, 49% of families did not have electricity in their homes. By 2008, that figure was under 20%. That level of progress was true for all service delivery markers, from housing to water and refuse removal. The number of people receiving welfare grants lifted from under three million to well over 10 million and that did a lot of good in raising basic standards of living.

Public finances were extremely well managed. A growing economy saw tax receipts lift and as a consequence the service delivery and welfare rollouts occurred even as government debt levels were halved and budget surpluses recorded.

The murder rate halved, the number of people graduating as engineers more than doubled, and we could go on.

Because life was getting better for people, and so quickly too, levels of violent protest came down sharply and support for the ANC in elections rose. By 2004, as the economy was really getting going, and jobs and welfare too, the ANC was six percentage points stronger, at almost 70% of the vote, than it had been in 1994, when under Mr Nelson Mandela it won around 63%.

Post-1994, ANC support was never in the main driven by blind loyalty to the party or issues of liberation mythology. That loyalty and mythology worked to get out the vote only because the material circumstances of people were improving.

After 2008, that all changed.

To sum it up in one paragraph, investor sentiment collapsed under the weight of the expropriation risk, the effect of taxing capital for black economic empowerment purposes, and electricity and infrastructure shortages. As it sank – this newspaper measures such confidence on an index – so did the investment rate, which fell to just half of the average of South Africa’s peer emerging markets. Because that occurred, South Africa’s economy did not follow that of its emerging-market peers out of the global financial crisis. The growth rate remained at around 1%, which in turn meant that whereas 15 million people had jobs in 2008, the figure today is just under 17 million.

As living standards stagnated and tax revenues grew too slowly, the state borrowed more. Debt levels as a share of GDP have almost tripled. That in turn put the brakes on service delivery and welfare spending. The 1994-to-2008 cycle was thereby put into reverse, and ANC support came off election after election while violent protest levels lifted by 500%.

The cycle became compounded by totally counter-productive policy decisions on green energy and by doubling down on expropriation threats and measures to tax capital. It was so obvious what would occur that , after factoring in a few demographic and economic calculations, in 2012 the call was first made in print that the ANC would lose the 2024 election.

It is worth quoting media coverage of that call at the time. This is how that forecast was carried in a report by IOL:

ANC rule ‘over by 2024’

The ANC is dying, and will lose its parliamentary majority at or before the 2024 national elections, says the head of the unit for risk analysis at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

In a policy brief published by the institute, Frans Cronje, who is also SAIRR deputy CEO, said the ruling party had entered a period of terminal decline.

Cronje said the party’s demise was now inevitable, and it was time for South Africans to start considering a future without it.

“We do not make this forecast recklessly but rather because the evidence points overwhelmingly in this direction,” said Cronje.

He said ANC support among South Africans was falling rapidly.

“It is true the ANC won 63 percent of the national vote in 1994 and increased that to 65.9 percent in 2009. However, this figure is misleading as it ignores the growing number of people who are choosing not to vote at all.

“While more than five out of 10 South Africans turned out to vote for the ANC in 1994, that figure (fell) to less than four out of 10 in the 2009 election. In a sense the ANC, for all its pretension as the ‘will of the people’, is now a minority government.”

The decline in ANC support did not result from an opposition party drawing its supporters, but from a growing number of people losing confidence in the party.

“Data from the police suggests that they are now responding to three service delivery protests every day.”

Cronje said the decline in ANC support and the rise in protest action had little to do with alleged failures in service delivery.

The drop in support had its origins in several areas. Among these he highlighted the overall failure of the public school system, and corruption.

“Only one out of every two black South Africans who enter Grade 1 will ever reach matric and only one out of 10 will pass maths. Hence black South Africans... have limited means to increase their own living standards outside of what the state, and by extension, the ANC can give them.”

The party had put candidates convicted of fraud and corruption on its election lists. “What this shows is that the ANC is not serious about addressing the failed education, low growth, unemployment, and corruption. If it is not addressing the reasons for its decline, it follows that the party must be in terminal decline,” Cronje said.

As to when the ANC’s national support levels would dip below 50 percent, opening the door to an opposition coalition to govern, “we think 2014 is too early, 2019 is plausible but uncertain, and 2024 is probable.”

