EXPERT COMMENT
Many of southern Africa's liberation leaders should take heed that electorates are impatient for tangible change - as the ANC has discovered.
Although Cyril Ramaphosa has just been sworn in for a second term as president of South Africa, it is not thanks to voter endorsement of his African National Congress (ANC). The party for the first time lost its parliamentary majority in the elections on 29 May.
Having governed South Africa since the country's first democratic elections in 1994, the ANC has now formed a centrist coalition government with its main rival, the Democratic Alliance (DA), and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP).
Various headlines describe this as a new era for South Africa. While coalition rule is not unusual in southern African countries, the electoral experience of the ANC - one of the continent's oldest liberation movements - serves as a warning to other liberation leaders not to take voters for granted.
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