The high turn-out was in line with previous elections which placed the country in the international top ten. Italy can claim the world's most civic minded citizens consistently scoring more than 90% turnout. It's tempting to appeal to Rome's rich and ancient history of government to explain the Italian's sustained voting fervour, but it may have more to do with their system of compulsory voting. Indeed, a history of democracy is no guarantee of high voter participation, for all its parliamentary heritage, the United Kingdom has seen turnout slump dismally in recent elections.
I attended a couple of election parties in Johannesburg on the day and the anecdotal evidence was that despite the high statistical turnout, the 23% who didn't amounts to plenty of young middle-class potential voters who were either too apathetic to register, or even if they did, were more interested in partying than voting for a party.
One of the cliches voters like to post rationalise with, no matter the futility of their vote or the chances of their chosen party, is that by voting, they somehow attain an indisputable right to complain about the government. With complaints flowing from the other, apathetic party goers as freely and fairly as the elections, that argument looked about as convincing as the opposition's national slogan of Vote to Win - a bold rally cry in an election where the African National Congress (ANC) was expected to retain its two-thirds majority.
At least for those supporting the ANC, voting offers solidarity. Many older black voters are happy to continue to, and will always, back the party that liberated them from apartheid, a decade and a half ago. Voting ANC is a powerful reminder and affirmation of their personal struggle.
The reality in South Africa is that political support is still racially determined. There was less chance of the Democrtic Alliance (DA), a party historically supported by the white minority, and today still lead by a white woman, of winning as there is of the President elect, Jacob Zuma, facing the multitude of criminal charges that the DA is determined to resurrect from the quagmire of political conspiracy and procedural incompetence into which they sunk, before the election.
Perhaps the 2009 elections were the young democracy's best chance yet of a serious challenge to ANC hegemony. With the liberators' halos dimmed by persistent allegations of corruption, infighting, and service delivery failure, the messianic Mandela, a fading memory, and the emergence, in Zuma, of its most controversial and divisive leader in modern times, to many political commentators, the party looked ripe for a chiding at the polls.
Yet, constrained by their origins, neither of the opposition parties most likely to benefit from the ruling party's malaise, failed to make significant inroads nationally.
Despite the ambitious slogans and the DA's leader, "tannie" (aunty) Zille's, best attempts to broaden the base through well rehearsed public displays of her Xhosa language fluency, and the traditional toi-toi dance, in the final telling, the party's white roots were laid bare. When it became clear that an election upset would not come in the form of an embarrassing public trial of "100% Zulu boy" Zuma, the DA launched its final and desperate play on white fears with last minute posters that read STOP ZUMA in alarmist red, reminiscent of the SWART GEVAAR (black threat) campaign that propelled the country into apartheid, in the 1948 elections.
However, the DA's campaign did pay some dividends: they picked up the Western Cape province on the back of Zille's performance as mayor of Cape Town, and an efficiently run, if not consistently inclusive, campaign. White-liberal friends of mine registered in the Western Cape received smses from the DA reminding them to go to the polls.
The Congress of the People (COPE), a renegade party formed only months ago, and initially slated to be a major threat to the ruling party from which it split, failed to fulfil its early promise and managed to garner less than 8% support, nationally. It too was hamstrung by its origins, unable to prove it was anything but a club of disaffected Mbeki accolytes. Like the Zulu party in terminal decline, the IFP, who managed a meagre 5% of the national ballot, they failed to win a control of even one province, and had to settle for the unflattering moniker of "official" provincial opposition, in their strongholds, which looks set to be the most any opposition party can aspire to outside of the Western Cape.
None of this came as a surprise. With such slim hopes of arresting the Zuma "Tsunami", surely any realist wishing to oppose the ANC realised voting was futile - they had no influence on the outcome. If voter turnout in a neighbouring country is anything to go by, people don't require a sense of influence in order to vote: nearly 60% of Zimbabweans regularly cast ballots in elections that were about as likely to elect Santa Claus as they were to give the opposition a fair run.
At least in a country with a more fractured political landscape, like India (with 700 odd million voters also at the poles this month), neither of the two major parties are guaranteed a victory, and even tiny minority parties can hold sway in coalition negotiations. Granted, the coalition governments they form are more often than not inherently unstable and paralysed by infighting, but they do give even the most marginalised voters a reason to get up on election day, endure the long queues and the real threat, in India, of election violence, to make their mark.
One would expect campaigning to be less intense in a country like South Africa where the guaranteed rule of the minority National Party has been exchanged for the guaranteed rule of a majority ANC. In the recent American presidential elections, Obama vs. McCain made campaigning history with their billion dollar media war. South African airwaves and bandwidth carried a battle of an altogether different kind - Nandos vs. Wimpy - the two fast food chains battling for the palate of every voter. Whilst Nandos continued their foul political satire with a scathing attack on the ANC Youth League's leading load mouth, Julius Malema, Wimpy tugged at the heartstrings with the audacious hope of turning cold ballot casters into customers with the promise of a free cup of coffee.
And perhaps that's it: the mystery of why South Africans turned out in such force might not just be about the need to voice an opinion, rekindle struggle solidarity, or have an influence on the outcome. It may just be that the thrill of ordering a coffee and not paying for it on election morning was the closest thing to satisfaction guaranteed public service delivery that voters are likely to get for the next five years.
Gilbert
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