Political analyst Professor Susan Booysen said Cronje’s analysis “is way out of touch with reality. It disregards the fact that many people who abstained from voting in recent elections have also shown a vote of no confidence in the DA. There is zero guarantee that their votes will convert to opposition support.”

It is worth quoting that in full, and Professor Booysen’s response, in order to establish credibility on what follows below.

Cronje, who today edits The Common Sense among other things, told the newspaper, “I am quite confident that if the ANC takes a series of decisions, it can restore its political majority by 2034 and I don’t think this would be particularly difficult for the party to do.”

According to Cronje the ANC, in as far as it leads the government, needs to secure one simple chain reaction.

“It needs to lift the investor confidence indicator to trigger a lift in the investment rate and then in the job creation rate. If it does the former the other two will follow like day follows night.”

“South Africa’s investment number is absurdly low so this will not be difficult to do. Deep in the ANC poll data we study it remains quite clear that there is vast latent sympathy for the party. Its former supporters are deeply saddened that they can no longer vote for it. They really, really want to, but they say it has offered them no choice but to leave, it has chased them away. There just are no jobs for young people and that is so terrible for them, so debilitating, and so disappointing for their parents and grandparents.”

Simple policy reforms will change that, according to Cronje.

“Take pragmatic decisions in energy and refit parts of the defunct coal fleet. I find it mad, quite mad, that the ANC pursues an energy policy dictated to South Africa from Europe. I never thought I would see such a thing from an African liberation government. Back out of expropriation, it is a non-starter. Business and investors won’t say it but they don’t trust the government and as long as laws allowing for expropriation for less than market value are on the books the investment number will stay down. Then, stop taxing capital, empowerment policy as practiced serves as a tax on investment trying to enter the economy and this just rock-bottoms South Africa’s global competitiveness. And lastly, strike good terms with all the world’s major powers from Beijing to Washington. You really are not achieving anything in your own best interests by trying to throw your weight around as some sort of moral superpower when your growth rate is 1% and mobs are marching in the streets and you’re polling way down in the cities.”

Cronje told The Common Sense that this kind of advice has been offered to the ANC but that the party had rejected it, as had rejected the balance of elite opinion in the country, and often business opinion too.

“What I have also found so amazing, thinking back on it, is that the ANC most often in rejecting this advice saw that, the rejecting of the advice, as some sort of victory, when the outcome could only ever be that it would lose further support. I don’t know why it didn’t better understand that, or if it did, why it didn’t care that it would lose everything, the control of the country, the cities, all of it.”

On corruption Cronje said, “That has done damage but I don’t think it’s the main thing. If life was getting better people would not care as much. It is because living standards stagnated that people got as angry as they did with the ANC about the corruption. I don’t think that, had the economy continued to grow after 2008, the ANC would have lost power even if all these same corruption allegations were out in the public domain. I think people would have thought, you know, that is what politicians get up but at least my life is improving and circumstances in my community are improving.”

Looking back at how the country has changed over 20 years, Cronje said, “Some people may find this odd, because they dislike the ANC so much now, but in a certain sense I feel sorry for some of those ANC guys. There were very good people there and some had been very brave before 1994 and made good decisions at first in government, and so many millions of South Africans had placed their hope of a dignified life in the ANC and are now so disappointed. Often, though, as I saw it, the ANC took advice from people, what you might call 'false friends', people who told them what they wanted to hear because they wanted something from the ANC. Now, many of those same people are organising against them and blaming them for everything. They’re charlatans, you know, all charlatans, but the ANC listened to them, so it’s its own fault.”

On looking forward, Cronje said, “I would say to the ANC, look here, the situation is now very bad but there is a way out. Do whatever you want to do, of course, but I think there is a set of decisions that gets you out of this, and then back to a position of control over the government and the state, that is perhaps easier than it seems. It would be a strategic mistake, I think, a misread of the balance of forces, to say it has to be a coalition future. You could in your own right get back to a majority and on your own terms. In many respects that may the best thing for South Africa as a unitary state. The alternative, I think, is the balkanisation of the Union of 1910, which will be fine for the middle classes in a practical sense mostly but very destabilising and the poor will suffer a lot.”