S. Africa Set to Decide Its Next Chapter

Election day in this village off the main highway from Pretoria will be a nuts-and-bolts affair. Most everyone who goes to the polls Wednesday is expected to mark the second box from the top: African National Congress.

“Many expectations from the last vote have not been met,” said Jabulani Mtsweni, a local ANC activist who has been canvassing voters. “But we’ve been patient for 350 years--why can’t we be patient for another five?”

In towns and villages across South Africa, as people of all races hold their second national and provincial elections, there is little mystery about the outcome. Polling data as well as anecdotal evidence point to a resounding victory for the ruling ANC, which won nearly 63% of the vote in 1994.

Most election day questions involve simple arithmetic: How big will the ANC win, which party will lead the opposition, and will any of the nine provincial legislatures withstand an ANC sweep?

Looking beyond Wednesday, however, the questions--and stakes--become far more complicated and momentous. With black-majority rule under ANC tutelage firmly entrenched, attention is beginning to focus on what’s next for the new South Africa. In that sense, many see these elections as the country’s first plebiscite on the future.

“When we voted in 1994, we did not vote on issues--we voted to get the apartheid regime out,” said Mtsweni, a water consultant who helped put this hillside village on the map several months ago when his mother became the country’s 3 millionth new recipient of running water. “Now, with this election, we are facing the issues that will really determine the future.”

In the last five years, the ANC-led government has brought water taps, electricity and telephone lines to millions of people deprived of basic necessities under apartheid. But the unresolved issues are far-ranging, including the stepped-up delivery of basic services, the suppression of ethnic rivalries, the resuscitation of an ailing economy and coping with the calamitous spread of AIDS. The country is also struggling to create a civil society that encourages people to participate in the new democracy--and not merely find ways to exploit it.

Most of the hurdles fall within the scope of what many analysts describe as the weightiest of South Africa’s unanswered questions: Can a nation that defied the odds by negotiating a peaceful transition from white minority rule achieve a second feat of historic proportions by establishing a lasting African success story?

“In South Africa, it is no longer a matter of keeping the ship afloat but much more a matter of which direction the ship is going to move,” said Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town. “I think everybody is aware that [the country’s direction] is now what is at stake.”

The “what’s next” question is being framed most often in the doomsday context of President Nelson Mandela’s decision to retire after the inauguration of his successor June 16. Much to his annoyance, Mandela has assumed superhero status among many people here and abroad, who see his forgiving heart and grandfatherly authority as the only threads holding together the country’s frayed patchwork quilt.

Former South African television anchor Lester Venter popularized the post-Mandela angst in a book, “When Mandela Goes,” which, in his words, is permeated by a note of tragedy. Venter predicts that the next government “will probably be ineffective against the underlying realities impelling South Africa toward a future containing great perils and threatening great hardships.”

Mandela has been so central to South African existence--both during and after apartheid--that there is even concern that voters will have trouble locating the ANC box on ballot papers because his photograph will be missing. As in 1994, pictures of party leaders are being printed on the ballot to guide illiterate voters, but this time the ANC will be represented by Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, who heads the ANC and is in line to succeed Mandela as president.

In a recent assessment of world developments, the London-based International Institute for Security Studies issued a harsh appraisal of South Africa’s prospects after Mandela, warning that if the country “continues on the path it is now treading, it will almost certainly become a failed state.”

The think tank said Mandela’s prestige has obscured the country’s slide into a state characterized less by economic success than by crime, poverty and social chaos.

“To prevent [Mandela’s] achievement from being the last, rather than the first, step toward a happier future, his successors will need to do more than simply trade on his reputation,” the institute said.

Mandela scoffs at the fuss over his retirement and has wholeheartedly endorsed Mbeki, the British-educated son of his close ANC colleague and longtime prison mate on Robben Island, Govan Mbeki. To bolster the endorsement, Mandela has emphasized his own disengagement from everyday governing, telling South Africans that his deputy president has been running all but the pomp and circumstance of his administration for the last few years.

