After Apartheid: Reinventing South Africa?

Introduction

Introduction Ian Shapiro and Kahreen Tebeau The new South Africa is a teenager. It seems only yesterday it was a miraculous young life, an infant bubbling with promise. How could one overstate the hope and enthusiasm that accompanied its improbable birth? Millions throughout the country and around the world cheered as long lines of firsttime voters queued patiently for hours over those three days in late April 1994 to legitimate the peaceful transition from apartheid and select their first democratic government. The process has now been repeated in enough national, regional, and local elections that it has come to seem routine, yet it was a dream that many South Africans still living today never believed would come true. South Africa’s fourth national election, held in April 2009, was both a striking affirmation of the nascent democratic regime and a remarkable consolidation by the African National Congress (ANC) of its power. True, the ANC’s 65.9 percent share of the vote was four percentage points less than it had won five years earlier. The decline cost the party thirty-three seats in Parliament , leaving it with 264 seats—three short of the two-thirds majority required unilaterally to change the constitution. The opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), led by Cape Town mayor Hellen Zille, won 16.7 percent of the vote and gained seventeen seats for a total of sixty-seven—its strongest showing ever. The DA also took control of the Western Cape provincial government, which had the important effect of curtailing the ANC’s regional power. Significant as these developments were, the larger story of the 2009 election was that South Africa’s nascent political institutions had weathered their most serious constitutional crisis to date, and the ANC had survived 2 Ian Shapiro and Kahreen Tebeau the most internally threatening leadership crisis in its history. The dynamics by which these developments took place were less than prepossessing, but this scarcely differentiated South African politics from what we have witnessed in other struggling democracies, such as Mexico or Iraq, not to mention in such established democracies as Britain or the United States in recent decades. Although less commented upon than the leadership struggle within the ANC, South Africa’s successful navigation of a potentially destabilizing constitutional crisis between 2007 and 2009 is perhaps the more consequential development. Attending to what did not happen—to the dog that did not bark—does not typically commend itself to our attention. Yet it is worth re- flecting on what was avoided in the run-up to the 2009 election. In mid2005 , supporters of President Thabo Mbeki began floating trial balloons about the possibility of changing the constitution to enable him to run for a third term as president. Initially he refused to rule out the possibility, but by early 2006 enough ANC bigwigs had weighed in against the idea that he was forced to back down.1 During the same period, Mbeki’s long-simmering conflict with his deputy president, Jacob Zuma, came to a head. Zuma was a populist who had built an independent base of support in COSATU, the trade union movement, and the left-leaning ANC Youth League. Zuma had long been a thorn in Mbeki’s side, and when the opportunity presented itself , owing to a series of rape and corruption allegations, Mbeki seized the opportunity and fired Zuma in June 2005.2 But Mbeki broke a primal rule: if you’re going to shoot an elephant, you’d better be sure to kill it. Zuma was acquitted of some of the charges, in some cases based only on technicalities, and succeeded by various legal maneuverings in getting the others postponed and ultimately dropped.3 He mounted a challenge to Mbeki’s leadership, provoking Mbeki to seek an additional term as leader of the ANC—even though he could not be president of the country for a third term. Zuma prevailed at a raucous ANC National Conference in Polokwane in December 2007, creating the anomaly that the country’s president was no longer the leader of his political party. The potential for this situation to precipitate a major political crisis was manifest in South Africa’s quasi-parliamentary system, in which the president is elected by, and relies on the continued confidence of, Parliament. Mbeki became increasingly isolated as his supporters were replaced in key ANC structures by Zuma’s people. Mbeki resigned the presidency in September 2008 after being “recalled” by the ANC...