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GQEBERHA, South Africa — South Africa’s ruling party endorsed President Cyril Ramaphosa as its leader on Sunday despite lingering questions over cash stuffed in his couch, hoping his personal popularity will be enough to shore up a diminishing voter base angered by crumbling infrastructure and corruption.
Ramaphosa, a wealthy business executive and the last confidant of Nelson Mandela still active in government, has positioned himself as a reformer in a government ridden by scandals. However, he has been damaged by the revelation he kept at least $580,000 in cash in his couch at his game farm. His staff told investigators it came from the sale of a herd of buffalo that were never collected, an explanation a panel appointed by Parliament questioned.
The cash was later stolen, and the panel said Ramaphosa did not properly report the theft to police. The affair emerged publicly after it was leaked by an ally of his predecessor and chief political rival, Jacob Zuma.
The panel recommended opening an impeachment inquiry against him this month, but most legislators from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) refused. Analysts said some wanted to protect the ANC, and others were afraid it could strengthen the faction loyal to the scandal-plagued Zuma.
A judicial inquiry found that Zuma and others had eviscerated the tax authorities, police, national prosecution service and other government organizations to enrich themselves and prevent investigation into the theft of public funds. Zuma was sentenced to jail for contempt of court when he refused to answer questions on the findings, a ruling that sparked riots that killed about 300 people. Zuma has dismissed the allegations.
Ramaphosa needs the ANC to win enough parliamentary seats in the 2024 national elections to choose a president without a coalition. But he faces growing competition from other parties, strong opposition in urban areas spreading to smaller towns, and popular frustration that has been driving down the number of registered voters and turnout.
While many voters have been deserting the ANC, they haven’t turned out in large numbers for other parties. Many see the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, as a haven for White liberals. Some voters also worry that the next-largest party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by firebrand ANC breakaway Julius Malema, is volatile. So the ANC has retained the lion’s share of a shrinking vote, said Collette Schulz-Herzenberg, senior lecturer in political science at Stellenbosch University.
That may be changing. The ANC has held power since the end of apartheid in 1994, when it received just under two-thirds of votes. That fell to 57.5 percent in 2019’s national elections. The 2021 municipal elections saw voter participation plunge, and the ANC received under half of the votes for the first time, Schulz-Herzenberg said. Many of the party faithful are so fed up with daily electricity cuts, poor public services and corruption that they are starting small grass-roots movements, which take nibbles out of both the opposition and the ANC’s support.
In Slovoville, a poor township on the edge of Johannesburg, the machinery at the gold mine next door dwarfs the one-story homes. The area showcases both the achievements of the ANC’s early days — affordable homes, a free clinic and school — and the decline of more recent years. The local primary school is partly flooded, four burst water pipes have been gushing wastewater around homes at an intersection, and the area hasn’t had power for months.
Tavern owner Mbhekeni Shongwe, 51, has voted for the ANC in every election since 1994. So have all his friends. Now they are fed up.
After their local councilman was shot dead in March, Shongwe decided to stand as an independent in June. He got 56 percent of the vote in his district, buoyed by his charitable work proing food to the needy and public demands that the nearby mine should employ locals. He wants to build sports facilities for teenagers, a rehab clinic for addicts and most of all, he says: jobs, jobs, jobs.
“Money is next to us, and people are suffering!” he exclaimed, sitting on a plastic chair under his dust-covered set of speakers. “People are fed up with the ANC and corruption.”
But the ANC was able to mobilize support more effectively in the other six voting districts and won the council seat. Now the Harmony Gold Mining Company is seeking to take Shongwe to court for leading what he said was a legally permitted demonstration to the mine.
Six women in a house down the road said they had all voted for Shongwe but would be boycotting the national elections. “No! Never!” Gertrude Mmoloawa cried out when asked whether she would vote in 2024. The ANC councilman had done nothing to address the flooding around her home from the burst pipes, she said. He did not show up for a scheduled interview with The Washington Post and did not respond to questions on WhatsApp.
The ANC has also just lost control farther south, in the municipality of Nelson Mandela Bay, spread around a breezy seaside city of around 1.3 million, Gqeberha. A palm-lined promenade meanders along its beaches. Residents have just welcomed their sixth mayor in as many years. Leadership has whipsawed between the ANC and the Democratic Alliance, amid political gridlock that has prevented the city from solving water, housing and other crises, said its new mayor, Retief Odendaal. Both parties have 48 council seats out of 120.
He said the city had spun through 37 municipal managers in 13 years, mostly during ANC control. He alleged the public procurement system has been deliberately paralyzed so vendors can bypass it with kickbacks. Now he’s trying to give the Chamber of Commerce the legal right to access and repair infrastructure while he streamlines the civil service again.
“We’ve been captured,” he said ruefully, using a term that commonly refers to the deliberate paralysis of state institutions during the Zuma years.
Odendaal has also turned to Gift of the Givers, a South African aid group that works in war zones like Somalia and Yemen. Demand for its services has skyrocketed in South Africa as infrastructure crumbles and poverty spreads.
When fires threatened the city last month, the aid group rented helicopters for water dumps. At a mental health hospital, neighbors fill plastic containers with water from a borehole the group drilled.
At the historic Paterson High School, the group is refurbishing seven classrooms destroyed by fire in 2015. The government had not made repairs, so remaining rooms had to accommodate 50 students at a time, some sitting on the floor. Memories of the ANC’s past glories fighting apartheid decorate the walls. A plaque commemorates a science teacher; police pulled him out of his classroom in 1976 for anti-apartheid protests and he became the first activist to die in detention. A mural at the front reminds students they were “BORN FREE.”
Some citizens have begun to see the aid group as a parallel government. Newspaper columnists have suggested taxes should go to the group, not the government.
Eugene Johnson, the former ANC mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay, said the water crisis was “an act of God,” that she had promoted water conservation and that its aging infrastructure was supporting a growing population and expensive to repair. Contracting was complicated, she said, and sometimes work was blocked by parties wanting to ensure their share. Repairs for the school were included in the 2023-24 budget, she said.
Farther north, in the small university town of Makana, residents won a 2019 court ruling to dissolve their ANC-dominated municipality after years of mismanagement left it with dry taps and areas reeking of sewage despite ballooning expenditure on water projects.
In municipal elections last year, university professors, social activists, former ANC cadres and others came together to form the Makana Citizens Front. The group took five seats — and a bigger share of the vote than other well-established opposition parties. The ANC’s majority shrank to only one seat. The mayor did not respond to requests for comment.
While backing for the ANC has been eroding, it retains a degree of popularity that goes far beyond gratitude for its liberation struggles, said Frans Cronje, founder of the Social Research Foundation. The ANC also won favor because of its performance in its first decade of rule, churning out low-cost housing, investing in infrastructure, education and health, creating jobs and adopting conservative fiscal policies.
But now polling by his organization shows that the decline in living standards is fueling a new wave of grass-roots activism.
“I’m actually very optimistic. This is the normal response of a healthy democracy to a crisis,” he said. “There’s more things holding us together than making us fall apart.”
Wroughton reported from Cape Town.
