Apartheid’s Long Shadow Hangs Over South Africa’s Election

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Marakoza lives nearly thirty miles outside of Johannesburg in South Africa's third largest township, Katlohong. She's thirty eight years old and pregnant. She lives in a community of more than four hundred thousand people, almost all of whom are black. Just over a quarter of them, including Mara, live in homes constructed out of corrugated iron sheets with no access to electricity.

Oh Mara, cause.

That's Mara speaking with Intando Thupuana, who covers economic and government affairs in South Africa for Bloomberg. She told in Tondo that for most of her life she's been a steady supporter of the African National Congress Party, the party of Nelson Mandela, which has led her country since nineteen ninety four. Mendela took power after a peaceful toppling of apartheid in South Africa when Mara was just eight years old.

Blood ourselves to live people from the quantilian bounds of pavl deprivation.

Jander and Art a discredation.

Mara has the ANC party colors hanging in her window. Like so many South Africans, She's believed in the party for decades. It's won every election in South Africa since Mendela's initial victory. Its consistent majority has meant it could enact many of its reforms without much pushback. But that decades long majority for the ANC could be coming to

Shows you the kind of dynamic and the kind of despondency that people have about the ANC's rule over the last there's.

He is Intando says there's growing disappointment with the party, especially among black South Africans, who feel that its promises haven't fully come true. South Africa has the most industrialized economy in Africa, but for years economic growth has been stagnant. Its official unemployment rate of thirty three percent is among the worst in the world, and there are huge racial disparities.

The NC is the party that liberated South Africa out of white minority rule in nineteen ninety four, and it's the reason why so many people believed in the party then and when it ran its campaigns in nineteen ninety four. It basically promised a beta life for all, and it promised to widen access to healthcare, education, employment opportunities and also make South Africa's economy more inclusive. And some of those promises have materialized, but not fully.

Today, nearly two thirds of the population live in poverty, and despite the ANC's efforts, South Africa's stark racial divides remain. When the party first took over, as many as seven million South Africans were either homeless or living in informal settlements. So the ANC made housing access a key part of its platform. They enshrined adequate housing as a right in South Africa's new constitution and pledged to build about a

In some ways? She does, because she has been given a plot of land which she can one day build a house for herself and her children and to her, she would not have been able to do that for herself and she feels appreciative and grateful that the ANC government was at least able to do that for her and also her community members also depend on the social

But housing for all isn't the only campaign promise the ANC has struggled to fulfill, and Tondo says educational opportunities are lacking too.

If you look at the education sector, most of the public schools in township areas, and those are very densely populated areas, we'll find that schools are overcrowded to appoints that it affects the learning outcomes of children in township areas or previously disadvantaged areas.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only seven percent of South African adults have received in education beyond the high school level, and those gaps in the school system have helped contribute to a mounting unemployment crisis in South Africa. Why are these unemployment rates so high? And what does that look like for families in South Africa.

The basis of the reason why South Africa is struggling with unemployments is because there isn't enough economic growth to begin with. And what that does is creates a need for social welfare and it's not sustainable because it means that the country is actually spending more consumption and isn't spending enough on productive areas of the economy, and that is really a huge problem.

The government has also struggled to provide basic services like electricity. The state owned electricity Company s COM was tasked with fixing the crisis, but its budget has been depleted and it has faced accusations of corruption, mismanagement and even sabotage. As a result, blackouts have been a fact of life in the country for more than a decade.

ESCOM has not been able to supply power. It hasn't been able to fill the demand coming from households and businesses.

The combination of these challenges housing, education, unemployment, and power create major drags on the country's entire economy, and finding the money to fix those things is not easy. Could you just give us a sense of the country's economic temperature given all of these problems.

If you look at South Africa's debt levels, they throttle South Africa's capability to spend on productive sectors of the economy. And that's the reason why it can't actually do important stuff like growth economy and create employments because it's spending on interest payments and that's a hefty amount that you could be redirecting to other parts of South Africa's spending needs. So yeah, South Africa's public finances are sitting at a basically a precarious position.

And Toando says, this has all led many voters to become disillusioned with the ANC. Paul suggests that the party could get less than fifty percent of the vote next week.

