Crime is high and the economy is getting worse. After 25 years of ANC rule, Cyril Ramaphosa’s party will be re-elected this week – but it faces a moral crisis

Andiswa Kolanisi looks out over the corrugated iron roofs, the shelters of salvaged plyboard, the washing fluttering in the raw wind, and smiles as she remembers a day 25 years ago. “The memories of that time are there but it is like we are telling a fairy tale now,” she says. “When we think about the difference between now and then, we ask: what happened?”

Kolanisi lives in the Cape Flats, a flat and dusty swath of land behind the stunning Table Mountain. Around her, neighbours in the squatter camp on the ragged fringe of a township called Khayelitsha listen carefully. Kolanisi supports four children and her unemployed husband by selling “fat cakes”, deep-fried bread rolls, at a nearby crossroads. Here there are no roads, no formal electricity or water supply, and those living in the few hundred shacks use half a dozen overflowing portable toilets supplied by the local authority. They all face eviction at a moment’s notice.

“That day, back then, I was in my village, a long way away. No one slept: we were so excited. Old people, children, we all stayed up all night. It was like a dream come true. To be able to vote? To elect our leaders? We could not believe it.”

Kolanisi was 21 when South Africa’s first free elections brought Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress party to power, and marked the definitive end of the racist, repressive apartheid regime that had ruled South Africa for more than four decades. Most of the population in the former British colony had been denied basic rights to vote, associate or even work or live where they chose. The elections marked the end of that long nightmare.

On Wednesday, tens of millions of South Africans will go to the polls again. The ANC has been in power ever since the 1994 election and is certain to retain a majority in parliament. This means that Cyril Ramaphosa, the leader of the party and the incumbent president, will enjoy a new five-year term once results are finalised by the weekend.

But this apparently foregone conclusion enhances rather than diminishes the significance of the coming election. The stakes are very high, and many speak of a genuine turning point in the troubled history of the “rainbow nation”.

Under Jacob Zuma, Ramaphosa’s predecessor as president, the economy deteriorated badly. Now, growth is minimal, inflation is high, and unemployment is officially more than 25%. South Africa’s curse of violent crime is as bad as many can remember, businesses have suffered from rolling nationwide power cuts, and foreign investors are going elsewhere.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nelson Mandela makes his first public speech in nearly three decades on the balcony of the Cape Town city hall after his release in 1990. Photograph: Chris Ledochowski/Africa Media Online

A recent survey suggested South Africa’s performance on a range of social, economic and governance measures had deteriorated more in the past 12 years than that of any other nation not at war.

“We’ve got a series of crises,” said William Gumede, an analyst and academic who grew up on the Cape Flats. “At the top is economics. For the ordinary citizen this is a tough economy now. Then there is the violence. If you are in a township, or wherever, you are unsafe after dark. And finally, there is a leadership crisis.”

It is this final issue that supporters of Ramaphosa see as most urgent. The 66-year-old president is a moderate who wants to push through wide-ranging reforms to generate economic growth.

But to be able to do this, Ramaphosa must first defeat powerful enemies within the ANC. Some of these are ideological foes who believe the president, who is one of South Africa’s richest businessmen, has sold out to “white capital”.

Others are corrupt, and see Ramaphosa as a threat to their criminal networks. A series of judicial inquiries and media investigations have revealed the extent of corruption under Zuma, and though Ramaphosa successfully ousted his predecessor from the ANC’s top post and the presidency, he has yet to move decisively against Zuma loyalists, who occupy some of the highest offices in the country.

In an interview with the Guardian last year, Ramaphosa spoke of “a new hope in the ANC”, but he has been unable to bring about significant major change in the 15 months he has been in office. A powerful mandate based on a strong showing in the coming election will allow him to do that.

Only this can rescue the party from long-term decline, supporters say. In 2016, the ANC won only 54% of the vote in municipal elections, down nine points on 2011. The party lost control of Johannesburg, the richest city, and Tshwane, the administrative capital.

Ebrahim Rasool, a senior ANC official, said the party needed voters to rescue it from a “deep moral crisis” and likened the new struggle to that fought against the apartheid regime.

“The battle is between those who want to renew the ANC and those who don’t want to go to jail,” said Rasool, 56, who is running the ANC campaign in the Western Cape province. “It is 25 years, and we should never have to rescue the fundamental values that Mandela and others suffered for, especially not within the [party].”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at a rally to mark May Day. Photograph: Rajesh Jantilal/AFP/Getty Images

For a long time, history helped the ANC. The battle the party waged against apartheid and the legacy of Mandela conferred an automatic legitimacy on the new democracy’s rulers. Now history is a potential disadvantage too – providing a benchmark against which the performance of the party can be judged.

The ANC points to a range of achievements over the past 25 years, such as the provision of power, water and homes to millions of people. It also stresses the appalling economic inheritance bequeathed by an almost bankrupt apartheid regime in 1994.

There are many signs of progress. Major Mgxaji, a 67-year-old trade union official in Khayelitsha, remembers organising transport for hundreds of ANC activists from the township into Cape Town to hear Mandela make his first speech on his release from prison after 26 years of incarceration in 1990.

