Reuters World News - Jobs, crime and keeping the lights on. The key issues in South Africa's election

Episode Date: May 18, 2024

South Africans vote in a national election on May 29, and for the first time since the end of apartheid 30 years ago polls suggest the ruling African National Congress party (ANC) is at risk of losing its parliamentary majority. Once the party of hope and change, the ANC is battling high unemployment and rising crime levels as well as issues with power supplies. Host Tara Oakes speaks with reporters Estelle Shirbon and Nellie Peyton on the key issues voters are grappling with. Follow the Reuters Econ World podcast. Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter here. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Will you please raise your right hand and say so help me God? So help me God. Nelson Mandela at his inauguration as South Africa's president in 1994, leading the African National Congress to victory, following the fall of apartheid. Then, the ANC was seen as a beacon of hope and a sign of change for the country's black majority. But after 30 years of rule,

the party is facing its toughest election yet. On May 29th, nearly 28 million South Africans will be eligible to vote. Record levels of unemployment, widespread poverty and years of corruption scandals are just some of the reasons that many have become disillusioned with the ANC. And the country's even struggling to keep the lights on. And so, the party of Nelson Mandela faces losing a majority for the first time in the post-apartheid era. On this weekend episode of Reuters World News, we take a look at the issues dominating South Africa's politics. We look at the key personalities involved and the wide-ranging parties that could form a coalition. Plus, the story of a leading sports star whose murder has placed tackling crime right at the heart of this election.

I'm your host, Tara Oaks. You've heard been. The Meregore Conversion of the world.

The incredible system of Pago Facility and the website on your website,

in the social and in your music for your eyes. No let's more

Wences, your negotiation will be a new thing's a good a period of a month

for a euro a month in Shopify dotes bar records. South African President Cyril Ramaposa signing into law

of Bill that aims to provide universal health coverage it's been criticized as a cynical

election ploy coming just two weeks before the country goes to the polls.

The presidency denies this but it perhaps underlines how this election is tightly

poised, with the African National Congress fighting to retain its parliamentary majority. Estelle Sherbon is in Johannesburg. Thank you, Estelle, for joining us. You're very welcome. So this looks like a significant election for South Africa. Yes, it is. It's probably South Africa's most momentous election since 1994, which was the first multiracial democratic election, and it marked the end of apartheid. And the AMC is facing a real challenge here, right? Yes, the ANC had been a liberation struggle movement under apartheid. So when Nelson Mandela was elected president and the ANC became a governing party, that was a complete transformation in what it was for.

It's now been in power for 30 years. And like any party that's been in power for a very long time, it's had its fair share of scandals and voters are disillusioned with it up to a point. And it now has a record in office. So that's obviously a very different thing for people to be thinking about than when its record was as an underground liberation struggle whose leaders were all imprisoned or in exile. So is this a natural course for a party that's been in power for 30 years? What we can say about South Africa over the past 30 years

is that it has enjoyed democracy and freedom in a way that it didn't before. And that's not nothing. That's very important. So the black majority have equal civic rights. They can vote. They can go where they choose their free and equal citizens like anybody else, which was not the case under the white minority regime. Unfortunately, the way that most people feel is that the political freedom has not been matched by economic prosperity for all. So it remains a very

unequal country. There's very high levels of poverty. There's very sharp inequalities between different groups in society. So it's a struggle. It doesn't feel to many South Africans as if the freedom that they gained in 1994 has translated into economic equality and prosperity for all. And youth unemployment is a particular issue, right? Yes, it's significantly higher for young people and it's also significantly higher for black people compared with other ethnic groups. White people in particular have a low unemployment rate, whereas it's very high for black people. So that indicates that there are still barriers to equal opportunity for all. And it's one of the main things that you hear people talking about here. It's one of the main things the parties are

