How should the low voter turnout in the 1 November 2021 local government elections be interpreted against the backdrop of growing waves of municipal service delivery battles? To help make sense of this puzzle, it is crucial to examine the 2021 election results through a wider socio-political perspective. Only 12 million voters cast their ballots, which is slightly less than 46% of the 26,2 million registered voters. This marks a big fall in the total vote count that the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) recorded in the 2016 municipal elections when 26,3 million people had registered, with a ballot count in the order of 15,3 million people or 58% of the electorate.
Reasons for the steep drop of more than 3 million voters when comparing the 2016 and 2021 local government election cycles have sparked intensive analyses and debates. Was this fall in electoral participation just some once-off peculiarity of the 2021 local elections or in line with some historical electoral pattern? Why did electoral participation in the 2021 local government elections fall below 50% of the electorate? How much of this might be due to growing voter apathy or disillusionment with electoral politics? To what extent might it be due to the electorate heeding a call to stay away from the polls? In addition, forward looking questions also arise that must be confronted. Even though local elections differ from national elections, it is important to think through what the outcomes of the 2021 local polls mean for the 2024 national elections.
The ANC and DA failed to secure outright majorities in more municipal governments than where they had absolute domination in the past. On the contrary, they lost votes to smaller formations that mushroomed during the 2021 local government elections. Many of these formations are ANC and DA offshoots – disgruntled or expelled ex-members – that do not represent a real political break from or an anti-capitalist alternative to the dominant bourgeois political parties. These formations do not only echo the reactionary and empty service delivery promises of the big parties, but also subscribe to tribal, racist, xenophobic and misogynist ideological fundamentalism. Their uneven and marginal electoral successes remain precarious and heavily dependent on ANC, DA and EFF influences in local governments.
Defeats that the ANC and DA suffered did not translate into gains for the EFF, except for a few extra seats near the traditional EFF strongholds. Judging from the EFF shenanigans, the party is increasingly unable to disguise its bourgeois aspirations behind their red berets, red uniforms and similar publicity stunts. The EFF will desperately search for ways that can help it recover from this setback in the electoral arena. How it does so should be clear from its populist track-record, which flows from enriching the party elites with the aid of misleading slogans against ‘white monopoly capital’.
A Vote Against Municipal Austerity and Exclusion
The onslaught of the neoliberal service delivery model on poor communities has been ruthless and relentless. Welfare for big corporates and elites (through outsourcing, state subsidies, tax rebates, etc.) but austerity for the labouring majority are its core principles. It has imposed privatisation, commodification of basic services and cost recovery on poor communities, placing functional, affordable and decent municipal services out of reach for these communities. Inseparable from corruption, neoliberalism has aggravated the disasters of municipal austerity that have burdened oppressed and impoverished communities before 1994. In fact, longstanding socioeconomic inequalities have grown more acute since then as is evident from enduring service delivery upheavals.
Community protests against backlogs and cutbacks in municipal services have erupted and continue to rage in many localities across the country. Usually triggered by a specific injustice, these service delivery revolts vary considerably in terms of organisational form and methods of mass struggle. Furthermore, communities’ demands for housing, water, sanitation, electricity and social infrastructure also embrace anti-neoliberal radicalisation. What this means is that while these service delivery revolts differ in their outward form, their substantive commonalities outweigh such nominal differences. The anti-neoliberal axis of demands offers a basis to unite locally disparate and ad hoc battles into progressive united fronts.
Progressive electoral initiatives
Social movements aligned with community demands and struggles for municipal services featured on the ballot papers in a few battleground localities. One case in point is the Makana Citizen’s Front that contested elections in Makhanda, formerly known as Grahamstown. This Citizen’s Front has been instrumental in local battles for decent housing, enough clean water and proper sanitation. Closely allied with a local movement of unemployed youth fighting for jobs, the Front has emerged as a voice of and for the interests of the oppressed, dispossessed and deprived residents of Makhanda.
Service delivery revolts in Bothsabelo outside Bloemfontein and the Garden Route District, have also given rise to social movements that decided to contest the 2021 elections in their respective localities. The Active United Front in the Garden Route District (particularly Bitou municipality), for instance, did not emerge overnight. On the contrary, it has been fighting side-by-side with local residents for municipal services, thus winning a support base in the community. The Bothsabelo Unemployed Movement, founded in 1999, has also been immersed in local community battles thus gaining recognition among residents in Bothsabelo. In their joint local elections manifesto, these three community movements declare, among other commitments, a ‘pledge of candidates’ and a call for ‘democratic and people-controlled municipalities’. They launched this manifesto under the banner of #CryofTheXcluded which is a network in which SAFTU has considerable influence.
The Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) participated in an eclectic mix of municipal polls, with its candidates on ballots in West Coast, Bitou and Alfred Nzo (targeting Matatiele, Umzimvubu and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela local municipalities). Based on the SRWP’s tactics and experiences in the 2019 national and provincial elections, it is surprising but publicly unknown why it did not participate in metropolitan areas where millions of workers reside.
Together, the community movements (#CryofTheXcluded) and SRWP will have more than a dozen councillors serving in municipal governments scattered across different provinces. Translating these electoral successes into gains for the struggle to overthrow capitalism and its state apparatus is a key task that confronts these organisations. A central part of this task is to consolidate and grow the self-organised support for the organisations in these localities, starting with a sober, critical assessment of how to use a consistent anti-capitalist electoral tactic. What will certainly benefit this exercise is to compare today’s lessons on participation in municipal government with activist learnings from the experiences of Operation Khanyisa Movement/Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC).
Today, after the oppressed and exploited have won the full franchise, anti-capitalist activists and movements broadly accept that principled abstention from electoral politics makes no logical sense. Accepting the need to participate in elections does not mean there is a clear and consistent strategy of how to get rid of all false hopes in bourgeois electoral enticements. The emancipation of the labouring classes, according to the logic of APDUSA politics, can only happen through a social revolution rather than bourgeois parliaments. Our programme to advance the independent interests and aspirations of the labouring majority states: “The elected representatives of the people, at organisational level or in the local, regional or national political institutions of state, must be fully accountable to those who elect them and they must be fully bound by the demands and aspirations of the working class and its allies, the landless peasantry.”