A flawed result - but this poll gives me hope for a new South Africa

12 April 2012

Voters' queues snaked around many city blocks in South Africa on Wednesday in scenes reminiscent of the first democratic elections in 1994 - but the mood was less exuberant. On that day, for most of the millions who braved extremes of heat and inclement weather, that had been their first experience of casting a ballot in their lives.

How well I remember the mixture of delight and shock it had been for my good friend Mazisi Kunene, Zulu poet and for many years the ANC's chief representative in Europe: delight, because after 38 years in exile he'd come back, almost 70 years old, to take part in the democratic process to which he'd devoted most of his life ; shock, because in his trembling eagerness to make his mark between the photo of Nelson Mandela and the green, black and yellow flag of his party, he had drawn his cross in the blank square allotted to the Pan-Africanist Congress which headed the ballot paper.

This time the mood was more subdued. Yet after the two presidential terms of Thabo Mbeki, recent events had, for the first time since the transition to democracy, begun to cast clouds of doubt over the ANC's arrogant assurance of an automatic landslide majority.

The unexpected split in the ruling party, the emergence of a predominantly black new party, the Congress of the People (COPE), the investiture of Kgalema Motlanthe as caretaker president late in 2008, and the persisting grave doubts surrounding the moral and political qualities of the president-to-be, Jacob Zuma, put the whole country under pressure.

At the time of writing, final results are not yet available but trends appear to confirm the expectation that the ANC will indeed obtain the two-thirds majority it had anticipated. It would confirm, at least for the time being, the fear - even the likelihood? - that Zuma might try to change the constitution, among other things to allow him a freer hand in taking his revenge on the judiciary.

However, that majority remains under threat. Given the increased strength of the opposition, the ruling party will be constantly reminded of the fact that simply to ride roughshod may jeopardise its majority. A somewhat stronger opposition is emerging.

COPE does not seem to have fulfilled the clearly exaggerated expectations of some of its followers; at the same time it is now established as a new kid on the block and is likely to remain a factor in the future. Provided its leadership can grow out of their present infighting, the ANC may have to move with more caution than before.

The hope for a decisive swing against the ANC has receded - but only for now, and the ruling party must live with the memory of what a break could mean to its over-confident recent swaggering.

To realise its potential role in the years ahead, the opposition needs a clearer grasp of the political challenges - and these go far beyond the immediate need of "fighting the ANC" or "containing Zuma". Mere oppositionality is not far enough.

What South Africans - and particularly the large black majority - clearly require is a programme based on the real needs of the people. That means not simply an acceleration and improvement in addressing poverty or Aids, or in the provision of more adequate education, but a rethinking of these urgencies in order to find new ways of devising adequate responses.

In some cases, as in education, the foundations for change have been laid. In my recent memoir, A Fork in the Road, I mentioned a white friend whose five-year-old son had started pre-school, where his best friend was a black boy.

One afternoon after school the white boy looked on as his black friend's father turned up in his car to collect his son. He stared in amazement.

Early the next morning he couldn't wait for his black friend to arrive, and immediately ran to him. "You never told me you had a black daddy!" he exclaimed. In this case, the two small friends were already geared to the new South Africa: only the system had to catch up.

The problem is that the ANC has become mired in hoary old reflexes and in the paralysis of corruption and arrogance. The slight diminution of its power base may open a space for some new thinking, even if this has not been dramatic enough to provide the complete shake-up the country needs.

This demands more creative inputs from COPE, the Democratic Alliance and others -- not just to speed up what has been happening but to find new approaches. The small shock of these results may help to shake some incumbents out of their sense of security, opening up some spaces for radically new thinking.

It is of course possible that the hint of a setback may prompt Zuma to reach for his machine gun sooner rather than later, and start moving faster towards the louring figure of an Idi Amin.

Many of his younger supporters, the sans culottes of the Youth Movement, may drive him on as they did at the watershed Polokwane congress in 2007 - where Mbeki's fall was prepared, where the government's campaign against the judiciary was unmasked in all its appalling nakedness, and where the rampant rule of unreason that has dominated so much of the past year (culminating in the denial of a visa to the Dalai Lama) was launched.

Against this background, the slight shift witnessed in these elections, following the malaise of the Mbeki years and the unease surfacing among both blacks and whites, may be the kind of warning the new government and its realigned opposition needs.

Sometimes the most fleeting moments may register possibilities of a shift in which a new world, a new country, can be glimpsed.

This week a black cripple on crutches arrived to joined our queue to vote. Without hesitation, a well-to-do white man near the front approached the new arrival, took him by the arm and escorted him to the voting hall, where he handed him to the care of an electoral officer before falling in at the back of the queue again.

Then, on my way home, I stopped at a pedestrian crossing where a young black woman saw an elderly white man approaching in a wheelchair and hurried to the edge of the freeway to push the chair across four lanes of traffic.

These are insignificant moments in their own right but they attest to a generosity and a capacity for sharing which have not always been in evidence in the racially divided South Africa.

There seems to be a readiness in the electorate to face the problems defined by the past few years. Something of that faith in the future that has carried South Africa from apartheid into the new era may yet be harnessed to new causes.

Unlike the Afro-pessimists whose writings on South Africa constantly confirm decades of gloom and doom, I believe the new elections have illuminated a real desire in the electorate to face the excesses in maladministration, nepotism and callousness of the past few years and come up with something really creative.

South Africans have shown themselves capable of such renewal and regeneration. I now believe it can be recovered and revitalised, even reinvented.

André Brink's memoir, A Fork in the Road ,was published earlier this year by Harvill Secker.

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