Rudolph
04-25-2009, 04:12 AM
DA wins Western Cape (http://www.news24.com/News24/Elections/News/0,,2-2478-2479_2507018,00.html)
25/04/2009 07:26
Pretoria - The DA can take sole control of the Western Cape government after winning an outright majority in the province with more than 51% of votes.
http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/378/20090425073551zillestop.jpg
The Independent Electoral Commission said early on Saturday that the party had taken 51.46% of the vote, nearly double its tally in 2004 and a resounding victory over the ANC whose vote share fell sharply to 31.55%.
"Yes, the DA won an outright majority," IEC communications manager Trevor Davids said, but added that the results had yet to be formally declared.
It is the first time since the end of apartheid that a party has scored an overall majority in the province and the result of a driven campaign by DA leader Helen Zille to unseat the ANC.
Cope won 7.74% of votes and knocked the Independent Democrats into third place in the province. The ID slipped from 7% five years ago to 4.68%.
Zille has promised supporters that as the new premier of the Western Cape she will serve the interests of all people in the province, where racial divides run deep.
"We will try to govern as well as we can to show that life is better for everybody under the DA," Zille said late on Friday after arriving at Cape Town airport to a hero's welcome.
Alliance with smaller parties
Although the election result means that the DA does not need coalition partners in the provincial legislature, Zille has hinted that she might still form an alliance with smaller parties.
She will be taking control of the province after receiving good reviews of her three-year stint as mayor of Cape Town, which boosted the DA's campaign in the hotly contested province.
The ANC, on the other hand, has been weakened by leadership problems in the province, where it took 46% of votes in 2004.
The Western Cape is the only region where the opposition has managed to wrest power from the ANC in this week's elections.
Early on Saturday the DA was lying at 20% in Gauteng, while the ANC had victory firmly in hand with more than 64% of the vote in the province.
Zille has charged that a constitutional amendment approved by the Cabinet on the eve of the elections was a blatant attempt by the ANC to limit the powers of local governments, particularly those under control of the opposition.
- SAPA
Rudolph
04-26-2009, 04:22 AM
TIME - Why South Africa's Over the Rainbow (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1890334-1,00.html)
By ALEX PERRY / EAST LONDON
Thursday, Apr. 09, 2009
On a warm summer's day in mid-January, South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress, held a rally in East London on the country's southern coast to launch its campaign for re-election. Inside the city's stadium, in a pen between the stage and a sea of supporters in the ANC colors of yellow, black and green, stood the party's VIPs. Many of the men wore Gucci and the women Prada, but mixed in with them were 60 or so people, of both sexes, in combat fatigues whose camo caps identified them as veterans of Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"), the ANC's disbanded guerrilla wing. A well-dressed young man whose baseball cap announced he was a fan of the Porsche World Roadshow, chatted to another in a scarlet T shirt that declared: "Let's all young people Join the Young Communist League of South Africa to crush capitalism as a brutal system and replace it by communism." The contradictions were on show even in the parking lot, where Range Rovers, BMWs and Mercedes-Benz were pasted with giant ANC stickers promising to "Build a Caring Society."
The ANC is expected to win a fourth consecutive term in South Africa's parliamentary and presidential elections on April 22. But for the first time since it came to power with the end of apartheid in 1994, that result is not guaranteed, and by any measure — popularity, membership, moral authority — the party is in decline. Its leaders are embroiled in a series of scandals involving both corruption and ineptitude. As a government, it has failed to stem raging violent crime and the world's largest HIV/AIDS epidemic. It has presided over an economic boom that has made millionaires of a well-connected élite but left countless lives unchanged. As a party, it is accused of politicizing the police and the bureaucracy and showing contempt for the constitutional democracy for which it fought so long. (See pictures of South Africa in the run-up to the election. (http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1889833,00.html))
The party split in November when a group of disaffected members formed a breakaway group, the Congress of the People (COPE), and old friends are turning on it. Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu refuses to vote for the ANC, saying it has betrayed Nelson Mandela's legacy. Helen Suzman, a prominent white antiapartheid campaigner, called its performance an "enormous disappointment" a few months before her death on New Year's Day.
