Why do South Africans still support the ANC?

Support for South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, has just fallen below 40 per cent, which makes it very likely that, come the May election, there’ll be a coalition government. I’m surprised that support for the ANC is as high as it is. Across South Africa, states run by the ANC are failing. Infrastructure has collapsed and unrepaired sewage systems mean the water is polluted and poisonous. Electrical systems are down and the railways and ports are often closed. Property prices in Cape Town soar as South Africans flee here from all across the rest of the country. Because South Africa’s rand has collapsed against the euro (and even post-Brexit sterling) everything’s a bargain. In Checkers, the big supermarket, Germans pile their trollies with boerewors, beer and wine. My basket of non-alcoholic beer causes consternation, mirth, then pity.

I’ve reported from the Cape over many decades. It’s always been dangerous and it’s always been a paradise – if you’re white. That hasn’t changed much since democracy came 29 years back. The racist apartheid regime forced non-whites out of the city and onto the swamps of the Cape Flats, the hunting grounds for gangsters like Ernie ‘Lastig (tricky)’ Solomons. Ernie was a so-called ‘coloured’, meaning mixed race, and leader of the 28s gang. He ran a wildly violent organisation born in South Africa’s prisons, that preyed largely on the poorest of the Cape, peddling drugs and people, selling ‘protection’. We got on well, Ernie and I. When I first met him he shoved the barrel of his shining revolver in my mouth – that made me gag but it also made me laugh, which Ernie liked. Ernie was shot dead last year and his successor as gang leader is living in the city’s poshest suburb, Constantia. At lunch there, my host tells me that the new gang leader has his advantages.