This is a paid article which your subscription is allowing you to read.

With the African National Congress (ANC) polling in the 30s, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) surging, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) maintaining its insurgency, the South African Communist Party (SACP) trying to go it alone, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) conflicted about which side to back, and the thinking-left backing the Democratic Alliance (DA) in places like Johannesburg, one of Cyril Ramaphosa’s abiding priorities, to hold the ANC alliance together, has failed, just as his economic and reform plans have done.

One of the excuses the Cyril Ramaphosa camp trotted out early in his presidential term was that it had to go along with ideas such as expropriation without compensation and national health insurance in order to hold the broader ANC family together. Pressing for reforms, the excuse went, would deepen fissures across that family and accelerate its break-up and splintering, which would be negative for South Africa.

Ramaphosa has consistently argued that ANC unity and preservation of the ANC family (ANC, SACP, COSATU, and their splinters in the MKP and the EFF) was essential to the party’s political survival and ability to govern. That “the unity of the alliance is fundamental” became a dominant theme from the earliest days of his takeover from Jacob Zuma.

Ramaphosa maintained that position even as relations within the ANC family further deteriorated, the EFF held out, the MKP took shape and began to grow, and the SACP went its own way. After the ANC lost its majority and entered the Government of National Unity (GNU), he continued to insist that the family remained intact, declaring that, “When we are united, we can never be defeated.” After the SACP broke away, he described the ANC-SACP relationship as “non-negotiable”.

It was odd behaviour on three levels – of which the third has held the greatest implications.

The first is that he continued to talk about the non-negotiability of sound relationships even as those relationships were plainly breaking up for the whole country to see.

The second is that the firmest single step towards that break-up was the ANC losing the 2024 election and then choosing, of its own free will, not to strike terms with the EFF and the MKP (which would have resolved the unity issue) but instead to go into government with the DA which exacerbated the splintering.

(There is an alternative view that he brought the DA into government in an attempt to compromise and discredit it, so that a future ANC alliance could be reconstituted in the absence of a firm DA challenge, and the like – there’s always room to consider whether a higher strategic plan is at play, but analysts at The Common Sense are sceptical.)

The third, and most important, is that it was just daft to think that unity and consensus were higher objectives than reform. By delaying and opposing reforms, in the name of unity, Ramaphosa was failing to address the reason why the ANC was breaking up in the first place, a reason that could be found almost exclusively in the weak performance of the economy.

ANC support and economic growth have tracked each other with remarkable closeness over the past 30 years. As growth lifted, so did the ANC, and as growth fell, so did the ANC. And nothing succeeds quite like economic success in politics.

By allowing the growth rate to continue to remain in the doldrums, Ramaphosa allowed popular frustration with the ANC to build, and it is that frustration, almost exclusively, which is the fuel that has allowed the EFF to hold out, the MKP to grow, and the SACP to think it might have a future alone. Reform would have cut off the fuel, brought the EFF and the MKP to heel, and the ANC could then have dictated terms on bringing the family back together.

That is the advice, at least, that the Ramaphosa camp got from the centre-right of South Africa’s think-tank and related spectrum – advice his camp rejected.

Look at the chart below, for example, which tracks ANC support in national elections against the rate of economic growth.

A myriad of additional charts could be drawn, and have been by analysts at The Common Sense, to corroborate this same point, which is very simply that ANC supporters vote on their material circumstances, and when these slip, they look for new political homes.

Take, as a further example, the chart below, which compares the share of households without electricity to real GDP per capita over the past 30 years.

Both indicators improved sharply as the economy grew strongly around 2008. Post-2008, both stagnated and ANC support fell through the floor.

This kind of analysis has been provided to the Ramaphosa camp time and again but both he and his government seemed unmoved. Charlatans and morons were relied on for advice, and advised that more populism was needed to rein in the EFF and the MKP, that global social-justice grandstanding would help shore up national pride in the ANC, and that green policies would see South Africa draw investment from firms seeking to bolster their Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) credentials. It was all nonsense, and predictably, ANC support cratered further. Good and sane advice was not just ignored, but at times jettisoned, with Ramaphosa’s government showing such contempt for it that senior officials were not even prepared to try to understand it – a situation which has persisted into the present.

