There are probably those in the West, and even in the East and in other African nations, who are celebrating the demise of the ANC in the recent 2024 South Africa national elections. The rock and hard place situation of the ANC, of having to choose between coalescing with the EFF and MK on the left, and the DA on the right, for the first time since their euphoric take over in 1994 seems to many in celebration mood, to be well deserved. This is especially the case for those in neighboring nations who have felt betrayed by a perceived ungrateful post 1994 ANC elite, who turned their backs on surrounding national leaders and publics who risked supporting them during their anti-apartheid liberation struggles. Just watching the ANC elite and their local foot soldiers putting party above nation all of these years; lining their pockets while the masses remained or became more impoverished and got less and less, consequently squandering all that euphoric social capital of good global will. It has left the ANC with few allies to stick up for a used-to-be, role modelling, African ruling party, and admired African nation, now on some very hard rocks.

The ANC’s unwillingness, with a deeply compromised President, who long ago lost his punch, to side with the United States in the Russian-Ukraine conflict and angering the same by taking Israel to international court over genocide claims, has just added salt to the deepening wound of the party’s now humbled state of internal affairs and fragile foreign affairs. It is forcing the ANC to stay in power by being stuck in the bed with the enemy to the left or to the right, with little capacity to build a well-functioning coalition government for the good of the society and the continent and world it is part.

They chose to turn rightward to the DA, preferring White/ Coloured business conservatism over being concerned with the chronic quality of life needs of the massive impoverished Black population. It will be chaos now since it is going back to the pre-1994 days, but with different twists. Whites will not be publicly taking over but pulling behind the scene strings moreso. Anyone who has been to real, rather than tourist, Cape Town, where the DA reigns, realizes this Party now in shared governance with the ANC has no effective governance interest in assisting Black people to empower their lives. Just mostly interested in possessing and selling off prime land and making the Western Cape into a wierd California with apartheid trappings. And where there is meager justice interest, there is little or no DA national party rulership experience, with the Black township poor with a deep historic Coloured as well as White prejudice against tribal Black people, no matter their class. As a consequence in the Western Cape, the massive townships with trickle mobility out into significant education and employment markets, exist along with Black immigrant and tribal middle and affluent classes locked out of the Provincial power structure.

With national Black tribal governance, has come the stranglehold on the Western Cape, depriving the Province of decent law enforcement resources and means to resolve serious water scarcity problems, completing the loop around the neck of the Province which will become aggravated rather than resolved in ANC -DA coalition governance polarized through undergirding Black/ Coloured & White prejudices, dating back to bifocal colonial times and institutionalized in the 1910 Union of South Africa constitution, which totally franchised Whites, partially franchised Coloureds, and totally disenfranchised tribal Blacks and First People.

The partial francisement of Coloureds, and the total disenfranchisement of tribal Blacks, has set in, a sustained cultural line of hatred between the two populations which westerners such as Americans experience difficulties understanding, as seen in the often mistaken identity of Coloureds who attempt to pass as Black anti-apartheid advocates once on American soil, while harboring anti-Black sentiments, especially since the ANC declared Coloureds ineligible for Black affirmative action benefits.

To continue, Zuma’s largely KwaZulu-Natal Province based MK Party, which was the spoiler in the national election is now a strange bedfellow with the DA dominated Western Cape, in their Provincial secessionist inclinations, in face of a gravely weakened nationalist ANC government. If the DA begins to press for more extensive Provincial rights it will spell trouble for the ANC if the DA proves to become a much more skillful national governance coalition partner than the ANC, while becoming decentralization advocates. But this is farfetched since the DA has never been tested as a national party with power, and its domestic and international policies are well out of step with the continent and general Global South such as BRICS. In principle the MK stands a better chance in spearheading Provincial spinoff but given Zuma’s precarious political status it is improbable the party will last once Zuma, in one way or another, leaves its leadership.

