This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Major Mgxaji, a retired union official in the poor township of Khayelitsha near Cape Town, was repeatedly jailed and tortured by apartheid authorities for his political activism with the ANC in the 1970s and 80s.

“It is not the same party as back then,” the 67-year-old said in an interview in Khayelitsha, where rolling power cuts in recent months have been widely blamed on corruption at the national electricity provider. “The ANC people have developed the struggle of the belly instead of the struggle to better the lives of our people. That is very dangerous.”

Twenty-five years after its victory in South Africa’s first free elections ushered in a new democratic era for the “rainbow nation”, the African National Congress has called on voters to rescue it from a “moral crisis”.

The country it rules is deeply troubled, and critics say the ANC is part of the problem, dogged by repeated corruption scandals and a continuing failure to deal with a flagging economy, collapsing public services, soaring unemployment and high levels of violent crime.

For many, the hopes and dreams they held following the collapse of the repressive, racist apartheid regime have been disappointed. Even senior officials at the ANC, in power without a break since the 1994 elections, say the general election on 8 May will be a “referendum about rescuing South Africa and securing [its] future”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest People queue to cast their votes in Soweto in the 1994 election. Photograph: Denis Farrell/AP

Many voters spoke of how the ANC no longer “understood how society had changed” in recent years and how its vocabulary of “anti-imperialist struggle” felt out of date. Rampant inequality has also fuelled anger.

“These guys don’t get it. Nothing has changed. [Nelson] Mandela sold us out to the whites, and this ANC with their big cars and their houses aren’t going to change anything,” said Lucy Sithole, a 23-year-old student in Cape Town.

Esethu Plaatje, 26, who was attending a demonstration in Cape Town against ANC efforts to prevent the sale of a book detailing the alleged corruption of senior officials, said: “Mandela made mistakes but people were dying back then. It is too easy to criticise him now. But the ANC has changed a lot. It is not the ANC we once knew.”

The ANC’s strategy for next month’s election is to admit mistakes but to ask the 27 million registered voters to give its leaders a mandate for internal reform.

“We should not have to rescue the fundamental values that Mandela and others suffered for … but for the first time an ANC president needs support on a scale broader than his party base in order to deal with those who created the problem within our own party,” said Ebrahim Rasool, a senior party official.

There is little chance that the ANC will fall to its first electoral defeat, but poor results could dramatically weaken its dominance of South African politics and possibly trigger rapid decline.

The party is split between reformers close to the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who took power following a bitterly contested internal party election last year, and factions that gained strength under the near decade-long rule of his predecessor, Jacob Zuma.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest President Cyril Ramaphosa on the campaign trail in Alexandra township. Photograph: Sumaya Hisham/Reuters

Rasool said it was certain that Ramaphosa would remain in power – the elected parliament chooses the president, and even the most pessimistic projections give the ANC a majority – but any effort to “deal with the deep moral crisis within the party” would be made more difficult if he lacked obvious popular support.

“How strong will his hand be? This time we are not dealing with an external colour-coded enemy but with our own comrades,” said Rasool, who leads the ANC’s election campaign in the key Western Cape province.

ANC officials argue they are still struggling to overcome decades of deliberate impoverishment of most of the population by white supremacist apartheid rulers, and point to achievements such as the construction of 2.8 million houses over recent decades.

The party lost ground in municipal elections in 2016, ceding control of key cities including the commercial capital, Johannesburg, and the administrative capital, Pretoria, to the Democratic Alliance (DA), a centre-right opposition party.

The DA, which is polling at 10%, has previously been criticised as a party representing South Africa’s white minority. Jonathan Moakes, the head of the DA’s campaign in Western Cape, said the charge was unfounded.

“The DA is a profoundly different party even from 2014. With Mmusi Maimane we have a black leader who has put a different brand on it. We are a party of governance. The electorate is thinking less about the past and more about issues,” Moakes said.

