After Mandela, a Test at the Polls for His Party

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/world/africa/after-mandela-a-test-at-the-polls-for-his-party.html

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DIEPSLOOT, South Africa — Isaac Makhura gestured toward the squalid sprawl of shacks outside his house in this informal settlement, where some of the country’s most desperate people live. Was it any wonder, he said, that he no longer had any qualms about voting against the African National Congress, the party of his entire family for three generations?

“Is this why Nelson Mandela fought for our freedom?” he asked as South Africans mourned the death on Thursday of Mr. Mandela, the country’s first black president and the party’s most beloved leader. “The A.N.C. has let us down.”

In the coming months, the African National Congress will face what may be its most fiercely competitive election since it came to power in 1994 — and, for the first time, will do so without its most important moral figure, Mr. Mandela.

“After Mandela, the A.N.C. loses the biggest link to its glorious past,” said William Gumede, who has written extensively about Mr. Mandela and his party. “It will face the voters without him.”

Corruption allegations against senior officials like President Jacob Zuma, a failing school system, endemic joblessness, violent crime and growing inequality have whittled away the once near-universal support for the party in places like Diepsloot, a traditional bedrock of a party that boasts of its “bias toward the working class.”

Now Diepsloot is a political battleground, with other parties making inroads. No one expects the African National Congress to lose the national election, but there are signs that it could slip below 60 percent of the vote, an important psychological figure for a party accustomed to landslides.

Mr. Mandela leaves behind a South Africa where political power is firmly in the hands of the majority, and he helped steer the country away from what seemed to be the biggest risk at the time of its transition to democracy: a race war that pitted blacks against whites.

But economic power is still largely in white hands. Unemployment, particularly among the young black people who make up a vast population bulge here, is higher than ever. Inequality has grown, as a small group of black elites has joined wealthy whites in the upper echelons of society, leaving the masses far behind. Seething anger over this state of affairs, after bubbling for years, boiled over in August 2012 when the police killed 34 striking miners in the country’s worst police violence since the end of apartheid.

It was a far cry from the heady days of Mr. Mandela’s release from prison after 27 years in 1990 and his landslide victory in South Africa’s first nonracial election four years later.

“Let there be justice for all,” Mr. Mandela said in his inaugural address. “Let there be peace for all. Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all.”

It turned out these promises would be tough to keep, even for a man with Mr. Mandela’s gifts.

“There was so much hope,” George Bizos, Mr. Mandela’s lawyer and a close friend, said before Mr. Mandela died. “Those of us who took part in the struggle, we expected the speedy establishment of an egalitarian society. It has turned out to be a daydream.”

Mr. Mandela pledged in 1997 that South Africa would avoid the “formation of predatory elites that thrive on the basis of looting national wealth and the entrenchment of corruption.”

And yet that has happened. The African National Congress has slowly gone from a liberation movement to a Tammany Hall-style political machine. Corruption is endemic. Deep ties between big business and politicians have reinforced the perception that those in power seek only their own enrichment.

Mr. Mandela’s death now poses daunting questions for the party. Even in his decline, it benefited from the aura of promise and possibility that surrounded him, and the urge to link the party with his name was evident. In recent months, it bused masses of supporters in African National Congress T-shirts to the hospital where he was being treated. After his death, party supporters were quick to tie the party to Mr. Mandela and its current leaders.

In Soweto on Friday, the day after Mr. Mandela died, South African flags were few, but the emblem of the African National Congress — a hand clutching a spear on a field of black, green and yellow — was ubiquitous. “This Mandela belongs to the A.N.C.,” a man said through a microphone.

A large truck was parked at a corner, a rolling stage with giant color photographs of the current president, Mr. Zuma, proclaiming that the entire province is now a better place.

“Viva Mandela,” a man shouted into the microphone. “Viva A.N.C., viva Zuma!”

Mr. Mandela stepped off the national stage in 2004, retiring from public life. Few can say with certainty what he would have made of the tumult surrounding the striking miners and the police response, such was the fog that enveloped him in his last years, people who visited him said.

But the problems of today’s South Africa are at least partly rooted in the choice Mr. Mandela made as president to put racial reconciliation above all else and, critical analysts of his legacy say, to put the easing of white fears above the fulfillment of black aspirations. “Mandela became a buffer zone between white fears and black aspirations,” said Aubrey Matshiqi, a veteran analyst.

Mr. Mandela guided the African National Congress away from its socialist past and shunned radical means of redistributing wealth, like seizing white-owned land and businesses, which helped keep the peace and stabilize the economy but made it harder to raise living standards for blacks.

By embracing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he helped the country move peacefully beyond its racist, authoritarian past, but some South Africans feel that serious crimes went unanswered and that wishful forgetfulness has replaced true reconciliation.

These days, it is easy to forget how acute the fears of whites were and how high the hopes of blacks ran at apartheid’s end. In the decade after apartheid, 750,000 white South Africans migrated to Australia, England, New Zealand and the United States. Others fortified themselves in highly secured compounds. In 1994, 240,000 South Africans applied for gun permits, a sign of just how fearful many were about a violent, black-on-white uprising during the transition.

Many black South Africans, meanwhile, expected to quickly acquire the trappings of middle-class life: suburban houses with backyard swimming pools, white-collar jobs and high-quality schools.

That did not come to pass. White South Africans have largely held on to their wealth, and their well-tended suburban neighborhoods have not been overrun by shanty-dwellers. According to this year’s census, white families earn six times what black families do.

Mzuvikle Sikodayi, a 33-year-old platinum miner who lives in a tin shack near the mining town of Rustenburg, said his parents believed that his life would be better than theirs — a government job, perhaps, a house and a car.

“My only hope now is that my son’s life will be better,” he said. “For me there is no chance. We are running out of patience.”

Since the end of apartheid, the government led by the African National Congress has given free houses to 2.5 million poor black families. More than 15 million people get government welfare grants. Electricity and running water have come to millions of black homes for the first time.

And yet, Mr. Mandela’s party has fallen far short of the pledge it made in its first election campaign in 1994: a better life for all.

To many, the party seems more focused on a better life for some, a perception underscored by the recent disclosure of a preliminary report on one of South Africa’s biggest corruption scandals, the $27 million makeover of Mr. Zuma’s private village home.

Mr. Zuma, who has also faced charges of corruption and rape, claimed the upgrades were related to security. But the preliminary report by the country’s ombudsman, published on Nov. 29 in the Mail & Guardian, found that amenities like a swimming pool, an amphitheater and a cattle kraal, or corral, had no security benefits.

To some, Mr. Mandela’s death offers the opportunity to shed the notion that South Africa’s transition from white rule to democracy was a miracle rather than a hard-won compromise.

“The idea that a miracle occurred in South Africa is a profoundly unhelpful one,” said Steven Friedman, the director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg. “We’ve had some successes and also a lot of setbacks, but no miracles that I can think of.”

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Nicholas Kulish contributed reporting from Soweto, South Africa.