Analysis: Keep cool, South Africa

Jacob Zuma, Al Jazeera, February 2009 (Video)
(On South African politics)

Analysis by Ashley Lewis. March 13, 2009
(Creative Commons photo, retrieved from southernafrica.files.wordpress.com)

South African President Kgalema Motlanthe recently made the announcement that his country will hold its next presidential elections on April 22. This announcement, however, is not the only indicator of upcoming elections; violence has erupted between party activists on both sides of the aisle as well, a phenomenon which has become dangerously common in the run up to several of the African continent's elections. However, in spite of the seemingly common attribute of violence amongst many African countries in electoral seasons, South Africa’s situation is not projected to become a seriously unstable one in the way of Zimbabwe or Kenya.

For one, South Africa is the most developed and stable of countries in the sub-Saharan region, both economically and politically. In addition, despite repeated eruptions of pre-electoral violence in the past, South Africa's democracy has not been crippled; if anything it has been strengthened. Party heads are removed when their actions are deemed inappropriate, as was the case with the removal Thabo Mbeki from the African National Congress (ANC), his own and dominating party in South Africa. And such rotations are not rare.

In fact, in an interview with Al Jazeera, Jacob Zuma, the presidential nominee for the ANC and the coming election's most promising candidate, states with regards to the ongoing pre-electoral violence that "everybody recognizes that this is the special quality of South Africans," implying that this is just a normal attribute of elections and should not be taken as an indicator of looming state failure.

Another reason for the unique quality of the upcoming elections is the talk of possible real opposition to the ruling establishment. The opposition party, or Congress of the People (COPE), is a splinter party of ANC and has attracted several of its dissidents since the removal of the ANC's former head Thabo Mbeki. Although the ANC is still projected to win the elections, its popularity has been waning (as illustrated by the emergence of COPE in 2008) and there has been talk that ANC may lose its two-thirds majority in parliament.

Jacob Zuma, however, does not seem to view COPE and its rise as a threat to ANC power. He attributes the dissidents' inability to lead to their still-recent emergence and to their alleged lack of democracy in their internal leadership selection. He also states that, "the people of COPE themselves are no longer happy. In fact they are coming back to the ANC ordinary membership, in droves."

Of course only the South African people can say, with their votes, how badly they want to see a change in leadership later this year.



Learn more about this topic:

On Jacob Zuma's corruption charges

On COPE's standing against the ANC

Backgrounder about South Africa's elections