Today is election day here in South Africa.
There won’t be much of this:
but there is definitely a bit of buzz in the air.
It’s looking like Mandela’s party, the ANC, is going to take the election. Despite the fact that the party leader, Jacob Zuma, has been charged with rape, been implicated in a shady international arms deal, and has had several corruption charges leveled against him, the people’s memory of 1994 still lives fresh in their minds. People are willing to look past the party’s leadership and acknowledge the party for what it did to help end apartheid.
In the states, if a candidate had any of these issues facing them during election time, they would never stand a chance in the polls. But, since people here vote for a party more than a candidate, the ANC still has been able to maintain power.
Here, when you vote, you vote for a political party. Although the leader of the winning party assumes presidency, the party holds the true power. Also, it’s a representative system, so the percentage of votes a party gets determines how much power they get in parliment.
Though the ANC does deserve a lot of credit for helping to get rid of the apartheid government in South Africa, they have done little to continue rebuilding the nation after Mandela left the presidency. It seems to me, as an outside observer, that this may be the ANC’s last chance before the voters get fed up with their inaction and selfishness.
