Governance & Political Systems
Contemporary (2000–present)
Southern Africa, South Africa
South African ANC factionalism after Zuma — Ramaphosa, Mbalula, and the 2024 election
<p>The ANC's loss of its absolute parliamentary majority in May 2024 — falling to 40.18% of the national vote, from 57.5% in 2019 — is the most consequential political shift in post-1994 South Africa. Understanding what happened requires reading the ANC's internal factional dynamics over the seven years from Zuma's December 2017 Nasrec defeat to the Government of National Unity formation in June 2024.</p>
<p>Cyril Ramaphosa's narrow Nasrec victory over Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma (179 votes margin) produced an ANC National Executive Committee that was structurally divided. The CR17 campaign that secured Ramaphosa the presidency was substantially funded by business donors whose disclosed contributions later became a litigation issue. The Zuma-aligned faction — institutionalized through MK Party after Zuma's December 2023 expulsion from the ANC — retained control of substantial KwaZulu-Natal patronage networks.</p>
<p>The 2024 election results crystallised this divide. The MK Party, formally registered in December 2023 and led by Jacob Zuma personally, captured 14.6% nationally and 45.4% in KwaZulu-Natal — directly cannibalizing ANC support in the province that had been the ANC's electoral fortress. The EFF, the older breakaway under Julius Malema, fell to 9.5% as MK absorbed much of the populist-Africanist vote. The Democratic Alliance held steady at 21.8%; the GNU coalition that followed combined ANC, DA, IFP, and several smaller parties.</p>
<p>Fikile Mbalula, the ANC Secretary-General after Ace Magashule's suspension, has held the organizational machine together but the factional fissures remain. The 2027 ANC National Conference will be the next test. The Ramaphosa-aligned faction has substantial Treasury, judicial, and business support; the post-Zuma populist faction has electoral muscle in KZN and parts of Mpumalanga; a third faction around Paul Mashatile and the Treasury Department represents something approaching a centre-developmentalist tendency.</p>
<p>Mahmood Mamdani's analytical framework on post-liberation movements — that liberation parties that conflate the party with the state struggle to manage routine alternation in office — applies sharply here. The ANC's institutional difficulty is not policy disagreement but the mechanics of operating as one party among others. The GNU coalition is the first structural test. Whether it holds for the full five years, or fractures over the 2026 Budget cycle, will determine whether South African multi-party governance becomes routine or remains a transitional curiosity. The institutions are being stress-tested in real time.</p>
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