SA’s Richest Provinces Are Done With the ANC

If you strip South Africa back to where its economic weight, jobs, and tax base actually lie, a striking political reality emerges.

According to the latest official data, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape together produce 63.5% of South Africa’s GDP, while accounting for 56.8% of the population. The three provinces also account for 63.4% of total employment, with 10.8 million of the country’s 17.1 million employed people living and working in these three provinces.

In other words, a little over half the population generates nearly two-thirds of national output and employment. This is the part of the country that pays the bulk of the tax, sustains formal employment, and anchors the economy. Call it, for short, productive South Africa.

Now consider how that bloc votes.

Taking the 2024 election results and aggregating them across Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape, the Democratic Alliance (DA) won 27.4% of the vote in these provinces. The African National Congress (ANC) followed at 26.3%, with the uMkhonto weSizwe Party on 21.6% and the Economic Freedom Fighters on 7.4%. So, if you consider the three richest provinces in South Africa as a single polity, the DA is no longer an opposition party trailing the ANC. It is the largest single political force.

This matters far more than national headline figures suggest. South Africa’s electoral geography is increasingly bifurcated. Provinces with slower growth, weaker labour absorption, and heavier grant dependence continue to anchor ANC dominance. But the provinces that drive GDP, absorb labour, and sustain the fiscus are drifting decisively away from it.

The implication is not that the DA has “won” the country. It is that the political centre of economic gravity has shifted. In the part of South Africa that carries the economy, voters are increasingly moving away from the ANC towards opposition parties.

That creates structural tension which the current political system cannot wish away. A party can still lead nationally while losing the confidence of the country’s productive core, but governing under those conditions becomes progressively harder. Investment decisions, job creation, and tax compliance respond to where economic confidence lies, not where liberation nostalgia polls best.

Seen this way, South Africa already contains two political economies. In the one that produces growth and jobs, the DA has edged ahead. The longer that gap persists, the more pressure it will place on national politics to realign with the realities of where the country’s wealth is actually made.