For many, the ANC's new leader, Jacob Zuma, embodies the party's decay. He won the leadership in late 2007 after a vicious fight with predecessor Thabo Mbeki that split the party — and led to COPE's formation. In 2005 his business adviser, Shabir Shaik, was sentenced to 15 years for soliciting bribes for him, and for years Zuma has faced a related prosecution for corruption, racketeering, fraud, money-laundering and tax evasion. Last month, Shaik secured an early release because of hypertension. On April 6, after three years of trying to bring Zuma to court, the National Prosecuting Authority dropped the case. State prosecutors denied yielding to pressure by the incoming Zuma government, while arguing — after years of denial — that their case had been irretrievably compromised by pressure from the old Mbeki administration.
Zuma's supporters insist he is just the man to fight for the interests of those left behind in South Africa's first years of freedom. Still, there are questions over Zuma's commitment to racial reconciliation — famously, in a country still wracked by racial violence, he chose the Zulu war anthem, "Bring Me My Machine Gun" as a theme song — and about his competence and judgment. He refuses to answer questions on policy, deferring instead to the ANC's executive committee. His coyness may be wise: those opinions he has aired have been startling. On trial for rape in 2006, a charge of which he was acquitted, he revealed he thought a shower could prevent HIV infection. Among his supporters, all that only adds to his appeal: Zuma has a populist following in the townships where his earthiness contrasts well with the élitism of Mbeki.
The New Struggle
The decline of the ANC is all the more dramatic considering the moral heights it once occupied. In the years it was fighting apartheid, its mission was clear and its righteousness unassailable. ANC members were freedom fighters repressed by a regime whose racism recalled the worst of European imperialism. Mandela, locked up for 27 years only to emerge with forgiveness for his oppressors, was a secular saint. There was no equivocation here. With the ANC and Mandela on one side and apartheid on the other, South Africa was literally a question of black and white.
During those early years, with Mandela presiding as the founding father of what Tutu dubbed "The Rainbow Nation," diversity, it was said, was no longer a source of division, but one of strength, hope, even beauty. Mandela's embrace of the new vision hid the fact that many in the ANC rank and file were struggling to discard their old monochrome view of the world. The ANC was — and still is — confronting the same dilemma that faces all liberation movements once in power. Simply put: good revolutionaries often make bad democrats. Revolutionaries plot in secret, follow orders and serve the people by leading them. Democrats debate openly and serve the people by listening to them. Revolution is resolute, romantic and self-righteous. Democracy is flexible, often boring and riddled with doubt.
History is full of revolutionaries who failed to make the switch. Most promised people's rule but, once in power, embraced a permanent state of revolution — some, like Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chávez, conjuring up fantastical foreign enemies to fight. (To those ranks, now add the leader of the influential ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, who told the East London rally that the young would "never allow them to donate this country to Britain, to the hands of the colonizers.") To their people, this never-ending war is generally experienced as dictatorship. Too many liberation leaders leave office only when another revolutionary seizes power.
It's a pattern that has been particularly ****ounced in Africa, whose post-independence history has been dominated by Big Men, despots like Mobutu Sese Seko, ruler of Zaire for 32 years, who took the country as personal reward for "liberating" it. But it is also observed around the world. A tide of leftwing revolt in Latin America, China and Southeast Asia left much of the same sour legacy of totalitarianism. In India, the Gandhi family has towered over its democracy for 60 years. In the Middle East, after helping broker a historic peace deal with Israel in 1993, Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement quickly lapsed into authoritarianism and corruption. As a young man, Henning Melber, executive director at the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden, fought in Namibia against white rule. Watching his fellow liberators turn on their own people once the war was won taught him that revolution and democracy are "incompatible," he says. (See pictures of China doing business in Africa. (http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1884396,00.html))
With its own war won, the ANC also found itself a revolutionary movement without a revolution. Not only did it have to fix the monumental inequalities that the apartheid government had created, it had to do so using the instruments of state power — government, law, the police — which it had spent years fighting. One way in which this identity crisis is expressed is in the modern ANC look — the mix of bling and camo worn by the Prada proletariat on display in East London. At a more serious level, while business, civil society and the press provide far more of a check on South Africa's government than they do in, say, Zimbabwe, the party's critics see the same bad underlying dynamics at work. Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP who resigned in 2001 in protest at the way his party was frustrating an investigation into a corrupt $5 billion arms agreement (the same deal from which Zuma was alleged to have benefited), says the last few years have seen a "regression in Africa's proudest democracy that seeps into some of those stereotypes of African Big Men." Raymond Suttner, a former ANC activist who was detained from 1975-1983, talks of how once in power the party let "ambition and greed" lead it into "lawlessness, amorality and criminality." COPE founder Mosiuoa "Terror" Lekota tells TIME: "To fight for freedom, you need a liberation organization. But South Africa has moved on now. We need political parties than can deliver services to the people, not reward the loyalty of former activists."
