April 14 was election day in South Africa. In less than two weeks, theinternational community will be fed images and narratives from massive ANC (African National Congress) sponsored “10 years of democracy” celebrations. The twinning of these celebrations with the federal election results will obscure an internationalvisibility of on-the-ground mobilizations against the ANC by South Africa’smost marginalized people.

It will also serve to legitimize the SouthAfrican neoliberal project and reinforce the ANC government’s internationalreputation as a government that is truly loved by its people. What must bemade visible is that from underneath the continued reign of the ANCgovernment, community groups across the country are encouraging electionboycotts and non-participation in the electoral process.

At the same time as the national and international propaganda machine of theANC remains seemingly invincible, a strong resistance to their politics isbuilding. Due to the inflated and highly undemocratic R200,000 ($40,000 CDN)fee to run for office, this opposition is being forced to organize outsideof the electoral framework. It is from community-based social movementswithin South Africa that resistance to the ANC is being generated, eventhough these groups are separate from union, NGO or institutional structuresand thus lack basic financial support and resources in order to fund even abasic public awareness campaign.

The reasons for organizing a campaign against voting for the ANC becomeclear when the “transition” that has occurred since 1994 is viewed throughthe lens of the nation’s poor majority. University of Kwa Zulu Natalresearch fellow Ashwin Desai explains that after 1994, “although the blackelite became rapidly richer and the white poor became rapidly poorer… ingeneral terms whites got richer and blacks got poorer.” This phenomenon hasbeen labeled “economic apartheid” and has been reinforced by the ANCgovernment through their economic policies.

People on the ground, and especially the poor, are fed up with the falsepromises the ANC has made since 1994. Because although the ANC promised freebasic services, and the right to water is enshrined in the constitution,privatization of municipal water services has resulted in the implementationof pre-paid water meters in poor communities. Although they were promisedfree education, youth are still expelled from schools for not paying theirschool fees. And although average life expectancy has fallen from 64 yearsin 1996 to 50.7 years in 2002 and the national AIDS rate sits at 20.1 per cent, lastSeptember, President Thabo Mbeki told a reporter from the New York Times that “Personally,[he doesn’t] know anybody who has died of AIDS.”

In interaction with community groups in struggles today, one realizes thatthe ANC government has not only left large sections of the population with thestatus quo in regards to substandard housing and access to basic services,but that they have actively persecuted the poor in order to meet neoliberalideals. Desai calls the ANC’s policies an “armed assault on the poor,” bywhich the ANC uses cost recovery as a measure of success and reserves theright to use force and arms, as well as the justice system, againstcommunities who resist water and electricity cutoffs and evictions thatoccur in the name of “economic development.”

One of the better known of South Africa’s social movements resisting thecontinued reign of the ANC is the Gauteng Province based Anti-PrivatizationForum, whose platform on the elections calls for “no vote for the ANC underany circumstances.” Instead, the APF advocates that citizens “vote with[their] feet through mass action,” positioning grassroots organizing as thealternative to the process of voting. In Soweto, APF affiliated SowetoElectricity Crisis Committee has asked its members to register to vote, buton election day to spoil their ballots and write their demands from thegovernment on the reverse. There are plans for street activities to takeplace throughout Soweto on elections day.

Other community based organizations have taken more radical positions of non-participation. The Mandelaville Crisis Committee (MCC) represents acommunity 40 minutes from Johannesburg whose residents were forcibly removedfrom the Mandelaville informal settlement in Soweto by security forces knownas the “Red Ants” in 2002. According to MCC member Thulani Skhosana, theirforced removal was part of the ANC government’s plan to “clean up Soweto forthe World Summit on Sustainable Development [held in Johannesburg in 2002],and hide what it couldn’t clean up.”

Today the community is in an area knownas Durban Roodeport Deep, where people live five or more to a room in abandoned miners’hostels and shacks without electricity or a proper sewage system. Graffitiin the area reads “NO HOUSING, NO VOTE!” calling on community members toboycott elections until they receive the housing they were promised by thegovernment before their removal. In the words of Skhosana, “We voted thefirst time and the second time with hopes that we will have a better life…The ANC’s lack of respect for the people of Mandelaville makes it impossiblefor us to go to the polls again.”

As community-based organizations and new social movements in South Africastruggle to respond to what Desai calls “a permanent state of emergency” forthe poor, election day and celebrations of democracy will be just two moredays of repression and resistance. Let us, looking in from the outside,remember that the struggles continue in South Africa, even as the world mediaencourages us to believe that the ANC has brought happiness and freedom toits people.