South Africa's changing political landscape

Last week saw local elections in South Africa, a country where the ANC (African National Congress), the party most closely associated with the independence movement lost heavily in most of its keys towns and cities. In 1994, South Africa took a giant step forwards as an independent country with it's first Black President, Nelson Mandela.

Ever since then the ANC has held a stranglehold in the electoral politics of the 53 million strong population. Furthermore, the ANC has been closely associated not only with the post-colonial independence and legacy, but with the Black majority of this new country.

What commentators find interesting is not only did the ANC lose heavily - down from 55% in 2011 to 41% last week- but that the leaders of the other two main parties Democratic Alliance (DA) Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) were for the first time too led by Africans. Whether this demonstrates that South Africa has moved on from a one-party apartheid legacy state to a more politically competitive post-racial landscape is being hotly debated.

Deputy President and civil rights icon, Cyril Ramaphosa, believes that the electorate perceived that the ANC took things for granted. “They think that we are arrogant, they think that we are self-centred, they think that we are self-serving," he said. "I'd like to dispute all of that and say we are a listening organisation."

There will need to be a great deal of listening if the ANC are to turn their fortunes around to becoming the political behemoth that its citizens and the world know them for being. Or was that level of power and privilege precisely the problem in the first place in the eyes’ of the poor and weary majority of Black South Africans?

OBV Staff Writer