South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has claimed that his once dominant ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, humbled and weakened by last week's poor showing at the polls, was "not on its knees".
But the party was ready to be "in opposition" in metros and municipalities where it failed to get a majority, he added.
Besides the Western Cape province and Cape Town metro, where the official opposition in parliament, the Democratic Alliance (DA), has held power for a decade or more, and where the DA held on to most of the towns it had controlled previously, the ANC has ruled South Africa in eight of nine provinces along with most towns and cities since the democratic era began in 1994.
But last week's municipal vote, with its historically low voter turnout – something the ANC itself admits was a 'vote of no confidence' by a large slice of its former supporters, among the 26.1 million eligible to cast ballots, but who did not – has ended ANC hegemony across many parts of the country.
Fikile Mbalula, the head of the ANC's electoral drive and a minister in Ramaphosa's cabinet, admitted that the ANC had taken a heavy blow, "a warning" from South Africans to the party that ended the dark era of race-based rule under which 'non-white' South Africans had suffered for 350 years.
Despite its still revered history, the ANC had, Mbalula admitted, been put on notice that it should now either deliver on basic services – let alone on its much grander and largely still unfulfilled pre-1994 promises of "houses, jobs, dignity, and a better life for all" – or it will be voted out of power in the next elections.
The ANC fell to its lowest ever support level of 45.87 percent in the polls. The party's failure to deliver on basic services, such as access to fresh water, sewerage and waste removal, access to electricity and roads without tyre-destroying potholes in towns and metros across the country, had become front and centre in the minds of voters as well as those who did not vote in protest.
ANC acting secretary-general Jessie Duarte admitted, after this past weekend's bout of "self-reflection" among the party's worried leadership, that its own polling showed many supporters would no longer vote for an ANC that was "deploying" loyalists to key positions but who could not do the job.
Ramaphosa and his senior party colleagues have had to swallow the distasteful 'political medicine' of losing control in towns and metros where they thought they would "rule forever", as proclaimed once by former president Jacob Zuma.
But it was under Zuma in particular that so many towns ground to a halt, some having to be taken over at the provincial government level because they could not provide even the most basic services.
One town has not had fresh water for more than two years, and another no electricity for a year – though a week after the polls, all South Africans are gritting their teeth through further rounds of the severest power outages yet.
That issue was another bug-bear among voters who either stayed away or elected to support one of several smaller parties or community bodies that benefited from mounting disenchantment towards 'the party of Mandela'.
The ANC held a 'celebratory' rally on Monday, a week after the polls, but it lacked the usual pizazz of such events, much trimmed back by both the severity of the losses suffered and the fact the ANC is strapped for money. The party is struggling even to pay its own staff, some of whom have gone on strike and picketed outside the ANC's head office in Johannesburg.
While trying to appear 'jolly' amid the bunting and unconvincing efforts to create a celebratory mood, Ramaphosa was constrained by the party's poor showing and news that the DA, Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), who grew somewhat in support, and several smaller parties are saying that under no circumstances would they go into governing coalitions with the ANC.
"Some people in some parties are going about the place and saying they will not work with us. But who says we want to work with them," said Ramaphosa, trying to make the best of a bad situation.
Ramaphosa tried to make a joke of the situation, even while saying that if the ANC was in the minority in any particular town or city, and it could not form a majority coalition as no other party or parties would work with it, "then we shall be a minority in opposition".
There were cheers for that, but not especially enthusiastic.
Analysts said that the ANC was on the verge of becoming "politically radioactive" such that other parties feared being taken down with it if they aligned with the party.
This was the case in dozens of metros and towns that are in deep trouble, effectively broke, short of technical and competent staff. ANC loyalists were deployed in operational positions but they could not do their jobs properly.
Many municipalities, even large ones, have sewage and water treatment works that are broken almost beyond repair.
Many have entire departments, such as refuse removal, that seem not to have worked for years on end.
These structural issues will take time to sort out and with another major election looming in 2024, none of those parties that made gains at the ANC's expense in this last election want to be associated with it.
ANC had inherited one of the most advanced national infrastructures in Africa but which has, through neglect, incompetence and wide-scale corruption, been run into the ground.
Angry South Africans are saying they are sick of hours of power outages daily, costing the country millions of dollars a week.
This past week has seen the worst outages to date, much aggravated by the collapse of the entire Zambian grid, putting severe strain on regional power-sharing arrangements and a further drain on SA's insufficient and unreliable fleet of ageing coal-fired power stations.
Citizens are demanding that the lights stay on – even though power producer Eskom's problems look set to run until 2025 at least. They also want the many potholes found almost everywhere to be fixed, fresh water reliably supplied to suburbs, settlements and townships, and that whoever is in charge in their areas serve the people, not their own financial interests.
