On May 29, South Africans will cast their ballots in what might be their last opportunity to save their nation from the damage caused by the African National Congress ( ANC), the so-called party of independence.
The ANC led the struggle against racism, and swept into company, with Nelson Mandela, in the country’s first fully political vote in 1994. The ANC has been kicking South Africa into the earth ever since then, but especially since Mandela left office in 1999.
Murder is soaring. Problem is prevalent. The government’s network is collapsing. Energy is usually accessible, thanks to “load- shedding”, which are scheduled blackouts designed to save the network from complete failure. Liquid is also limited in Johannesburg, the region’s financial hub.
The Western Cape, which is led by the opposition Democratic Alliance ( DA ), and includes beautiful Cape Town, is the only region of South Africa that is moderately run.
More than addressing the country’s issues— and its own failures — immediately, the ANC has found distractions, somewhat the issue in the Middle East.
The ANC has a standing support for the Hamas terrorists in Gaza, and South Africa is in charge of the Israeli-Israel case before the International Court of Justice ( ICJ) in The Hague. In order to argue that Israel has no right to defend itself from mass murder and rape, its lawyers cite fraudulent claims and misleading quotes .
South Africa’s remedy of Israel is a warning signal, many the way Zimbabwe’s remedy of white farmers in 2000 was a sign of inevitable social collapse. The ANC uses the Palestinian cause to revive the sentimentality of the anti-apartheid years by creating a new “apartheid” army in the same way President Robert Mugabe used racist “land reform” to appeal to “war veterans” from the country’s independence conflict and divert challenges to his strength.
This time, it may not be enough. Early polls suggested that the ANC might experience its first-ever decline to be in the majority. There is a chance that South Africans will finally have had enough, despite South African polls tend to undercount the ANC’s support because it has a formidable turnout machine and appears to have revived in recent weeks. Black voters, in particular, may have decided that their debt to the ANC is paid, and they deserve better.
If the ANC fails to win 50 %, there are two possibilities. One of the benefits of the coalition government is that it will work with extremist parties like the racist Economic Freedom Fighters ( EFF), which have publicly pressed for the government to seize white farmland. Another possibility is that the opposition, led by the DA, will form a coalition of small parties to overthrow the ANC, as they did in Cape Town in 2006.
Who will turn up to the polls will determine the outcome. There is no significant absentee balloting, and there is certainly nothing like vote-by-mail in a nation where fraud is a daily hazard of economic life. A photo ID issued by the government will be required for voters to present. ( None of this is considered “racist”. )
The issue is whether South Africans have enough faith in the possibility of change, or whether nostalgia for the ANC is still rife.
Time is running out. Every day, South Africa loses the skills it will need to rebuild, as educated people emigrate. The ANC government may continue in power for a decade or so until South Africans are sufficiently confident to leave it, similar to the apartheid regime.
Until they do, the great experiment in democracy that Mandela launched in 1994, with hope for reconciliation and prosperity, will feel incomplete. To many observers, it will have been a failure.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor- at- Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p. m. to 10 p. m. ET ( 4 p. m. to 7 p. m. PT ). He is the author of How Not to Be a Sh*t!, a recent e-book. thole Country: Lessons from South Africa, now available as an audiobook form from Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
