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On May twenty ninth, South Africa headed to the polls. I'm out and about covering the election, so this week we partnered with The Big Take podcast. In this episode, Sarah Holder is joined by Johannesburg based economic and government affairs reporter in Tondo, Taquana, to discuss why data suggests voters have shifted away from the ANC with South Africa's ruling party set to lose its parliamentary majority according to a model developed by a state research agency.
Maracosa 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.
Come on cause.
That's Mara speaking with Intando Tupuana, 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.
Eight Mendela promised a better life under the ANC, access to healthcare, education and employment opportunities.
With bloods from the Quantilian bounders of Pava deprivation.
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 Mandela'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
an end. Now even voters like Mara are unsure. Nintando 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 unemployment rate for black South Africans is more than three times higher than it is for white South Africans. South Africa's African National Congress Party has been elected over and over
again for the past three decades. That thinks in large part to its association with Nelson Mandela and Bloomberg's In Tondo, Thuquana says life is better for South Africans now than it was during apartheid, but that doesn't mean things have turned out exactly as the ANC promised.
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 bran its campaigns in nineteen ninety four, it basically promised a better life for all, and it promised to widen access to health care, 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 Africa were either homeless or living in informal settlements, so the ANC made housing access a key part of its platform. They n try in adequate housing as a right in South Africa's new constitution and pledged to build
about a million subsidized homes and electrify even more. But Maracosa, the woman from Katlahung, is one of many South Africans who have waited years for housing under a government led program and when her turn finally came, all she was allocated was a vacant plot of land. Does she feel like the government has failed her 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 welfare grants. But on the other hand, she says that they have been promised city for instance, and it's not been connected yet, which basically means that they are in the dark.
But housing for all isn't the only campaign promise the ANC has struggled to fulfill, and Tonto 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 a points 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.
Es COM has not been able to supply power. It hasn't been able to fill the demand coming from households and businesses, and if you think about it, there's historical context that comes with it, because when the NC did come into power, they inherited a power system that only serviced a select few and as time went by, obviously they promised to provide housing and electrify those houses, which means that the demand had increased, but they had not
invested enough to make sure that they expand their network of equipment.
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.
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 these challengers and what are they promising for the future of South Africa. In South Africa, voters elect parties,
not politicians, and the parties choose their own leaders. In Tando Tujuana, who covers South Africa's economy and government for Bloomberg, says, there have never been so many competitive candidates.
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 Umkanto we Seeswear Party. What are the different directions for South Africa's future that these different candidates and parties are promising.
The NC 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 stance 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 lens and they leave like sardines in the squad a camps.
He's only forty three and used to lead the ANC. 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 overse whose party leader is former Presidents of the South African government's Jacob Zuma majority Jonasensa.
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 position in parliament, but he remains popular with his followers and so his candidacy could prove a
spoiler for the ANC. The main opposition is a more conservative party, the Democratic Alliance.
The Democratic Alliance, which is led by John Sten Haysen. The policies are more similar to the A and c'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 Steen Hazen. Here he is responding to President rama Posa's State of the Nation address in twenty twenty two.
We cannot sit through another year of your folk while our country slides further and further backwards and millions more of our citizens fall into poverty and unemployment.
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, rama Posa 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 very good. I asked Sometando, what are the odds of the ANC maintaining their majority.
It's very, very difficult to actually pin a figure in terms of whether you know or how much he will get. But the consensus is that his party will still remain the main party and will still remain the main policy driver, and that if there are any significant shifts or maybe
he has to tap other political parties to help. The NC former government that is not going to actually you know, translate into major shifts and governments and how government is run and you know, all the policies that they have in place, they you know, it won't really have a big effect on policy. So it is a bit of a concern if the NC doesn't manage to get enough
electual support. If it falls maybe let's say to forty two percent or forty percent, which is what some polls are suggesting, then it is in real trouble.
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.
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
and markets collide. Each week, listening as Stephanie Flanders, Bloomberg's head of Government and economics coverage, Allegra Stratton, author of Bloomberg's The Readout newsletter and Bloomberg opinion callist Adrian Wooldridge, helped make sense of this consequential election season. Find it in the in the City and Stephanomic's feeds. This episode was produced by Jessica Beck and David Fox. It was edited by Stacy Vannicksmith, Mark, Daniel Davies, Jessica Laudis, and
Neil Munchi. It was mixed by Veronica Rodriguez. It was fact checked by Thomas lou and Audriana Tapia. Naomi Shaven and Kim Gidtleson are our senior producers. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso, Nicole Beemsterbor is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. Special thanks to stembulay Selee. If you like this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show thanks so much for listening,