The South African townships turning against the ANC

Johannesburg may appoint its first white mayor since apartheid after longtime ANC bastions broke with the liberation party

For a decade, Alutha Dyantyi had seen no reason to vote. Living in a corrugated-iron shack in Soweto, the Johannesburg township that was crucible of Black resistance to apartheid, she concluded that the African National Congress' three-decade reign offered little more than broken promises as rubbish piled up and taps ran dry.

But three months before local elections that took place on November 4, Helen Zille, the divisive white politician leading the opposition Democratic Alliance's mayoral campaign, arrived in her neighbourhood of Snake Park. It was the first time Dyantyi, a 40-year-old IT graduate, could remember a senior politician coming to the area.

"At first, I was sceptical," she said of the DA, which has long struggled to shake its image as a party for privileged white voters. But within days, the DA said it had raised funds to replace the neighbourhood's broken transformer, restoring power after a year of darkness.

On election day, Dyantyi became one of what the DA estimated were 1mn Black South Africans nationally who voted for the party, a showing once unthinkable in the ANC's historic heartlands.

"There's no hope for the ANC -- none whatsoever," Dyantyi said. Zille -- who is in pole position to become the first white mayor of Johannesburg since the start of democracy in 1994 -- was the only politician with "a plan, a vision" to fix Johannesburg's long slide into decay, she said.

Support for the former liberation movement of Nelson Mandela has been in freefall, and Dyantyi's defection reflects a broader unravelling in the communities that long formed its electoral bedrock -- pointing to a deep political reckoning ahead of national elections in 2029.

The scale of the ANC's retreat was laid bare as its share of the national vote fell to 31 per cent, down from 46 per cent, marking its worst showing since the end of apartheid. The DA secured 26 per cent, while former president Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party was in third place nationally with almost 10 per cent.

The former liberation party, which once commanded the loyalty of the overwhelming majority of Black South Africans, is now confronting a fragmented electorate, with voters turning to a growing array of rivals or abandoning the ballot altogether.

"A lot of people voted against pain," said Thuli Madonsela, South Africa's former public protector and a lawyer who helped draft the country's post-apartheid constitution.

The ANC has been overtaken for the first time as the largest party in Gauteng -- home to Johannesburg -- by the DA, and in KwaZulu-Natal by Zuma's MK party, which tapped into anger at the ANC and a current of Zulu nationalism in the province.

The DA's wins included Ward 13 in Gauteng's Sharpeville township, where police killed at least 69 people during an anti-apartheid protest in 1960.

In Soweto, where the 1976 student uprising helped galvanise international opposition to apartheid, the ANC's share of the vote fell by 13 percentage points as ActionSA -- the centre-right party led by former mayor Herman Mashaba -- made significant inroads and the DA notched symbolic victories.

"It's a fantastic moment in our democracy and it shows our democracy is maturing," said William Gumede, an associate professor at the University of Witwatersrand School of Governance.

"We will never get the dividends of democracy unless people stop voting based on the past and historical lines of division. We are finally seeing Black voters cross that barrier."

With the ANC's township stronghold now cracking, votes are also flowing to other Black-led challengers, including populist offshoots such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and Zuma's MK party.

It was also losing ground to a plethora of free-market movements, said Dawie Scholtz, an economist at independent research firm Themis Analytics.

"The ANC's lunch is being eaten by the left, but also by centre-right political movements," Scholtz said. "Once the smaller political parties get a real foot in the door, that's the beginning of the end of the ANC."

In Johannesburg, much of the discontent has benefited ActionSA, which picked up 16 per cent of the vote in Gauteng. The DA won 35 per cent of the vote in the province and is the frontrunner to helm a coalition that runs Africa's richest city. But deep racial mistrust lingers.

ActionSA's Mashaba, who quit the DA in 2019 after serving as Johannesburg mayor and has emerged as a kingmaker in the city, has ruled out supporting Zille's mayoral bid. "We can't afford to take another risk of working with people who have demonstrated an unwillingness to provide public services to Black communities," Mashaba told the FT last week.

Fikile Mbalula, the ANC's secretary-general, last week acknowledged the party's liberation credentials no longer gave it "an entitlement to govern" and said the result had been "catastrophic".

The party would now have to seriously consider "the option of becoming an opposition, a principled opposition", he told journalists.

The ANC's electoral slide mirrors more than a decade of stagnating living standards and deteriorating public services across South Africa.

Since peaking at nearly 70 per cent of the national vote in 2004, its support has withered in lockstep with economic malaise -- falling to 40 per cent in 2024, when it lost its parliamentary majority and was forced into a coalition for the first time.

Meanwhile, GDP per capita has slipped from roughly $8,650 a decade and a half ago to about $6,600 last year. Unemployment has for years hovered above 30 per cent.

For millions of South Africans, however, the ANC's legacy as the party of liberation remains powerful. In the early years after 1994, Mandela's party transformed lives -- rolling out electricity, clean water, housing and an expansive welfare safety net to a Black majority systematically disenfranchised under white rule.

"I'm sitting here right now because of the ANC, so I will always vote ANC," said Maserame Nakedi, sitting outside her home with her granddaughter.

But Dyantyi has grown impatient with this nostalgia. "I came to Joburg and there was no work. Nothing, nothing, nothing," said Dyantyi, who left her Eastern Cape township for Johannesburg a decade ago, as she joined a group of volunteers decked in the DA's blue colours to clear an overgrown, rubbish-strewn verge outside a block of dilapidated apartments.

Later, back in her single-room shack -- patched together with scrap timber and battered tin -- Dyantyi picked up a bucket to fill with water from a storage tank, saying the taps had run dry. "We are just asking for the basics," she added.

It hadn't always been easy to convince her friends a party helmed by a white leadership might improve their lot, she said. Weeks before the vote, Zille had drawn attention after a campaigning move that saw her spinning in a modified BMW in Soweto, before emerging holding a bottle of beer.

Some friends had been delighted -- others dismissed it culturally insensitive posturing. "I just told my friends, OK, so she did that, but have you seen any of our ANC councillors?"

"We were governed by a Black-owned party, and what did it do for us? When our parents voted, they were making a change for me. Now it's up to me to take the step and make a change for my children -- and if the DA doesn't deliver, we will change them too."