South Africa's Voters Just Handed the ANC a Brutal Verdict

Thirty years after apartheid collapsed, South African voters have looked at the party that led the liberation struggle and said, plainly, you have failed us.

The African National Congress still holds the most votes in the country. But with just over 30 percent nationally, it has lost roughly 14 percentage points since the 2021 local elections. Its main rival, the Democratic Alliance, sits at about 25 percent. Former president Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe party took around 10 percent. The ANC did not win an outright majority in any of the eight major metros, including Johannesburg and Pretoria. Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula called the result catastrophic, and for once he is not exaggerating.

Ask yourself what this means for a young person in Soweto, Tembisa, or Mamelodi. Unemployment stands at 34 percent, more than three decades after the end of apartheid. One in three people who want work cannot find it. Millions of families are living with taps that run dry and power that switches off on a schedule nobody can predict. Those are not abstractions. They are a mother carrying water up a hill, a student studying by candlelight, a small trader whose business dies because the lights went out again. South Africans did not stop voting for the ANC out of boredom. They stopped because they were tired of being lied to.

Consider what the ANC has had. It has held power nationally since 1994. It has controlled most of the country's municipalities for years. It has run the same cities through decades of mounting service failures. Each election, the same promises returned: new infrastructure, jobs, clean government. Each time, the bills went unpaid, the pipes leaked, and the corruption deepened. When you govern for thirty years and your voters still wait in line for water, the question is no longer whether you failed. The question is whether you ever intended to succeed.

The mechanics of this result matter too. In Johannesburg, the DA led the count with about 35 percent against the ANC's 20 percent. The DA's Helen Zille, a veteran politician who campaigned on fixing potholes and burst water pipes, may now become mayor depending on the coalition deals struck over the next two weeks. The rest of the ballots scattered across hundreds of smaller parties. That is a fragmented, messy, and deeply democratic outcome. No single party commands the country the way it once did. Voters have made coalition governance the reality, and they have forced politicians to bargain in public.

Some will call this chaos. We call it accountability. A democracy in which a ruling party can lose 14 points and still feel untouchable is not a healthy democracy. A democracy in which voters punish a party for stealing from the public, and the party must now negotiate with rivals, is exactly what the founders of our constitutional order imagined. The 1996 Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, independent Constitutional Court, and robust public accountability institutions, was built for precisely this moment. The ballot box is working. The question is whether the people who win it will work too.

South Africa's problem has never been a lack of institutions on paper. It has been a failure to enforce them. Corruption in state-owned enterprises, looted municipal budgets, and the capture of public bodies by politically connected networks have turned strong laws into weak practice. Every coalition agreement signed in Johannesburg, Pretoria, or Ekurhuleni should be judged by one standard: does it advance clean government, or does it simply redistribute the spoils to new hands?

Here is what must happen. Coalition partners should sign binding agreements that publish municipal budgets, tender awards, and service-delivery targets online, where any citizen can check them. Every metro should appoint an independent audit and anti-corruption unit that reports directly to the public, not to the mayor's office. Water and electricity utilities should be run on commercial principles, with transparent tariffs, ring-fenced maintenance funds, and private-sector partnerships where they deliver results. Property rights and small business licensing must be streamlined so that the informal trader in Johannesburg can build a livelihood without paying a bribe at every step.

We do not need to invent this model. Botswana has spent decades showing that a resource-rich African state can build durable institutions, keep corruption relatively low, and invest in citizens when leaders are held to account. Mauritius, with fewer resources but disciplined governance and a free-market economy, has become one of the continent's most prosperous states. Closer to home, the Western Cape, governed by the DA, has often delivered better basic services than many ANC-run municipalities, though it too faces criticism over housing and inequality. The lesson is not that one party is saintly and another corrupt. The lesson is that competent, transparent, rules-based governance works, and voters know the difference when they see it.

To the ANC, we say this: you cannot go home and "put your house in order" without naming the thieves inside it. Cleaning house means suspending officials implicated in corruption, prosecuting them, and rebuilding the public service around merit rather than loyalty. To the DA and every party now bargaining in the coming days, we say this: your coalition criteria are right. Clean government, the rule of law, and service delivery for all are the minimum standards, not the bonus features. Prove it in the first hundred days, or you will be the next party voters abandon.

And to ordinary South Africans, we say this. Do not let the coalition talks happen in back rooms while your water runs dry. Attend council meetings. Demand the budgets. File the requests under access to information laws. Ask your councillor, in writing, how many leaks were fixed last year and why. Organize your street, your church, your taxi association, your student union, and insist on public scorecards for every ward. Vote next time with the receipts in hand.

Thirty years ago, South Africans fought for the right to choose their leaders. That right has now been used to deliver a verdict. The ANC has been warned, and the warning is written in the faces of voters who have waited too long. Now the real work begins, and it belongs to all of us.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA