A changing S. Africa looks beyond historic ANC

Ruling party since end of apartheid on verge of a split

"We don't know which is the right or the wrong ANC. We will be confused," said Cynthia Nontsinyan of Kliptown, South Africa, of a possible split in the party. (Karin Bruilliard/ Washington Post)

JOHANNESBURG - On a recent evening at a swank downtown restaurant, a table of young black entrepreneurs sipped cocktails and talked politics by candlelight. They were symbols of the new South Africa: Raised in all-black townships, they now own suburban homes, pricey cars, and stocks.

To their parents, politics meant one thing - the African National Congress, the liberation movement that has been the ruling party since apartheid was brought to an end in 1994. Now the party is on the verge of a split, and to these young South Africans, that sounds like progress.

"To date, the ANC's been the obvious choice. It's time to change a little bit," said Ndumiso Davidson, 28, who works for a private equity firm. "We fought for freedom, and freedom was attained."

That fluid loyalty might be typical in most multiparty systems. In South Africa, however, it hints at what some here think is a turning point toward a new revolution in this nation's young democracy: a future in which the ANC is not in charge.

After nearly 100 years as an organization, the ANC is racked by infighting and beset by criticism that it has succumbed to factionalism and careerism. Last month, the party forced out President Thabo Mbeki, a rival of ANC leader Jacob Zuma, himself a polarizing populist accused of graft. Mbeki loyalists have announced plans for a new party that they say will reclaim ANC values.

No one thinks the ANC will lose next year's elections. It remains a mighty electoral machine with deep roots among the rural and poor masses.

"This is the party that overcame the apartheid struggle. This is the party of Nelson Mandela. I think we haven't completely got through that phase," said Adam Habib, a political scientist who is deputy vice chancellor of the University of Johannesburg. "But young people are losing their attachment to the ANC. They want it to deliver."

Since 1994, the voting bloc loyal to the ANC has declined steadily as voters turned their focus from liberation to day-to-day issues, according to a recent University of Cape Town study. But, the study said, their votes have not typically shifted to opposition parties.

In interviews, many young South Africans praised the ANC for having ushered the country in just 14 years from oppressive white rule to guaranteed freedoms, the continent's biggest economy and a political system in which the recall of a president sparks debate but not bloodshed.

On a recent afternoon on the sun-drenched Soweto campus of the University of Johannesburg, Ipeleng Mashao, 21, said he had grown so disenchanted that he would vote only if a splinter party were on the ballot. The accounting major ticked off a list of grievances: the cloud of corruption surrounding Zuma. The Youth League leader's vow to "take up arms and kill" for Zuma. The dismissal of Mbeki just months before his term was to end.

"For my grandfather, who was a member of the ANC, it was his freedom," Mashao said. "Now I know the ANC will be on the television tomorrow for another fraud case."

The trouble, many youths said, is that opposition parties - the most powerful of which won 12 percent of the vote in 2004 - seem only to scold the ANC, not offer new ideas. The ANC, now led by Zuma allies, has skewered the idea of a splinter party as the fantasy of a few angry Mbeki backers. Jackson Mthembu, a member of the top party committee that asked Mbeki to step down, said the ANC remains a liberation movement - not a party - in the midst of a long struggle to attain the Freedom Charter ideals of equality, land reform, and shared wealth.

"The people that we fought for, that we wanted to liberate, they are liberated, but they are still the poorest of the poor. There is nothing that can make us change our path," Mthembu said.

To be sure, analysts say, the ANC's power lies not with college students but with people such as Cynthia Nontsinyan, 19, an unemployed mother who lives in the Soweto squatter settlement of Kliptown. Residents in her crowded neighborhood of rusted tin shacks and stinking portable toilets complained about the government: not enough jobs. Too many thieving thugs. Police who do nothing about them.

Still, everyone interviewed said that they would vote for the ANC.

Nontsinyan said that the ANC is the only party whose members come to Kliptown, and that it has promised to build houses. Most important, her life depends on the government grants that sustain more than a quarter of South Africans.

"I don't think it's right," she said of a possible ANC split. "We don't know which is the right or the wrong ANC. We will be confused."