The African National Congress (ANC), led during the 1990s by the late Nelson Mandela, is projected to be reelected in South Africas May 7, 2014 national election by a wide margin, probably with between 50 and 60 percent of the vote. But underneath the ruling partys apparent popularity, the society is seething with fury, partly at the mismanagement of vast mineral wealth. The political and economic rulers increasingly venal policies and practices are so bad that not only did ANC elites play a direct role in massacring striking mineworkers in August 2012, but corporate South Africa was soon rated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers as world leader in money-laundering, bribery and corruption, procurement fraud, asset misappropriation and cybercrime, with internal management responsible for more than three quarters of what was termed mind-boggling levels of theft.1
With such degeneration from above, the countrys impotent socialist left was pleasantly surprised last December when the largest union in Africa, the 342,000-strong National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) split away from the ANC. Numsa pledged to organize mineworkers and any other disgruntled workers, and steadily to reconstruct a new South African left from below, including radical social movements once derided as ultraleft (because from the early 2000s they had already broken with the ANC)…