campaigning on. And one of the reasons for that is because the economy has just not been growing enough. It's been growing in particular since 2011. It's averaged about 0.8% a year of GDP growth, which is just not enough to power wealth creation and job creation on the scale that would be needed to really narrow the gap between those who have jobs and are doing all right and the many who are not. When I went to South Africa a couple of years ago, it was remarkable how the power could just drop out wherever you were at random times of the day. And if you were in a tourist hot spot, then the generators would switch on and start whirring. But for locals who live there, it must just be such a nightmare. And I definitely didn't know before I'd turn. And I definitely didn't know

before I turned up that I would become so familiar with the terms load shedding and with the inner workings and mysteries of an energy company like ESCOM. So the state power utility, which is called ESCOM, has run into difficulties this past decade, which are attributed in part to corruption, so dysfunctionality because of that, poor management, underinvestment in some of its power stations. And all of those things have added up to a situation where South Africans have unfortunately become accustomed to something which is called here, load shedding, which basically means planned rolling power cuts affecting every part of the country and every segment. So households, companies. And apart from the fact that it makes people's lives of misery because you don't have power in your house or in your flat, so your fridge goes off and you can't turn the lights on and it can be quite miserable. It's also obviously a huge problem for business. Most days, of the year there was load shedding and some very severe load shedding. So that means power cuts of up to 10 hours. And in the first three months of this year, there was load shedding most days. And then in the past 50 days or so, there hasn't been any. The lights have been on. There's been uninterrupted

power supply. This hadn't happened for about two and a half years. How has this been turned into an election issue? So, of course, the opposition parties, the DA, for example, has been out saying, are this is political manipulation. The ANC has denied that and said that it's this improvement in power supply as a result of the government's energy plan and efforts that ESCOM has been making to improve its maintenance and bring on new capacity. And also they've attributed it to an increase in the use of rooftop solar panels by citizens, which means that some people are using that for their power supply and reducing demand on the grid. And depending on whether you talk to the government or to the opponents of the government,

you may hear that it's got nothing to do with the election or that it's got everything to do with it and it's very much a campaigning issue. Another issue that is key to South Africa's election is crime. The country has one of the highest murder rates in the world with an average of 75 a day. Last month, the killing of Luke Fleurs in a carjacking shocked the country and highlighted the issue of violent crime.

I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome everybody who's here today as we celebrate this young soul's life. The 24-year-old played for one of the country's top soccer teams, Kaiser Chiefs, and had represented his country at the Olympics. Nellie Payton spoke to his father after his funeral and memorial service. Part of what makes this story really sad is that he had kind of escaped a tough upbringing.

So his family was from Mitchell's Plain, which is a suburb of Cape Town. In South Africa, you can see really stark differences where in the main part of Cape Town, it's going to be really pretty nice and clean and developed. And then if you go outside, it's really different. And so places like Mitchell's Plain are also known for gang silence now. It's a place where they're gang wars. And Luke's father told me that growing up, that was very very important. much part of their reality that he had friends who joined gangs as young as like 11, 12 years

old because they didn't really have a lot of safe recreational spaces or activities. They might not have had kind of a strong support system at home. That's why we rather decided to keep a little busy with all sorts of sporting coach that he loves the most so that he don't have a lot of time to run around. So six men have been arrested and charged with Luke's murder. One of the things that was really moving is that Luke's father, Theo Fleurs, talked to me about what he felt when he saw these men in court for the first time. And he said that he actually didn't really feel any hatred toward them.

Even though they've been charged with murdering his son, that he just felt sadness, that these were also young people who had been led astray. Just sadness came over. for what they have done to my son and to South Africa and to the world. I tried for them to just look at me. I really tried. I wanted them just to feel what I feel.

I even stood up as they were leaving just to look at me, but they didn't. They didn't even look at me. I think this case got more attention. because Luke is a public figure, but it's not really something that's unusual in South Africa. It's not shocking because this happens to so many people every day. South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The last statistics are from 2022, 23, and the murder rate was 45 murders per 100,000 people.

Just to put that in context, the U.S. murder rate in 2022 was about 6 per 100,000. So we're talking about South Africa having more than seven times as many murders per population as the United States. And the United States is already one of the highest among developed countries. And it's actually getting worse. Last year it was the highest in 20 years. Estelle, what about the characters involved here? There are some former key ANC people now in different parties? So it's all a bit complicated.

