South Africa’s recent election sends a clear message to Zanu-PF and Zimbabwe

By Prof Brian Raftopoulos

The 2024 elections saw the ANC lose its parliamentary majority for the first time in the post-apartheid era. The vote for the liberation party declined from 57.5% in 2019 to 40.2% in 2024, leading to a fall in the number of National Assembly seats from 230 in 2019 to 159 in 2024.

In second place in the elections was the Democratic Alliance with 21.8% of the vote, and we saw the strong emergence of uMkhonto Wesizwe, the newly formed party of the former leader of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, which emerged with 14.6% voter support.

The decline in support for the ANC and strong support for Zuma’s new party and other smaller opposition parties were, arguably, the result of a combination of the cumulative effect of deepening poverty and inequality in South Africa since 1994, the lack of service delivery by the state, and the articulation of these genuine grievances into historically constructed and contested ethnic and racial identities “in the form of ethno-nationalism, apartheid nostalgia and the romanticisation of the darker moments of the anti-apartheid struggle”.

The major outcome of this election is that the ANC has negotiated a Government of National Unity (GNU) under the leadership of Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC.

The GNU is faced with the complex challenges of dealing with the apartheid legacies of poverty, inequality and complex ethnic and racial constructions of national belonging.

Implications for Zimbabwe     

The Zimbabwe Exemption Permit (ZEP)

For Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa and their families back home, the ZEP issues have been a major concern for several years. The upsurge in xenophobic narratives in some political parties in the recent past has exacerbated the sense of fear, insecurity and anxiety among migrants in South Africa.

While the immigration issue was in the top five agenda items in the manifestos of all the parties in the recent elections, it is unclear how the GNU will move on the ZEP issue. This is because of a combination of the potential differences among the GNU parties on immigration, the ongoing legal challenges to the unlawful termination of the ZEP, the administrative incapacity of the state in the implementation of the policy, and the lack of clarity of the recent government White Paper on Immigration issued by the Department of Home Affairs (DHA).

In a strong critique of the paper, the Southern African Liaison Office, a South African NGO, laid out some of its weaknesses:

“The DHA goes to great lengths to build a case that the proposition to overhaul the current system is in line with international trends, but the DHA has been selective in building its case on practice and not ‘best’ practice. Additionally, the White paper lacks insight into the socio-economic conditions and political drivers that have played a role in promoting anti-immigrant sentiment, coupled with the spread of migration misinformation published and promoted by public officials, and political and social movement leaders. It is clear that the White Paper adopts some of the narratives as a basis for the proposals, which re-surface similar language and tone.”

Sanctions

While there are likely to be differences in the GNU over the sanctions issue and Zimbabwe, this is unlikely to change the SA government’s position in support of the removal of the remaining sanctions on the Emmerson Mnangagwa regime.

Given the continued support of SADC and the AU for the government of Zimbabwe on this question, it will be very difficult for the GNU to shift the current SA position on this matter.

Moreover, in a move closer to the EU’s sanctions position on Zimbabwe, the US government has also recently moved towards targeted sanctions.

In March 2024 the US Department of the Treasury announced that President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order “terminating the national emergency with respect to Zimbabwe and revoking the Executive Orders that have authorised Zimbabwe-specific sanctions. As a result, the economic sanctions administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) pursuant to the Zimbabwe sanctions are no longer in effect.”

The statement also noted that the US was moving toward “a clear and targeted approach to hold egregious human rights offenders and corrupt actors accountable” according to the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.

Given the strained relations between the US and South Africa, particularly relating to the latter’s strong position on Palestine and its “ability to act as a normative superpower, exceeding even the great powers in its capacity to shape the global moral discourse”, in the context of the changing power relations in global politics, the potential move by the US towards a more transactional relationship with the authoritarian Mnangagwa regime should not come as a surprise. The US has a long history of such relationships.

The state of the opposition

In much of the political sphere in South Africa, there is an increasing concern about the divided and confusing state of the political opposition in Zimbabwe. There is little doubt that the long-term strategy of the state to systematically dismantle the main opposition party in the country has had dire effects on the capacity and structures of opposition politics.

However, the persistent fractures and leadership transitional challenges in the MDC since the mid-2000s, and the more recent turmoil in the Nelson Chamisa-led CCC, have cast serious doubts on the future of opposition politics in Zimbabwe.

Chamisa’s concentration on the importance of his personal leadership, the party’s lack of structures and his politics of “strategic ambiguity”, have contributed to the disarticulation of opposition politics. While historically the ANC has had a problematic relationship with Zanu-PF, it has had even more challenges with opposition politics in Zimbabwe.

Thus, the current state of the opposition has facilitated its narrative of legitimising the post-coup regime in Zimbabwe. In addition, Chamisa’s continued call for SADC to “peacefully resolve the issues around the irregular and disputed election” of 2023, is unlikely to lead to any further substantive regional involvement.

Elements of hope

There are two hopeful outcomes of the South African elections.

First, despite the ANC losing a majority vote in the National Assembly, the ruling party did not resort to violence or electoral irregularities to re-assert its dominance. Instead, it respected the vote of the citizenry, the Constitution and the electoral institution put in place after 1994. This is in stark contrast to the violent and much-disputed electoral history of Zanu-PF and its party/state.

Second, considering the voting outcome, the ANC has begun the process of setting up a Government of National Unity without the intervention of SADC and is calling for a renewed politics of non-racism and reconciliation.

It is still too early to gauge whether this process can be sustained, given the major cleavages in South African society. But it could send a different message from the polarised and retributive politics of Zimbabwe’s ruling party.

Brian Raftopoulos is Senior Research Fellow at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town.