But in an acknowledgment of the explosive ethnic tensions that have ruined other African transitions from white rule--and that still loom over this one as well--Mandela admitted this month that he had held early reservations about Mbeki. Because Mbeki, like Mandela, is Xhosa, Mandela feared that other South African ethnic groups would view his ascension as an indication of a “Xhosa Nostra” in the ANC-led government.

“I did not want to give our enemies the ammunition that this is essentially a Xhosa organization,” said Mandela, who favored the appointment of businessman Cyril Ramaphosa, a Venda, but was eventually sold on Mbeki by the ANC leadership.

Even with the trepidation at home and abroad, some political analysts say Mandela’s voluntary departure speaks volumes about what is going right--not wrong--in South Africa, particularly when viewed in the context of other African successions. Most African leaders, even those who count themselves as democrats, do not relinquish power after just one term, short of illness, death or some other act of divine or military intervention.

“I would like to return to my village and to be able to walk around the valleys and the little hills and the streams around which I grew up,” Mandela, 80, said this month in a sentiment typically uncharacteristic of his peers. “I don’t want to reach 100 years whilst I am still trying to bring about a solution to some complicated international issue.”

The back and forth over Mandela’s retirement reflects the quandary of measuring progress in South Africa, which inevitably boils down to an unsatisfying examination of a glass of water. The pessimists see the South African glass as perpetually half empty, while the optimists increasingly see it as half full. Analysts say the competing views are inescapable in a country that is still not settled on its new identity or on its way forward.

“Transitions are, by definition, periods of uncertainty in which it is difficult to understand the medium- and longer-term import of events,” Louise Stack of the Johannesburg-based Center for Policy Studies wrote in an assessment of changes since 1994.

Despite so many questions and so much change, British author Frank Welsh says there are two historical factors that encourage him to see the glass as half full. Welsh, who last year published a critically acclaimed history of South Africa, said the country has historically maintained a leg up on other African countries because of its traditions of parliamentary democracy and reasoned compromise.

Although no black was elected to Parliament before 1994, the so-called Cape Franchise gave blacks limited voting rights when the first legislative assembly was created in 1854 in Britain’s Cape Colony; some blacks kept the franchise as late as 1933.

Welsh concludes that it was only the advance of apartheid in the years after World War II that convinced blacks that achieving their goals within the existing parliamentary system was beyond hope. Even under apartheid, governments depended on winning a majority of votes, albeit only among whites; similarly, white voters had to approve the hand-over to black majority rule.

“South Africa has had a long experience with parliamentary democracy,” Welsh said. “People of all races are used to working within this sort of framework, which is not true for any of the rest of Africa.”

Moreover, although South African history has been bloody, Welsh says it is notable that the bloodshed has often been accompanied by compromise, especially in the case of feuding black ethnic groups.

Even during one of his trials, in the late 1950s, Mandela expressed a willingness to compromise on the fundamental issue of black franchise, telling his white jurists that it could be introduced over a period of a decade or two.

The spirit of compromise continues into post-apartheid South Africa. Several weeks ago, the ANC and the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party signed a peace agreement in provincial KwaZulu-Natal, where thousands of loyalists from both parties died in political violence before the 1994 elections.

Inkatha and its leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, have been seen by many analysts as the most likely spoilers of an ANC-led South African renaissance.

Until now, the ANC government has secured relative peace by giving Buthelezi a seat in the Cabinet. There are rumors, meanwhile, that the Inkatha leader may be elevated to deputy president in the new administration for the same reasons.

“We want to transform the politics of conflict between enemies into the politics of normal democratic discourse,” said Inkatha Chairman Lionel Mtshali.

As campaigning hits full stride in the last days before Wednesday’s vote, the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is meeting in nearby Pretoria to consider an amnesty application from Eugene De Kock, a former secret-police commander who is serving a 260-year prison sentence for apartheid-era crimes, including attempts to sabotage the 1994 poll.

The hearing is among only a handful of cases still to be considered by the commission; as such, it represents one of the country’s last official excuses to look into the past.

“There has been a tendency among South Africans to just shut one’s eyes to the more difficult issues coming up,” said Mamdani of the University of Cape Town. “That period is now coming to an end. The party is over--it is time for the morning after.”