The African National Congress, the party of the late Nelson Mandela, has been in power in South Africa since the end of white-majority rule in 1994. Voters look as if they are coming to the conclusion that maybe it is time someone else was running the Rainbow Nation. Before the end of apartheid, South Africa was essentially corrupt. Racial divisions were mirrored in the divisions of wealth. The country's white rulers protested that it was Africa's economic success story, despite international sanctions and a rising tide of terror from ANC insurgents. That was news in the townships and in the mines where blacks were second class citizens in their own land. But many whites came to see the deep injustice of a racist system and the rotten tree of apartheid finally fell. As the country's first president, Mandela took the view that there should be no revenge for the long years of oppressive white rule. But he backed a program of black empowerment that was designed to give economic opportunity across the board. Private companies needed to take on black directors, black entrepreneurs received start-up funding and the management of state enterprises was largely taken over by blacks. And the ANC made one big promise, which was to improve the lot of the people in the sprawling townships, which under apartheid had been given basic schooling and medical facilities but often lacked power, water and proper sanitation. In the euphoria following the arrival of the ANC, there were clearly unrealistic expectations of immediate improvements in the townships. However 22 years on, remarkably little has been achieved in them. Meanwhile, black empowerment has led to significant abuses, outright corruption and stunning mismanagement. The state electricity company Eskom is a prime example of incompetence. It has failed to build a single new major power station in almost a quarter of a century. The result has not only been major power outages but also serious damage to key extractive industries. At a time when the price of mineral resources has collapsed, mining companies are having to pay for their own power generation. With profits hard to find, there have been layoffs and wages freezes, even cuts, which have in turn led to strikes. These turned violent when the ANC allowed the police to use deadly force in an uncanny reprise of the 1960 Sharpeville massacres which had demonstrated the brutality of white rule. But more than anything else, what has disenchanted ANC supporters has been the rampant corruption, which has reached to President Jacob Zuma. It is not only the millions of state funds that he lavished on his personal ranch but also the way in which he and the party he leads has handed out patronage and expensive sinecures to secure political support. Voters have had enough. Last week saw the defeat of the ANC in key local elections. They have effectively lost control of the capital Pretoria and Johannesburg to the opposition Democratic Alliance. Zuma's personal ratings are at an all-time low as, at 55 percent, are the ratings of the ANC. The next general election is in 2019. On present showing, there is little evidence that the party can reform itself and root out corruption within the next three years. The ANC's problem has been that because it never faced a serious political challenge, it assumed that it had a permanent right to govern.