To be fair, the ANC is far from the worst example of a revolutionary movement lapsed into self-enrichment and autocracy. But because South Africa is the continent's biggest economy and natural leader, the ANC is a role model and has influence beyond South Africa's borders. That's not always been a good thing. Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela as President in 1999, tried to forge a middle way between revolution and democracy by calling on the ANC to embrace a "democratic revolution" in government. The approach proved schizophrenic. Mbeki the democrat adopted liberal economics, oversaw impressive growth and won plaudits as a consensus-building peace negotiator across Africa. Mbeki the revolutionary saw his country's AIDS epidemic as a Western conspiracy, a stance which cut treatment and cost 330,000 South African lives between 2000 and 2005, according to a November report by the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. (See pictures of Africa's AIDS crisis. (http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1857136,00.html))
Abroad, the former President failed to rein in fellow liberator and neighbor Mugabe, when the Zimbabwean leader unleashed his security forces on the opposition, crippled his country's economy and created millions of refugees. At the U.N., South Africa has consistently defended some of the world's worst regimes — Burma and Sudan, as well as Zimbabwe — against punitive international measures, apparently more concerned about Western bullying than the way governments treat their own people. As Feinstein says, the ANC "hasn't sent a great signal to other countries in Africa that are trying to build democracy and progress."
Problems at Home
If there is one region in South Africa on which the ANC might have focused its efforts to build democracy and progress, it is the Eastern Cape around East London. Drive out of the city and after an hour you descend into a steep, forested canyon along whose floor snakes the River Kei, the old boundary between white-run South Africa and the rolling prairies which apartheid authorities designated the black "homeland" of Transkei, meaning "across the Kei." During apartheid, the Transkei was a place of destitution: thousands of mud-walled, grass-roofed huts where people lived without running water, electricity and roads. Apartheid's rulers absolved themselves of any blame for this poverty by arguing that blacks were free to do what they wanted in the homelands — but had proved unwilling or incapable of developing. It wasn't an argument that washed with their opponents. The Eastern Cape's poverty lit the flame of rebellion in Mandela and Mbeki, both born and raised near the dirt-poor Transkei city of Mthatha, and Steve Biko, who grew up in nearby King William's Town. Even today, both the ANC and COPE claim the Eastern Cape as their heartland.
Which makes it all the stranger that the ANC has done so little to improve the region. Today much of the Eastern Cape is still typified by mud-walled, grass-roofed huts without running water, where boys ride horses, girls carry babies on their backs and families subsist on cattle, sheep, goats, chickens and maize. A new power grid has reached most homes — but supply is erratic. Most roads remain unpaved. In Mthatha, 74% of the population earns less than $150 a month and 43% are unemployed, according to a June 2008 report by the South African Medical Journal. In 2007, East London's Daily Dispatch newspaper revealed that poor maternity care at the city's Frere Hospital was resulting in around 200 stillborn babies every year — and that the corpses were being buried in mass paupers' graves. A tour of Mthatha General Hospital suggests conditions as grim: paint peels from rotten ceilings, the floors are filthy and in the casualty department, an old woman lies slumped in her wheelchair in a lake of urine.
