Durban - As political parties gear up to sound the ANC’s death knell at the 2024 general elections, ending 30 years in power, party national chairperson Gwede Mantashe says South Africans will live to regret voting the party out.
Several parties, led by the official opposition the DA, have publicly declared their intention of ensuring the ANC drops below 50% at next year’s elections, which would force the ANC into a coalition government.
At the general elections in 2019 the ANC retained majority rule after winning 57.50% of the vote. This was a 4.65% decrease from the 2014 elections when the party gained 62.15% of the vote.
During the 2021 local government elections the ANC dropped below 50% in the overall cast in the November 2021 polls, gaining just 46% of the vote nationwide, signalling a sizeable loss of power in local government. Ahead of its national policy conference last year the party acknowledged it faced a significant risk of falling below 50% at the country’s seventh democratic elections in 2024.
However, in a candid interview with the Sunday Tribune, Mantashe fired a warning shot about the possible adverse results of voting the ANC out. Mantashe said citizens would live to regret the move. He acknowledged the drop in support at the previous national elections and the last local government election could be a sign of the public’s confidence in the ANC gradually eroding.
“It can erode, but I know that you don’t value what you have until you don’t have it. The ANC was removed from the Johannesburg, Pretoria, Ekurhuleni metros in Gauteng. Since that happened it’s been a disaster in all those municipalities.
“I listen to the DA all the time, they basically want us to believe that our oppression was better than our freedom. I can’t take it and if many people take that it’s a pity, but I believe that’s why they will attack policies like (cadre) deployment … in 1994 every case of a deployment was a white male.
“If you say ‘take the ANC out’ it’s fine, take it out, but a lot of that progress that has been made is going to be reversed and only at that point will people understand the difference. “I always read like ‘nothing has happened since 1994’ and then I know that maybe I’m staying in the wrong country, I have not seen the change.
Half of the people who make this point, have never experienced apartheid. “I went to work in the mine with a matric. I couldn’t have a blasting certificate, but a white person with Standard 2 (Grade 4) would have a blasting certificate.
I know that and I know the change that has happened.” He said that it was the duty of the ANC to explain to people that in 1994 only 34% of South Africans had access to electricity, mainly whites and a few townships, while today over 90%have access to electricity. “Then there is load shedding, therefore because there is load shedding ‘nothing has happened since 1994’. I can’t be part of that kind of narrative,” he said.
Weighing in on Mantashe’s assertions, Siyabonga Ntombela, political analyst from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said there could be some elements of truth in Mantashe’s view. “There are countries like Zimbabwe where today they are saying that it was better under the late Robert Mugabe than it is now under incumbent President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s reign.
“There is some truth to it because it could happen that we vote out the ANC and vote into power another party and then we realise that it’s better the devil you know than that you don’t.
However, on the flip side you can’t disallow people to explore other opportunities,” Ntombela said. He added that the comments by Mantashe could just be another political card he was playing to gain points as he could probably see that “he’s on a sinking ship and it was an attempt to prey on people’s emotions and plant seeds of doubt in them about voting the ANC out”.
SUNDAY TRIBUNE