ANC Dominance Highlights Need for Ranney's Principles

For decades the African National Congress (ANC) fought for equality and justice while being led by luminaries such as Nelson Mandela. However, in recent years there has been criticism about how the ANC has taken advantage of its lack of competition and has lost its way. When measuring the ANC against the four precepts that Ranney lists as identifiers of a responsible party the ANC fails three of them.

Ranney’s first precept is that responsible parties “make policy commitments to the electorate”; this is the only principle that the ANC follows and even in doing so it fails miserably. The ANC has a broad and appealing platform on which it bases its policies. Most of them deal with ending apartheid era discrimination and opening economic opportunities. With a 24% unemployment rate and 50% of citizens living under the poverty line it is no wonder that promises are easy to dole out while unfortunately being so hard to keep. Promises have gone so far that President Jacob Zuma even stated that entrance to heaven would be given to those who voted ANC!

Ranney’s second principle states that responsible parties “are willing and able to carry them out while in office”; this is where the ANC begins to fail. A common excuse for the ANC’s inability to fulfill its promises is to blame the apartheid era. However, so many promises have been broken that even former ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema has organized rallies to condemn the government for years of broken promises.

Ranneys’s third and fourth principles of “developing alternatives to government policies when out of office” and “differ sufficiently between themselves to ‘provide the electorate with a proper range of choice between alternative actions” are broken simultaneously by the iron like grip the ANC holds over the vote of its people. Because the ANC brand is so powerful they are never out of office meaning that there is little influence for alternative options. Furthermore, the ANC is so dominant that no other party comes close to defeating it during elections. Concerning this issue Nobel Prize winner and former ANC supporter Archbishop Desmond Tutu said to the effect, “that he could no longer vote for the party and the country would benefit from more competitive politics, leading commentors said that South Africa has suffered as a result of the ANC's electoral dominance.” While it is not the ANC’s job to lose elections, its continued dominance is beginning to show why multiple parties that follow Ranney’s principles are needed.