"Jacob Zuma and his ailing alliance"

So this week’s (actually by now last week’s) Economist happened to have a bit on the current situation of South Africa.  Where is it now, politically, economically, and socially?  For economics, a large amount of it is in president Jacob Zuma’s new house, which he spent $20 million of the public’s money on building.  The country is, as it has been for quite a while, in economic disarray, with “barely four in ten people of working age” employed.  There have also been issues with the central bank’s new 5.5% interest rate, raised from the previous 5%, as well trouble with foreign investment (although this problem is more indirect than some of the others).  As for South Africa’s political scene, you probably could’ve guessed it: corrupt, racially divided (although perhaps not as much as you would suspect), and dominated by one party.  Which party is this, might you ask?  Well, none other than the ANC, with the aforementioned Zuma as their leader.  The public was certainly outraged by the blatant act of greed, but support for the party remains above 50%.  Much of the country still remains relatively loyal to the party that Mandela had led.  However, when “contrast[ing] Zuma’s ANC with the ANC of yesteryear”, most are severely disappointed. The greater goal of internal unity and equality that Mandela had promoted Zuma has contributed to eroding away.  For example, I can personally recall an article perhaps a year old describing a scene that played out at a South African mine, an even quite reminiscent of the novel Cry, the Beloved Country; the police/army/‘agents of the man’ opened fire on a crowd of relatively unarmed miners on strike.  And yes, many of said strikers were killed.  But perhaps out of all the political and economic chaos comes a blossoming of social reform; a societal equalizing from the formation of a common enemy.  This could be too much speculation, given the one resource I used did not wholly touch base on South Africa’s social problems.  But there does seem to be some congruence between this idea and the political scene, where the ‘main opposition’ Democratic Alliance, a party formerly-viewed as too white-dominated, has decided to run the African Mamphela Ramphele, “one of the heroines of the fight against apartheid”.  This might just be enough motivation for those supposedly loyal followers of the ANC to switch sides.  If not, then at least both sides, blacks and whites, will be able to boo Mr. Zuma through his second term together.