It is the sheer arrogant exceptionalism of the ANC elite, learned well from their White governance predecessors, and its sinking into such deep state corruption, while blatantly leading to massive socioeconomic deprivation, which has led to this moment of national despair. They got into power compromising with white elites wishing to preserve and expand their internal and continental economic power, remain in control of media, academia, technology, and energy power, while leaving the hollow shell of state governance for Blacks to run for show and tell. They sealed off the Western Cape for Coloureds and Whites and KwaZulu-Natal for Indians and Zulus, thinking foolishly they could govern alone rather in democratic coalescing while receiving White money under the table.

It became an ANC joke; an ANC scam, raping the nation’s poor in the process, which began to accelerate down hill during and since COVID-19, crashing and crushing into the 2024 national elections with the masses voting with their ballots about how tired they are of all of it. The street crime coming into malls as well as into gated and open communities. The starvation. Horrible shacks with no running water. Luxury for the white and non-white affluent. Disenfranchised if you are Coloured, Indian, and poor/ middle class White. The power outages are out of control. Failing schools and inaccessible and unpassable universities. No decent work anywhere. Police brutality everywhere. Mega churches are just about money. COVID-19 pandemic drew the real red morbid line between the haves and have nots, with the haves turning deaf ears to the frustrated public protests of the have nots viewed as thugs in the unruly masses. ANC leaders living in their millions worth mansions, with their ever ready generators, with their global speeches about justice and empowerment for Africans not applied in their home turf. The world laughs and rolls their eyes at a South Africa, down the drain yet still in denial. They are naked before the world, long squandering their immense good will social capital.

But with all this said, Africa, especially Southern Africa and its links to Asia and the rest of this multi polarized world, has much to lose in the quagmire rudderless South Africa has now sunk into. As much as surrounding nations and the Indian Ocean Region may wish to fantasize otherwise, they remain heavily dependent on South Africa water, power, agricultural imports, corporate finance, retail business and sciences and technologies. Economic and political instability in South Africa impacts an entire region composed of deeply under- developed states. And a large reason for such underdevelopment stems from the continuation of the historical hegemonic dominance South African elites have perpetuated, even after 1994 Black Majority Rule changed the demographic faces of governance and made possible Black wealth off exploits of regional domination.

To think about the ANC having to stoop to coalescing with the DA, a front for Afrikaner, English, and otherwise European descent derived national and regional economic wealth in sustained apartheid mindsets, and segregated social arrangements was unthinkable even a few years ago. At best it was presumed such coalescing would be with the EFF and other emerging Black political parties. Those of us, who as early as 2006, warned of a tilt to the right subsidized in part by American right wing foundations were ignored. In fact anyone who dared to mention the phrase coalition government was ridiculed.

Well, here we are with an ANC ill-equipped in knowing how to cooperate with anyone with declining good governance capacity, in coalition with a DA out of step with global, let alone continental time, wistfully hoping for the return of white rulership, even indirectly, with black puppets with longer strings they now have.

This speaks of a fact about South Africa which startles Whites and Indians, as well as Blacks, especially those Blacks claiming to be of decolonialism ilk. Namely it has been easy to forget or ignore the fact that just like the rest of Africa, including Ethiopia and the Indian Ocean Region, which enjoy escaping conventional African colonialism claims, that South Africa, like the rest of the continent, has been since the 19th century, a societal project of American and European imperialism driven by first exploiting banks , mining corporations and private philanthropic foundations;and then the Western security interests of the two World Wars , the Cold War, and growing twenty- first competition with China and Russia on the continent.

When DA Western Cape Provincial Helen Zille caused a flap a few years ago when she claimed colonialism was not all that bad, she was inadvertently talking about herself and constructed White race colonials as well as Blacks, Coloreds, and Indians colonials. Of course White South Africans symbolized by Cecil Rhodes,Jan Smuts, Christian Bernard, and even Nadine Gordimer were allowed to enter into the hallways of the White Supremacy privileged in European derived societies, but they were colonials just as much as their non-white counterparts. Perhaps with better infrastructure and having nuclear arms before Black Majority Rule, but top South African institutions of higher learning have always been viewed as being colonial in nature, at best aping after Western elite places with no noticeable degrees of separate or compatible eminence. This is no different than Western attitudes towards other African countries as being lower places at best: good for patronage and encouraging imitation, assuming anything indigenous to be inferior, indeed exotic at best, fitted into some Western niche for Western interpretation and exploitation.

