Something funny happened to me yesterday. After I cast my vote in South Africa's fourth democratic election since 1994, I hosted a lunch at my house. For the first time in the 15 years since blacks had won the right to vote, not a single person at my table had voted for the party of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress.

Instead, the former activists - some of whom had lost relatives in the struggle against apartheid - had decided that they would give their vote to one of the 25 other parties.

Despite this overwhelming show of no confidence in the ANC, however, not a single person at the table had any doubt that the party would win a comfortable majority and possibly a two-thirds majority.

"That is the mistake that the opposition parties have made in this...