Rudzani Floyd Musekwa: The people finally show the middle finger to ruling party

The ANC finally got its biggest humiliation of its 104-year existence and also in the 22 years of a democratic South Africa – the very democracy it can claim to have ushered in to the people of South Africa even though the reality is quite complicated.

With a national vote of more than 15 million the ANC should be celebrating being the country’s number one political party, but no, that’s not going to happen. The ANC has lost in all the major and strategic metros in the country, namely Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality (the country’s sixth largest metro in the country), the City of Cape Town, the City of Johannesburg as well as the country’s capital city of Tshwane, formerly known as Pretoria.

This is a huge setback for the ANC that has recently been a party of infighting and factions.

These local government election results effectively mean the president of the country will live in a DA metro in Tshwane, have the country’s economic hub of Johannesburg under the DA and not forgetting that there’s a Nelson Mandela metro that’s named after who is known as the eternal face of the ANC, former president Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. All the events that I have mentioned have never happened in all of the 22 years of the ANC being in power nationally.

So, what’s really the problem here? It’s easy to put the blame on one individual called Jacob Zuma because he is the easiest target with all the controversies he’s been involved in from his close relationship with the controversial Gupta family to many more scandals that dog him, including his own controversial sex life that includes sexual relations with a daughter of a former close friend.

But looking closely, Zuma is not the only problem here as the problem is the ANC itself that fails to show him the door after all the mistakes he’s committed in his time in power.

Zuma is the one president who has caused the ANC more trouble and division than all the other leaders who came before him. And it is unfortunate that when the ANC is expected finally to get rid of him, it keeps talking about collective responsibility and that collective responsibility got the party seriously punished at the polls. The ANC has lost a solid 8% of the electorate vote which certainly went to the opposition, the DA and the EFF.

The EFF managed a respectable 6% of the vote nationally, as just more than a million South Africans who mostly believe in disarming the ruling ANC of some power as too much power has certainly corrupted the once glorious movement of Luthuli, Lembede and Mandela.