The biggest chicken to come to roost in this South African quagmire is the complete failure of the Western and even African hope that 1994 Black Majority Rule South Africa would become the moral voice of the continent. That dream has failed miserably with its euphoric fantasies vaporized decades ago with successive limitations and failures in State leadership, with a continued sense of South African arrogant exceptionalism seeped in sustained historical xenophobia and internal disenfranchisement of the majority Black population, just with now black faces rather than white ones governing.

The public relations stunt of the 1990s Bishop Desmond TuTu Truth and Reconciliation Commission, over time, fell flat on its face with the Bishop’s moral leadership in ANC circles in his treatment of Winnie Mandela, its incomplete limited mandate, and its lack of extension to the rest of a society. A society, since its bifocal Afrikaner- English colonial roots, which has never experienced more than piecemeal symbolic reconciliation of its deeply polarized internal and external racialized fissures, now in full public bloom.

Its internal racial, class, and tribal problems which are ignored, denied, and trivialized under a public face of unity that the rest of the continent realizes is just a myth of arrogant exceptionalism, is what has been preventing South Africa from being the continent’s moral voice. The pivotal nation to turn to resolve conflicts, and to set paces and trends for the continent and world, never materialized. The African world never turned to South Africa with hope when it has come to resolving post-1990s continental difficulties be they in Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Zimbabwe, Francophone West African coups, the Congo, Rwanda, or the massive problems of poverty, starvation, climate change, unemployment, epidemics , and youth under-education. South Africa is not even a minute after thought as a continental moral voice in the pressing affairs of the continent, let alone the world. It is why the world was so shocked to see South Africa rise to the IJC case against Israel, only to do no significant power play follow-up any empowering nation would have stood up and done. But ran out of gas and nerve to capitalize on the global stage, with a compromised President refusing to take the helm of global leadership his ANC Party paved the way for him to seize.

Even as an Indian Ocean nation, South Africa has never been a moral voice for very much, as envisioned by Mandela. In fact, Indian Ocean Island states have become havens for unreconstructed South African racists imposing their segregationist social norms and values and bypassing the anti-racist policies in their homeland, to exploit labor and employ discriminationatory labor practices. In some national cases wealthy South Africans have been able to buy citizenships and build properties to which native citizens are refused access.

All of this is counter to the late 1960s and 1970s, when the Indian Ocean Region had State leadership, especially Prime Minister Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam (SSR) of Mauritius, the first and last Chair of the OAU in the mid-1970s who as a Pan-Africanist, staunchly opposed the South African apartheid regime. It was a stance changed in the early 1980s when SSR was ousted from power and successive state leaders became more receptive to White South African capitalist racists, especially after Black Majority Rule came into being.

As Southern African Nations scramble to get from under the crumbling hegemony of South Africa’s ANC, China is trying to assist in plugging up the holes of the sinking cruise liner with the abating simmering anger of Americans, Europeans, and those whites behind the DA. There is the power load shedding problem the Chinese are quietly assisting with and more shoring up the public sector with private enterprise partners to come.

Whatever assistance South Africa receives from China, it will not be enough to keep the nation from sinking. The only hope for the quagmire the multi- polarized South African elites find themselves jammed up in, is what they all, most fear. The rising up of the bottom that too, has for centuries ignored and dismissed. Their chaos over time will become orderly as the masses gain leaders who can lead and create a new just society, rather than the paper mache one bogged down in the pig slop of a Western derived failed African state.

John Huston Stanfield ASARPI June 17, 2024