So the ANC is led by the president, Cyril Ramaphosa. and there are two opposition parties which are led by people who were in the ANC and have fallen out with it for a variety of reasons. So one is the Economic Freedom Fighters, which is a Marxist party that wants to do things like redistribute land and nationalize mines and banks. And that's led by a man called Julius Malema, who was once the leader of the youth wing of the ANC. Jacob Zuma is a former president, and he used to be. be with the ANC, but he's fallen out with them after he was forced to quit as president.

And he's now decided to back another party called Umconto Wiesizwe, which is known as MK for short. And the choice of name of that party is somewhat controversial because Conto Wisisizue was the name of the armed wing of the ANC back in the apartheid era. Jacob Zuma is one to watch. We don't really know how things are going to play out, but MK is certainly a party that lots of people are looking at. So is MK the biggest opposition party? So the main opposition party is called the Democratic Alliance or DA, and they're a pro-business party.

They're into free market economics and that kind of thing. And they're led by John Steenhusen, and they're the ones who achieve the second biggest share of the vote after the ANC in the previous election. So they're considered a serious opposition party, and they're campaigning very vigorously. They're saying that the prospect of a coalition between the ANC and the economic freedom fighters with their desire to nationalize mines and banks and to redistribute land. For the DA, that's a complete doomsday scenario. That's how they describe it.

And they're part of a wider alliance of opposition parties called the Multi-Party Charter or MPC. That's not on the ballot. It's like an alliance between individual parties. but they're trying to see whether by aligning themselves in one big group and saying that they've got a serious plan and they've agreed on a bunch of policy platforms, they can contribute to motivating the voters to come out and vote for change, vote for opposition parties. There's very little doubt that the ANC will still be the largest party after the election. The question is how close will they be to that 50% mark, that magic number?

If they're either over it or they're very, very close to it, then probably, they can either govern alone or make do with very small parties as coalition partners and then it will be business as usual in a way. But if they fall short by some distance, they may end up having to make an alliance with one of the parties we've mentioned. And frankly, it's all speculation because it's uncharted territory. We don't know what's going to happen and it's certainly going to be very interesting to watch. We heard Nelson Mandela's inauguration at the start of the podcast.

and you said how transformative that time was for South Africa. Eleven years after his death, does his name still influence voters? So there isn't a completely straightforward answer to that question. What you can say is that Nelson Mandela is ubiquitous in that buildings and roads and places are named after him and his image, his statues of him and representations of him are quite ubiquitous. And to many, he's a revered figure. But I would say that it may surprise listeners outside of South Africa to find out that he's not universally revered here and that there are some South Africans who feel that the approach that he took to the end of apartheid was too conciliatory towards the white minority who had dominated the country and oppressed the black majority for so long. And those South Africans think that in particular, yes, he achieved a negotiation.

a transition to democracy in a peaceful transition. There was no civil war. There was no major bloodletting or displacement of populations or anything terrible like that. But the price that was paid for that was that the white minority got to keep their wealth, keep their land, control of many of the companies, the big commercial farms, the levers of wealth, if you like, and that therefore the job was unfinished because the political liberation was not accompanied by redistribution of wealth or some kind of reparation process or something like that. And so, yes,

of course, his image is everywhere and many people still revere his memory. But there are questions and debates to this day about the rights and wrongs of how apartheid came to an end and whether the price that was paid for political freedom

and for a peaceful transition to democracy was too high. Estelle, thank you very much. That's it for this special edition of Reuters World News. We'll be back on Monday with our daily headlines show. Special thanks to Estelle Sherbon and Nellie Payton. Reuters World News is produced this week and every week by Jonah Green, Gail Issa, David Spencer and Christopher Wall Jasper. I'm your host and producer Tara Oakes. Kim Vinal is our regular host. Your senior producer is Carmel Crimmons and the executive producer is Leila Decretzer. Sound design, engineering and music composition by Josh Sommer.

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