Mgxaji, who was repeatedly jailed under apartheid, describes having had “all the hopes in the world” as he listened to the future Nobel laureate speaking to a crowd of hundreds of thousands.

Though these hopes have been largely disappointed, Mgxaji says, there has been change. His daughter is studying medicine at Stellenbosch University, once a bastion of apartheid, and his son is now a senior police officer. “That is an achievement. That is what we were fighting for. We still have hope for the country”.

Khayelitsha was created by apartheid administrators in the mid-1980s as what one local resident called a “dumping ground” for black communities that the white minority did not want in Cape Town. Similar moves were made in every other city and town. The township, home to an estimated 400,000 people, has long been infamous for high levels of gang violence, drug abuse and unemployment. Every morning and evening fleets of private buses and ramshackle public trains ferry workers into the city to poorly paid jobs as domestic or shop workers and security guards.

But even here there is a growing middle class, working in the corporate sector or running their own businesses, and new commercial ventures are opening. One is a bar-restaurant that offers chicken wings, spaghetti bolognese, beer, Veuve Cliquot champagne and bottles of rare single malt whisky priced at 2,300 rand (£121) to the growing number of young professionals with disposable incomes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julius Malema, the former ANC youth activist now leading the leftwing Economic Freedom Fighters party. Photograph: Jérôme Delay/AP

“We are showcasing the best of Khayelitsha,” says Zuko Mbobo, the bar’s 30-year-old manager. “The changes are amazing. We’ve got shopping malls, transport, tourism, lifestyle spots. House prices are rising very fast. Tourism has dramatically increased.”

Mbobo, who grew up in the township, says he will be voting for the ANC to “maintain the heritage”. But he is increasingly rare among younger voters. “There is a whole group now who are totally ahistorical … None of the old solidarity against apartheid stuff plays with them,” says Gumede, the analyst.

Worse, many see Mandela as a sell-out who failed to effect radical change when he had the chance. The ANC’s continual references to South Africa’s secular saint is thus a double-edged sword.

“Before, I saw Mandela as a hero, but not any more,” says Nkotula Bulana, 32, who lives in another squatter camp on the margins of Khayelitsha township.

Analysts have noted that a generational gap exists within the ANC, too. A new wave of younger leaders who have come up through provincial politics are clashing with older anti-apartheid veterans.

Some have already broken away. Julius Malema, leader of the populist radical leftwing Economic Freedom Fighters party, which may win between 10% and 12% of the vote, is a 38-year-old former leader of the ANC youth league.

“Ask any South African who knew the horrors of apartheid: the fact that they have a tap at home, that their children can go to school, that husbands and wives can be joined –life-saving mechanisms that didn’t exist … For them the idea of a sell-out is preposterous,” says Rasool. “We have a significant body of people now who have no benchmark for measuring achievement.”

The other major opposition party has a different problem: that too many people remember the past too well. The Democratic Alliance, which surveys estimate could win between 10% and 20% of the votes, has struggled to counter the widespread impression that it represents South Africa’s white community, around 12% of the total population of 57 million. “We are a party focused on the future. The electorate is thinking less about the past and more about issues, and the biggest issue is jobs,” said Jonathan Moakes, who directs the party’s campaign in the Western Cape, where it is in power at provincial level.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Many younger voters cannot remember the horrors of apartheid. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

One of the biggest long-term challenges for the ANC has been the distribution of wealth and land since the end of apartheid. According to recent World Bank statistics, South Africa is now the world’s most unequal country.

Travellers arriving at Cape Town airport fly low over the sprawl of Khayelitsha and the informal settlements, but can also see extensive beautifully kept vineyards just a few miles to the east of the township, and impressive whitewashed mansions against the forested slopes of Table Mountain to the west.

To the south, on a picturesque sweep of sand, is the resort town of Muizenberg. Middle-class residents here also say they have been squeezed by rising prices and deteriorating public services. Tamara Jansen, who works for a charity that runs programmes for young people, remembers taking the train from the nearby township where she grew up to see Mandela’s 1990 speech.

“When I went to high school, we whispered his name. I never ever thought I would see him. Then he was up there giving his speech and it was amazing,” says Jansen, 47. “I used to go to school in a train that had whites-only carriages. And when I tell that to my nine-year-old daughter, she cannot understand. And that for me is the biggest gift of that moment on the balcony.”

Standing next to Mandela as he spoke that day in 1990 was Ramaphosa, a young labour activist who had played a stellar role in the anti-apartheid struggle and whose charisma, charm and intelligence had made him the chosen heir of the ANC’s leader. Ramaphosa spent time in solitary confinement under apartheid and then in the political wilderness when he was sidelined after Mandela’s retirement in 1999.

He thrived after the setback, though, creating a business empire that made him one of South Africa’s richest men before returning to politics seven years ago. Described by close associates last week as a “chess player” and a pragmatist rather than a “conviction politician”, the 66-year-old leader now faces what could be his greatest challenge.

In Khayelitsha, Mgxaji, who remembers Ramaphosa from his days as a union organiser in the 1980s, has a message for his former comrade in arms.

He says: “This country needs a leader who will unite the people … A leader who will be on top of all the others but who will unite all the country. That is the only thing that is important.”