South Africa’s Political Futures: The Positive and Negative Implications of One-party Dominance

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2016-10-26

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Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa

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University of Cape Town

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EISA Democracy Seminar

Abstract
Rarely has a country so divided political analysts as contemporary South Africa. Ever since R.W. Johnson famously enquired ‘How long will South Africa survive?’1 , a procession of doom-mongers has viewed its political trajectory through the lenses of post-colonial African decline, seeing its carefully managed ‘transition to democracy’ as just one more step along the road to civil war, rampant tribalism, and a one-party state. Well-wishers saw the new South Africa through quite different eyes, as a rainbow-coloured adventure bus unshackled by the ‘miracle’ of transition from the economic and social chains of apartheid. Many of its supporters even saw the African National Congress (ANC) as the glorious locomotive of continental renaissance, pulling its peoples into the African century. The calm Mandela presidency exposed 1994’s spectres of tribalism, ungovernability, and civil war as the creations of political leaders striving, in the heat of negotiation, to represent their constituents as inconsolable. The mobilisation of Zulu ethnicity proved to be an epiphenomenon of transition, and new stereotypes of the patient masses supplanted whites’ lurid fantasies of the ungovernable youth. The ANC’s qualified alliance with de Klerk’s National Party rapidly proved a luxury, as the great Afrikaner institutions - the defence force, state bureaucracies, parastatals, and Afrikaans-medium universities - were neutralised cheaply and easily through pension guarantees, sunset clauses, and endlessly deferred rationalisation.
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