Election 2009

Today South Africans go to the polls to decide, among other things, who will be their next President (although the office of President is not actually directly elected).

The ANC are widely expected to win, which would make Jacob Zuma the next President. Now to illustrate the problem, I'm going to use a couple of statistics which I found here. 51% of ANC supporters believe he is innocent of the corruption charges (which were recently dropped for dubious reasons), while 71% support him unconditionally. So that means that there are plenty of ANC supporters who believe he is guilty of corruption, but still support him unconditionally. That is the problem.

Apart from the corruption, there's the fact that he doesn't have any education beyond age 12, thinks that a shower will protect you from HIV ... the list goes on.

But if so many of his own supporters believe he's guilty of corruption and still stand behind him we have a problem. Combine that with the propensity of black people to vote ANC for historical / emotional reasons rather than based on any rational thinking, and they will be in power for many years to come.

The best thing that can happen to this country is a viable black party (like COPE) to take a large chunk of the votes. Democracy will only be mature when the ANC are in opposition and have to win the voters through policy and political debate.