South Africa’s youth deserting Nelson Mandela’s party

Bloomberg

In the South African township where Nelson Mandela joined the struggle against apartheid, Lordwick Nxumalo is reduced to hustling for a living.
Each day, he and other young jobless men of Soweto hang around on Walter Sisulu Square, waiting to take passport pictures for documents like driving licenses. The licensing office boss, who owns the camera, pays 10 rand ($0.65) per customer. It’s not much: Nxumalo says he lives in a shack and is “busy getting more poor.”
The 29-year-old’s predicament is common in Kliptown, a Soweto district seared in memory as the site where African National Congress (ANC) leaders including a young Mandela gathered in 1955 to adopt a constitution. There’s a memorial to the ANC’s freedom charter on the square, but Nxumalo isn’t impressed: he’s had enough of the party that has brought little relief to his community despite ruling for most of his life.
“I loved the ANC since I was a child and when the elections were there I just checked in and voted for the ANC—I didn’t think too much,” he said. “But the ANC that I’m voting for gives me nothing: We have no jobs, no housing and we’re struggling for electricity.” He said he won’t vote for them again, because “nothing is changing for us.”
A quarter of a century after the end of the repressive system of institutionalised racism that made South Africa a global pariah, the same forces that freedom unleashed—the right to free movement and a
thirst for education—threaten to bring down the party that won black South Africans their liberty.
Facing the tide of an increasingly youthful, urbanised and educated electorate that cares more about pressing daily needs than tales from the struggle era, the ANC looks vulnerable. But it’s also accelerated its own decline.
In the first decade after apartheid, the ANC government received widespread praise for improving services, reducing poverty and creating a thriving black middle class. While some of that rapid social and economic progress had slowed by the time Jacob Zuma assumed the presidency in 2009, his scandal-ridden tenure alienated many voters too young to remember South Africa’s transition to democracy.
The ANC is struggling with a stagnant economy that’s failed to significantly narrow the widest income-inequality gap in the world. Unemployment of 29 percent is at the highest level since at least 2008, the majority of South African municipalities are suffering more power and water outages, and state corruption is rampant.
The results are all too evident in Kliptown, once a heartland of ANC resistance on the outskirts of Johannesburg, where young people now say they’ve lost patience with the party. It was here, 64 years ago, that ANC leaders ratified their famous document that opens with the inspirational “the people shall govern.”
Nhlanhla Ngobese, 34, sells bead animals at a stall outside a museum in Soweto’s Orlando West district, where Mandela once lived. The museum commemorates Hector Pieterson, a 12-year-old boy shot by police who was photographed dying in the arms of a fellow student in the 1976 Soweto Uprising, a key moment that led to international sanctions on the South African regime and bolstered the ANC cause.
An ANC member, Ngobese doesn’t have much respect for the party now. “Too much corruption and fighting for position, that’s all what it’s about today,” he said.
As yet, there are few political alternatives to the ANC. The official opposition, the Democratic Alliance, is hamstrung by the perception that its roots in a party that represented white liberals during apartheid means it still has that minority’s interests at heart.