Then there is the violence. Parents in Mthatha don't let their children walk to school for fear of robbery, or worse. The South African Medical Journal noted Mthatha's murder rate was 133 per 100,000 in 2005, twice as high as that in Colombia, and nearly three times the South African average. Walls and streetlights in the town's main drag, Nelson Mandela Drive, are plastered with posters offering "Safe Abortion, Same Day," "Quick and Safe Abortion, 3 Hours," even a free lottery ticket with every "100% guarantee, 2-hour" procedure. Nobu Sipoka, director of the Mthatha Child Abuse Resource Center, says there is no precise data on the incidence of child rape, but says she founded the center because anecdotal evidence from doctors suggested it was unusually high. "It's symptomatic of the unemployment and the poverty," she says. "This is not a happy town." An hour away in the village of Mvezo, where Mandela was born 90 years ago into a small gathering of huts on a narrow, windswept spur, the Mandelas' immediate neighbors are outspoken about their disillusionment with the ANC. "My life was better during apartheid," says Vincent Ntswayi, 53, who held a steady job in Johannesburg during white rule but has only been intermittently employed since. "Freedom turned out to be just a word. Real freedom, real power, that comes from money — and I haven't got any money."
There are thousands of Mvezos in South Africa, hundreds of Mthathas and hundreds of big city townships too. In 2006, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated 4.2 million South Africans were living on $1 a day in 2005, up from 1.9 million in 1996. In its 2009 election manifesto, even the ANC admits inequality has increased. "There are a handful of extremely wealthy people whose lives have changed dramatically," Suzman told Time before she died. "But the vast majority has been left behind. And there is a very clear link between that nondelivery and the violence and protests we experience. People are getting fed up, and understandably so."
The violence is an increasing international concern as the 2010 soccer World Cup draws near. But first there is the election, and as that approaches, many South Africans are weighing a suspicion that the ANC hasn't delivered on all its past promises because the party hasn't been made to. Granting the ANC a hefty majority — it won 66% of the vote in the last general election — obviated its need to perform: instead of focusing outwards on improving the living standards of the country, it focused inwards on improving its own. That hasn't gone unnoticed, and notwithstanding Zuma's populist appeal, may now be punished. "They're crooks," declares Lucky Maqutu, 33, an unemployed construction foreman in Mthatha and a volunteer at St. John's Apostolic Faith Mission Church. "Come election day, the ANC better watch out. They're in for a shock."
Disaffection — and the ability to express it at the ballot box — is a cornerstone of democracy. If the ANC is in for an upset on polling day, even simply a reduced majority, it will be receiving a lesson learned by revolutionary groups before it. Fatah's loss to Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian elections was a boost for militancy, sure, but also a testament to Hamas's superior social-service delivery. Mugabe's efforts to hold onto power, trying to alter the constitution to allow him everlasting rule, was the spur for the formation of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
A jolt at the ballot box might prove a much needed reminder to the ANC that it is there to serve the people, and not the other way around. In addition, a weakening of the ANC and a strengthening of the opposition would help redress the one-party domination that has hitherto undermined Africa's proudest democracy. Lekota says that this election may be the "maturing" of South Africa's democracy.
South Africa can take comfort from the knowledge that even its greatest leader had trouble making the transition from revolutionary to democrat. In office, Mandela expressed admiration for autocrats like Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, and in his farewell speech to the ANC party conference in 1997 claimed South Africa's violent crime was part of a "counter-revolution" engineered by pro-apartheid whites "to render the country ungovernable." But in retirement, Mandela rediscovered his inner democrat, speaking out against tyranny, wherever he found it — even in his own party. In March 2007, at the funeral of Adelaide Tambo, wife of his longtime friend and comrade Oliver Tambo, the old man scolded the assembled party leadership. The ANC's leaders should be "making this country of ours the caring and decent society for which this great South African dedicated her entire life and for which she sacrificed so much," he said.
Mandela's successors would do well to remember that it was the democrat in him, not the revolutionary, which made him the greatest among them.
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