Ramaphosa is a former labour activist who was twice imprisoned under apartheid. Though thought of as a successor to Mandela in 1998, he was marginalised politically by others within the ANC and left politics to make a fortune in business. He is a reformist and moderate, and seen by many voters as an honest and committed public servant.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A boy rides a toy scooter past an election campaign poster for the Economic Freedom Fighters in Cape Town. Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA

However, his years as vice-president under Zuma have left him open to charges of complicity. Last year Ramaphosa told the Guardian he would appear before a judicial anti-corruption inquiry to account for his actions as a senior official during what he described as a “very dark period of our recent history”.

Though Ramaphosa has spoken of “a new hope in the ANC”, he has been unable to bring about major changes in the 15 months he has been in power, and the long-term trends are not good for the party.

“There is a leadership crisis in the country. There is a sense of a vacuum, no sense of direction, not even pointers as to where we are going, and that creates a lot of uncertainty,” said William Gumede, an analyst and executive chair of the Democracy Works Foundation.

Timeline The ANC's 25 years in power Show Hide Taking power ANC wins South Africa’s first democratic elections, making Nelson Mandela the country’s first black president. Second election win Mandela steps down after one term. The ANC wins the second democratic election with Thabo Mbeki as president. The MP Patricia de Lille presents a dossier containing numerous allegations of bribery relating to a 70bn rand (£5.44bn) arms deal. Mbeki and Aids 'denalism' Mbeki is criticised for a speech that appears to underplay the threat of HIV. Campaigners will later accuse him of Aids “denialism” that costs hundreds of thousands of lives. Winnie Mandela convicted Winnie Mandela, the ex-wife of Nelson Mandela, is convicted of theft and fraud. Third election The ANC is re-elected. Mbeki resigns Mbeki is ousted at the Polokwane conference and replaced by Kgalema Motlanthe as caretaker president. Jacob Zuma Corruption allegations are dropped against Jacob Zuma. The ANC is re-elected with Zuma as president. Zuma's victory Zuma is re-elected as ANC leader. Death of Mandela South Africa mourns as Nelson Mandela dies in December aged 95. Simmering discontent over Zuma’s presidency – he is booed at Mandela’s memorial service – rises to the surface. Zuma and corruption In March an anti-corruption watchdog orders Zuma to repay £13.7m worth of state funds he spent on lavishly refurbishing his private home. In May the ANC is re-elected for a fifth successive time with 62% of the national vote, down slightly from 2009. A generation of “born frees” – who never lived under apartheid – vote for the first time. Local election setback The ANC is punished by voters at municipal elections, losing control of key cities. Cyril Ramaphosa Cyril Ramaphosa, Zuma’s deputy and standard bearer of the ANC’s reformist wing, is elected party leader, edging out Zuma’s ex-wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Zuma resigns Amid outrage prompted by new evidence of improper influence on government enjoyed by business tycoons and under intense pressure from the ANC’s ruling committee, Zuma resigns as president. Ramaphosa is quickly elected his successor by a parliamentary vote. Another election win? South Africans go to the polls in general election on 8 May.

One 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.

A big issue has been the implementation of a 2017 ANC pledge to redistribute prime agricultural land, currently disproportionately owned by white people, who constitute less than 10% of the population. A leftwing faction within the party, and the populist opposition Economic Freedom Fighters, have pushed for more radical measures to redistribute resources.

South Africa election: everything you need to know Read more

Some analysts see the ANC as suffering the same problems as other liberation movements turned ruling parties across Africa. Counterparts in Angola, Zimbabwe and Algeria have all been in power since defeating colonial or white supremacist regimes decades ago and are all struggling to win the support of younger voters more focused on jobs, graft, accountability and living standards now than the achievements of bygone eras.

Others see the ANC as closer to dominant parties in countries such as Mexico, Brazil or Thailand. “The ANC has managed a situation that could have led to a potential racial conflict. Possibly disastrous economic choices have been avoided. Some decisions have not been great perhaps, but we’ve not ended up like Venezuela,” said Anthony Butler, a professor of political studies at the University of Cape Town.

“South Africa now looks like a typical middle-income developing country, with roughly the level of corruption, crime and confidence in government that you’d expect.”