Abstract
Local government elections are notorious for low voter turnout, but the May 2011 elections in South Africa showed a record 58 percent of the 24 million registered voters. In South Africa, local government matters and not just because it provides a pointer to what might happen in the provincial and national elections due in 2014, but helps in determining the readiness of the African Nation Congress in providing basic services to the different communities. Interestingly, these elections were preceded by service delivery protests against the ANC. The article is an analysis of the decreased support for the ANC during the 2011 local government elections. The multifaceted reasons behind the boiling cauldron of this decline in support for the ANC are scrutinised. Underpinning this decline in support often lie deep and complex factors which can be uncovered through a careful analysis of the ANC’s campaigning strategies ahead of these elections; the media which has been accused of rampant sensationalism; service delivery protests and mudslinging from other political parties. However, it is not the author’s intention in this article to deal with how other parties fared during these elections, but to highlight their impact on the declined support received by the ANC in the elections. The discussion is presented in four parts: the first presents an exploratory discussion on the theory of local government in the sphere of governance. The second part discusses some key strategies and tactics used by the ANC in attempts to galvanise support, as well as the challenges encountered. The third deals with the opposition parties’ machinery in preventing the ANC from getting a majority vote during the election. Lastly, the article concludes by highlighting the lessons learnt by the ANC during these elections within the framework of electoral politics in South Africa.Keywords: local election 2011, African National Congress (ANC), local government. Disciplines: History, political science, electoral studies
Highlights
The narrative about the ANC’s decline, which had gained much traction among certain sections of the media which painted the party as venally corrupt, wholly inefficient and lacking the political will to chart a different path, did not resonate with the majority of ANC members, nor with the party’s key constituencies among the rural and urban poor
With the service delivery protests experienced prior to the elections, the ANC faced a stiff challenge from the Democratic Alliance (DA) as the official opposition
3 The background to this toilet saga is as follows: In 2004, the Cape Town Municipality decided to upgrade the informal settlement at Silvertown in Khayelitsha in terms of the Housing Act’s Upgrading of the Informal Settlement Programme (UISP)
Summary
The narrative about the ANC’s decline, which had gained much traction among certain sections of the media which painted the party as venally corrupt, wholly inefficient and lacking the political will to chart a different path, did not resonate with the majority of ANC members, nor with the party’s key constituencies among the rural and urban poor. The ANC implanted a notion of entitlement by telling its members that the Cape Town City Council under the DA’s administration owed them houses, free water and free electricity (Cape Argus, 25 May 2011: 16) In the main, these utterances by the ANC’s leaders and the deployment of senior party members to canvass support in the Western Cape did not yield any positive results, as the DA became victorious in most municipalities in the province. The ANC began its electioneering campaign hardly 2 months before the elections In his address at the launch of the manifesto, at the Royal Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg in the North West Province, Zuma admitted, in what might legitimately be described as a calculated understatement, that there were some municipalities that were “not performing well”, as manifested by the rising number of service delivery protests (Louw, 2011c). The Western Cape High Court ruled that the city council was violating the residents’ constitutional right to dignity and its own duty to provide for the basic needs of the poor
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