South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa will deliver his most crucial state of the country address on Thursday, during an election year in which his ruling party faces losing its legislative majority for the first time.
Analysts believe Ramaphosa, 71, will need to galvanize support for the scandal-tainted African National Congress during his speech to MPs at Cape Town City Hall at 1700 GMT.
It will be the third time he has given the address at City Hall since the nation’s parliament was destroyed by arson in 2022. However, this will be the most widely followed of his seven annual speeches since becoming office in 2018.
“It’s going to be a campaign speech,” William Gumede, a politics professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, told AFP.
Ramaphosa has “very little” to celebrate because he has had “very little domestic success” while making his mark on the international stage.
South Africa supported the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) landmark finding that Israel must do everything possible to avert acts of genocide in Gaza.
It also hosted last year’s BRICS summit, which included the leaders of China, Brazil, and other major rising economies.
However, Africa’s most industrialized country is heading into elections plagued by chronic power outages, graft that has affected the ANC, rising unemployment, and a stagnant economy.
Ramaphosa’s spokesman said that the date of the national and provincial MP elections will be announced within the next two weeks.
They are commonly predicted between May and August.
However, the ANC, which was formerly led by Nelson Mandela and has been in power since 1994, may receive as little as 40% of the vote, according to the Ipsos research organization.
According to polls, the ANC may need to form a coalition government for the first time to maintain power.
According to polls, the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) could win 19 to 31 percent of the vote.
The DA has established a coalition with numerous other parties in the hopes of unseating the ANC.
Former President Jacob Zuma’s promotion of the breakaway uMkhonto We Sizwe (MK), or Spear of the Nation, party may also have an impact on ANC support.
Polls reveal that Zuma, who is facing corruption charges, has public support.
At a voter registration gathering in Pretoria over the weekend, Ramaphosa stated that “whether people like it or not, the ANC is going to come back with a bang”.
According to Gustavo de Carvalho, a political analyst at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), the speech will be “an important stepping stone to see what tone we will be seeing in the upcoming election”.
Carvalho projected “a fairly strong emphasis” on Ramaphosa’s international achievements, which had been less significant in prior years.