As a consequence, opportunities to produce enough energy to power industrial recovery were lost, the chance to take advantage of trade and investment offers from both China and the United States was allowed to lapse, the option to fix rail and port infrastructure was batted away, and even the vast oil and gas reserves South Africa holds have remained safely untouched under the ocean (reserves that The Common Sense has shown could have turned South Africa into one of the world’s top-20 oil and gas producers, thereby taking the growth rate to 3% via that industry alone).

What a mess the ANC has ended up with instead.

The chart below shows the extent of it, with the ANC polling below 50% among black voters, rural voters, and the poorest voters, in addition to the relatively prosperous middle-class suburbanites – where it now holds almost no support at all.

What about the argument that, had Ramaphosa driven reforms, there would have been a populist revolution? That is nonsense. Consider, for example, this poll question that was put to voters after the DA proposed an alternative black economic empowerment policy that explicitly excluded race.

The full question, for clarity, was as follows. “The Democratic Alliance recently proposed a new policy. Its policy suggests that Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) be replaced by an empowerment policy that uses poverty, not race, to determine who is in need of upliftment. It argues that BEE has been abused to benefit an elite few, and its new policy will benefit those who really need it. Do you agree or disagree with the DA’s new policy proposal?”

The responses of all voters, black voters, and ANC voters are set out in the chart below.

Given the importance of empowerment policy, the touchiness of the question of race, the fact that the proposal came from the DA, and the extent of poverty and unemployment in South Africa, the result is a pretty definitive statement that the idea, still popular in the press and business, that South Africa’s government cannot do reform because people would rebel is flat-out wrong.

Could Humpty Dumpty be put back together again? There is a popular idea on the radical left that, if you tot up the ANC, MKP, and EFF vote shares, you get back to a majority pretty much in line with what the ANC alone has historically held since 1994. That is set out on the chart below, which compares ANC support in the 1994, 1999, 2004, and 2009 elections to that of the ANC-EFF-MKP post-2009 (the EFF contested its first election in 2014 and the MKP in 2024).

Why could you not just put all the pieces together again around a new ANC and carry on as before? It seems simple enough, at a superficial level, but would quickly blow up in the proponents’ faces.

The EFF and MKP split from the ANC has been motivated by frustration at how living standards stagnated after 2008. That is the source of it, not that the EFF and MKP policies are more attractive. It is a frustrated, angry response to the party in government. If you put the whole collective back in government together, the response would continue to attach to them all, and their vote share would fragment into a splintering of newly radical opponents, not to mention how the leadership of the three parties would fight over resources and positions.

A future post-Ramaphosa leadership may try this of course, but the result would probably be along the lines of what is happening in Gauteng, where ANC-EFF-MKP became the governing relationship, only to push the collective vote tally under 50%, and the ANC down to record lows – leaving the DA in pole position to win the province in 2029. (The charlatans and morons are, of course, on hand to advise that the Gauteng ANC stays the course).

A chart for the latest Johannesburg poll data is set out below to make the point (note that the ANC is very low in that data and could come back a bit before the November vote).

That is not a bad place to begin to end this analysis, though, as the state of the ANC in Gauteng, and Johannesburg within it, the jewel in the crown as it were of South African politics, is perhaps the best example of the degree of failure that followed from the unity-above-reform policy pursued by Ramaphosa since his takeover from Jacob Zuma.

What is the upshot of it all?

Two things. First, the ANC has an easy enough way back to 50%, except that it continues to consult people who feed it advice sure only to further crater its support. Second, if it does not make its way back, and even if it seeks to form a new national GNU with the MKP and EFF, the probable result is simply the further fracturing of South Africa into the enclave future this newspaper continues to write so much about.