The official results from national elections last month just don’t add up for Mbalenhle Mthethwa, a loyal adherent of a new political party led by Jacob Zuma, former president of South Africa.
“The elections were not free and fair,” she said, echoing the stolen-election narrative Mr. Zuma has advanced.
Mr. Zuma, 82, whose nine years as president were marred by allegations of corruption and looting of state coffers, has taken a page from the playbook of recent populist leaders, notably in the United States and Brazil.
In those nations, claims of rigged elections resulted in chaos. South Africans will get a first look at how the situation might unfold in their country on Friday, when Parliament meets to vote for a new president.
Mr. Zuma’s party, uMkhonto weSizwe, known as M.K., has vowed to boycott the session, and it remains unclear what will happen among the other parties. The long-governing African National Congress party announced late Thursday that it had yet to finalize a coalition with the 17 other parties that won seats in Parliament. The A.N.C. won just 40 percent of the vote in the last election, losing its absolute majority for the first time, which has forced it to work with bitter rivals in order to form a government.
Fikile Mbalula, the secretary general of the A.N.C., would not say on Thursday whether his party had secured an agreement to re-elect the A.N.C.’s leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, as president.
“The foundational principle of what we all agree about with everybody is we want stability,” Mr. Mbalula said of the state of negotiations with other parties.
The A.N.C. has vowed to create what it called a government of national unity, having reached out to all parties about forming an alliance. Most parties have said that they are open to collaborating with the A.N.C., but some, like Mr. Zuma’s, have resisted, Mr. Mbalula said.
M.K.’s boycott would not prevent Parliament from accomplishing its goals, electing a president and a speaker, on Friday. But it would provide a high-profile stage for the party to express its anger.
Mr. Zuma’s party actually outperformed the expectations of analysts and political rivals: It won nearly 15 percent of the vote nationally, making it the third-largest party in Parliament. It took 45 percent in Mr. Zuma’s home province, KwaZulu-Natal, on the country’s eastern coast.
Still, Mr. Zuma and his supporters claim that they won at least two-thirds of the vote, enough to change the nation’s Constitution to pursue some of their proposals, although they have not presented evidence. Those initiatives would include allowing traditional ethnic leaders to have a role in Parliament and paving the way for Mr. Zuma — who is ineligible to serve because of a criminal conviction for refusing to testify before a corruption inquiry — to return as president.
Beyond Parliament, Mr. Zuma’s supporters have said that they would remain disciplined and would await instructions from him on how to respond to what they see as a system stacked against them.
The latest fodder for their grievance came on Wednesday evening, when a terse decision by the nation’s top court threw out M.K.’s application to prevent the opening of the parliamentary session.
The party had argued that the new Parliament should not be allowed to meet because the election results were in doubt. But the court said that the party had waited too long to file its application and that it had not presented sufficient evidence to support its case.
M.K.’s electoral showing was unprecedented for any South African party competing for the first time in national and provincial elections in the post-apartheid era. And it was a big reason that Mr. Zuma’s former party, the A.N.C., lost its absolute majority for the first time since coming to power at the end of apartheid in 1994, though the A.N.C. still captured more votes than any other party.
Leaders of M.K., named after the armed wing of the A.N.C. during the fight against apartheid, have said that they would not entertain a partnership with the A.N.C. under Mr. Ramaphosa, the former deputy to Mr. Zuma. They had a bitter falling out Mr. Zuma was forced to resign as president in 2018.
The extent to which M.K. has upended the A.N.C. is most evident in KwaZulu-Natal communities, including Ms. Mthethwa’s township, KwaMakhutha, a hilly, hardscrabble outpost near the coastal city of Durban.
Five years ago, the A.N.C. won Ms. Mthethwa’s ward with 76 percent of the vote. This year, M.K. won it with 75 percent. The M.K. branch in the area has about 5,000 members, said Ms. Mthethwa, who is its coordinator, and most of them have defected from the A.N.C.
Ms. Mthethwa, a 38-year-old chef who has been out of work for four years, said she had not been politically active or a fan of Mr. Zuma until she heard his message at the launch of M.K. in December. Her community suffers from high unemployment, shortages of water, electricity outages and cratered roads, a reflection of a country that is in a desperate situation.
“There are certain people, when they talk, they command your attention,” she said, adding that she believed Mr. Zuma when he said “this is the party that’s going to save all people who are living in South Africa.”
What resonates most in communities like KwaMakhutha is M.K.’s message to fight for the nation’s Black majority, which still faces deep disparities in wealth, land ownership and other economic measures three decades after the end of apartheid. Ms. Mthethwa said the best way for the party to endear itself to the community was to essentially be good neighbors.
On Wednesday, at an old animal pharmaceutical shop with an exposed cinder block wall in KwaMakhutha, several M.K. volunteers folded clothes that they had collected to donate to community members whose homes were destroyed in flooding last week. Up the road, several young men who now back Mr. Zuma’s party sat next to an open lot where they were planning to plant a vegetable garden for the community after having cleared it.
“The vision of the M.K. party is to bring back the dignity of the Black people,” said Sthobela Khuzwayo, 21, who embraced the new party even though he is from a family of A.N.C. activists.
Having worked as a monitor at the polls on Election Day, Mr. Khuzwayo, too, believes that his party was robbed. The party is still trying to find ways to challenge the official outcome, but if it is unable to do so, he said, it would be prudent to take up its 58 seats in the 400-member Parliament.
“You can’t produce any change,” he said, “without our members inside the Parliament.”
Source: nytimes.com
