ANC Faces Declining Minority Support, Seeks Path to Reconciliation

The African National Congress (ANC) has lamented the decline in support for the party among coloured, Indian, and white South Africans and is looking for ways to stop the haemorrhaging of support in these communities.

This is according to a discussion document the party released ahead of its 5th National General Council (NGC), which is due to start on Monday in Ekurhuleni.

The NGC is the ANC’s most important decision-making meeting between its five-yearly national conferences.

The document says there has been a deep erosion of its support within what it calls “national minorities”.

It says that among coloured South Africans there has been deep political alienation, especially within working-class coloured communities. The document says that there is a growing belief that the limited privileges coloured people had under apartheid have now been replaced by marginalisation in the democratic era. It says: “This reflects our failure to sufficiently include and uplift all poor South Africans irrespective of race.”

The document notes that while Indian South Africans have done fairly well in post-apartheid South Africa they may feel "politically sidelined or fearful of crime and instability”.

It also argues that “right-wing voices” have “grown more vocal and emboldened” in parts of the white community. The document says: “The narrative of white victimhood seeks to camouflage the reality that whites continue to benefit disproportionately from our economy, whilst the face of poverty and unemployment remains Black, female and young.”

It says: “We should intensify the campaign to emphasise that white South Africans not only have a place in the country but also stand to benefit from a prosperous society whose benefits accrue to all, especially the poor and marginalised.”

It also laments that a strong shared sense of patriotism has not been developed, and outside national holidays and national sporting triumphs South Africans retreat into their community laagers.

However, the document lays out a number of solutions to the problem.

It says that it will “ensure the ANC’s leadership and membership reflects South Africa’s diversity. Proactively recruit and promote capable comrades from minority communities not as tokenism, but to demonstrate that the ANC is for all.”

In addition, it says the party “should be attentive to poor of all communities and design inclusion programmes accordingly (like geographic targeting of poverty). Non-racialism does not mean being blind to diversity; it means no one is excluded from progress due to their identity [their emphasis].”

It also says the ANC itself must be a “non-racial vanguard”.

The document is one of the clearest indications that the ANC is seeking to move back towards non-racialism, which it had seemingly largely abandoned in recent years. Read with its willingness to at least consider changing elements of racial policies, such as black economic empowerment, this could show that a real measure of reformist thinking is entering the ANC when it comes to the question of race politics in South Africa.

Whether the NGC results in any real movement on the issue remains to be seen, but this does indicate that there could be strong reformist pushback against the racial nationalist element of the ANC.