The winds of change are here

The ANC enfeebled. The DA emboldened. The looming local government elections will deliver South Africa’s sternest test yet of its democracy.

At a national level, a worrying sign is the state’s intelligence apparatus increasingly insinuating itself into politics through the leaking to the media of dodgy “dossiers” intended to smear opposition politicians.

At the local level, there is the furious response to the DA’s Joburg mayoral candidate Helen Zille’s unannounced visit to the Joburg Roads Agency’s asphalt plant, which has stood idle for a month after its gas supply contract was allowed to expire.

Workers hurled insults and formed a human chain to thwart her.

A far more daunting test

When the ANC accepted its stunning 2024 national election setback, the nation heaved a sigh of relief.

Many took it as evidence of a political maturity rare on the continent.

That is too sanguine. November’s municipal elections and, beyond them, the 2029 national election, will present far more daunting stress tests.

The 2024 result caught the ANC by surprise. Its continuing free fall now foreshadows further heavy defeats and, ultimately, the possible loss of power altogether.

There are those in the party leadership, as well as its security apparatus, who will do whatever they can to impede it.

The cost of losing power

But November will not only repeat the 2024 humiliation.

According to current polling, it will deepen it. Across the country, thousands of ANC public representatives would lose their livelihoods at a stroke.

Most of them, with little employment history beyond service as pliant party cadres, would face penury.

Many thousands more municipal employees – appointed not on merit but for their hue of skin, party membership or family connections – would face the axe.

They and their families, too, would confront a frighteningly insecure future. Nor are their fears fanciful.

The DA has signalled it will not allow a strongly unionised and often militant workforce to thwart a change of control.

As the DA’s Cilliers Brink told The Common Sense: “We’re not going to be asking the officials. To fix local government, we need to make fundamental and decisive changes.”

To frustrated ratepayers, Brink’s words may sound like the bugle call of deliverance.

But to the cadres, officials and patronage networks whose positions depend upon the existing order, they are a declaration of war.

Battle beyond politics

What confronts an incoming administration is not simply an overstaffed bureaucracy defending its privileges.

Over three decades, networks of patronage have solidified into criminal syndicates that penetrate every crack of government.

A new administration would be severing revenue streams defended by people who have demonstrated their willingness to spill blood.

When I ask Zille about the risks facing opposition politicians, she downplays the danger.

Her immediate concern, she says, is less the physical threat than the political risk of allowing the ANC and the unions to turn the election into a trial of strength by mobilising worker resistance against her.

She acknowledges a professional security assessment has rated the threat against her as “significant” and that she now travels with protection.

But, with a certain fatalism, she says: “I’m 75. I’ve had my life.”

If someone has to do it, she adds, perhaps it is better that it be someone older.

The battle for the Gauteng metros is key to an ANC drubbing in the local elections.

That, in turn, could fatally imperil its prospects in the 2029 general election.

Arrayed against that outcome is an alliance of desperate interests: politicians, public sector workers, securocrats and criminal syndicates, who have everything to lose.