Resisting State Capture in South Africa
Anne Pitcher2019, Journal of Democracy
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Abstract
On 8 May 2019, nearly twenty-five years to the day after Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa's first democratically elected president, the country went to the polls in its sixth round of national elections. Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) had won by comfortable margins in every previous election, all peaceful, "free and fair" contests administered by the country's well-regarded electoral commission. Much of the skepticism about the quality of South Africa's democracy has centered on the ease with which the ANC wins elections. With the majority of voters committed to the ANC, the essence of democracy as described by Joseph Schumpeter-elite competition for voter support-seems to be lacking. And South Africans seem to be in no rush to pass Samuel Huntington's two-turnover test of democratic consolidation. At first glance, the run-up to the 2019 election looked like more of the same. The ANC's presidential candidate, Cyril Ramaphosa (b. 1952), campaigned on the lofty promise of bringing a "new dawn" that would reinfuse the country with Mandela's values. He had the pedigree to make this promise credible. In the early 1980s, at the height of the apartheid policies that had institutionalized a pervasive system of racial discrimination, Ramaphosa founded and led the National Union of Mineworkers, the country's largest trade union. Between 1991 and 1996, he served as secretary-general of the ANC, which made its own transition from banned resistance movement to dominant political party. He played a central role in the political negotiations that brought South Africa out of apartheid, and he was a key architect of the country's progressive, democratic 1996 Constitution. Ramaphosa was reportedly Mandela's personal choice as presidential successor when the widely re
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