The rainbow election

 Cape Town

South Africa has just seen her most encouraging election results ever. The general election of April 1994, which brought full democracy, was important in itself but its results were a foregone conclusion — the black majority voted for the ANC, as expected. The local elections this month were different and immensely hopeful. There has been a large vote against the ruling party, the ANC, bringing an end to the great curse of post-colonial Africa under which the people keep voting for the ‘liberation’ party however corrupt and incompetent it is. The ANC still won 54 per cent of the votes, but this is the first time its share has fallen below 60 per cent. President Jacob Zuma has taken a battering, but to his credit — another welcome departure from bad African ways — he has taken it gracefully and without complaint. Nobody has challenged the freedom and fairness of these elections. Better still, South African voting has ceased to be entirely dictated by race. In any country with strong racial or religious differences, Northern Ireland for instance, people tend to vote accordingly. The official racial composition of South Africa today is as follows. Black African: 81 per cent. Coloured: 9 per cent. White: 8 per cent. Asian: 2 per cent. Until now, a map of voting results has looked like a racial census, with all white and brown people voting one way and all black people another. This has changed. In three of South Africa’s most important cities, Johannesburg, Tshwane (which includes Pretoria) and Nelson Mandela Bay (which includes Port Elizabeth), whites and blacks together voted in large numbers against the ANC. South Africa has three tiers of government: central, provincial and local. Local government includes municipalities and cities, and it has been a special victim of ANC misrule.