A lot of these people are actually conflicted. If you talk to them, they're at odds about how they feel about the ANC. It's like the ANC has put them in a very hard spot where they are now being forced to choose between the ANC and someone else, and many of them actually don't feel like voting for someone else. I mean, I spoke to someone else who basically said to him there's no other party.

But other parties have emerged to challenge the ANC's majority this year and what has become the most hotly contested election in South Africa since apartheid ended. After the break, who are the challengers and what are they promising for the future of South Africa. In South Africa, voters elect parties,

What you're seeing now for the first time is a long list of new entrants coming to the foe.

There are three main parties challenging the ANC, the Democratic Alliance, the Economic Freedom Fighters and the Unkonto with Seeswear Party. What are the different directions for South Africa's future that these different candidates and parties are promising.

Currently is promising things that it has promised before, to make the economy more inclusive, to increase employment levels in the country. And if you look at a party like the Economic Freedom Fighters that is a left leaning party, it stants is really one of extremism and radicalism.

The Economic Freedom Fighters are led by Julius Malema.

These are province where a lot of people don't have lends and they leave like sardines in the squad a camps.

He's only forty three and used to lead the ANC's youth wing. He's long focused on the ANC's failure to address the country's stark racial inequality, with headline grabbing moves like calling for wide scale land redistribution from the white minority to the black majority.

And then there's a new entrance on the block, the cont Overseas Party, whose party leader is former Presidents of the South African governments Jacob Zuma.

Zuma is eighty two. He served as South Africa's president for years under the ANC before being jailed on contempt of court charges amid a massive corruption probe. But Zuma managed to get out of jail early and is running under the umbrella of a new political party. He's technically disqualified from holding a position in Parliament, but he remains popular with his followers and so his candidacy could prove

The Democratic Alliance, which is led by John Stan Haysen. The policies are more similar to the ANC's policies, but there are certain variants.

The Democratic Alliance is the country's official opposition party. It's historically been popular with white South Africans. The party emphasizes reducing violent crime and the country's crippling debt. Its leader is John Stean Hazen. Here he is responding to President Ramoposa's State of the Nation address in twenty twenty two.

We cannot sit through another year of your fool while our country slaves further and further backwards, and millions more of our citizens fall into poverty and unemployment.

Ramaposa, for his part, has said he's confident about the ANC's chances. The AFC is going to win this election.

Outright you, and with a very clear and decisive majority. So the notion of coalition is not part of the equation.

The possibility of a coalition government would be a situation where no one party had majority control, so to pass reforms, there would likely be lots of negotiation and compromise. If re elected, Ramaposa has promised new job creation efforts, a national health insurance plan, and a monthly welfare program to support the country's poorest, but his polling is not looking very good. I asked Intando, what are the odds of the ANC maintaining their majority.

Well, it's a very difficult question to answer. We've had like a lot of polls come out. The over arching line that we've been hearing is that his party all yet you know, less than fifty percent. It's very very difficult to actually pin a figure in terms of whether

And what that could mean, says in Tondo, is that South Africa might not be able to act swiftly and decisively to change as policies.

What that does is that it's a problem for growing the economy and creating employments and fixing the power crisis. And it will also put a burden on public finances because now you've got diversion views about how public finances should be managed.

But Nintando says that for some South Africans, voting for the ants may still be too tough a pill to swallow. In Tando talked to Maracosa about how she feels about her choices.

She said, for the first time she will actually abstain from voting, and there are a lot of people who actually share her thoughts.

And what could that mean for the election if so many people set this one out.

I think it's a very complex issue because if a lot of people are saying that they are not coming out to vote, that tells you something about what they think about the other political parties that exist in the country. They're not voting because they have been disappointed. They're not voting because they aren't seeing a viable other option for them. Yet at the same time, the A and C it can be a headache to them. So that's the sort of dissonance that you find in a lot of people.

Thanks for listening to The Big Take podcast from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. South Africa is only one of many important elections in twenty twenty four. This year, voters all around the world will have the ability to affect markets, countries, and economies like never before. To make sense of it all, Bloomberg's created a new podcast series, voter Nomics, where politics