South Africa goes to the polls on 22 April in what is sure to be one of the most crucial elections since 1994, possibly even since 1948. From being an ardent supporter of the African National Congress (ANC) I have recently switched my allegiance to the newly-formed Congress of the People (Cope). This is my story of how this has happened.

On 26 May 1948 the Nationalist Party under leader Dr D.F. Malan won the General Election and almost immediately began the process of formalising and institutionalising the racism and racial divisions which had existed, more or less informally, in South African society since the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in 1652.

My father turned 40 that same day. I remember him remarking (it must have been the next day or so, when the results were in) that it was a sad day for South Africa and that we would expect many changes, mostly for the worst. I was all of four years old and yet I remember very well the sense of foreboding that my father's reaction to the news of the Nationalist Party victory brought.

Then followed the years of the incremental erosion of individual rights, most especially for Black people, but also for whites, make no mistake about that. Whites also lost many freedoms, though obviously their losses were not as acute, nor as dire in their consequences, as the losses experienced by Blacks as a result of the Nationalist Party victory.

My parents, who had both served in various capacities in the armed forces during what the Nationalists referred to as “Smuts's War” between 1939 and 1945, were infuriated by the Nationalist's actions in limiting the franchise further and did what they could to campaign against the ever-increasing limitations placed on freedom by the government.

When the Progressive Party under the leadership of Dr Jan Steytler broke away from the then Official Opposition United Party my parents were enthusiastic about the new party and my mother especially began to work voluntarily for it. My father was constrained by the fact that he was a teacher and believed that teachers should not become involved in party politics.

In 1959 I was enrolled at St Andrew's School, Bloemfontein, where I met a very important figure, the first of many such to have graced my life, who was able to open my eyes and mind to much wider perspectives than I had up to then experienced. This was the chaplain to the school, Fr Trevor Noel Wood Bush.

Fr Bush was passionately involved in anti-apartheid politics and introduced me to many of the ideas of the struggle against the apartheid regime. He got me involved in the white part of the Congress movement, the Congress of Democrats and I started to read journals like Africa South (later Africa South in Exile) edited by the great Ronald Segal. This was in the year of Sharpeville and the increasingly desperate campaigns against passes and the whole apparatus of apartheid generally. And the increasingly desperate responses of the repressive regime. So in this period my real awakening to the realities of South Africans society happened.

Then came the grim apartheid years with increasing repression and constantly rising levels of fear – fear of the “other”, the unknown, fear of the security branch (remember them?). I became involved in the National Union of Students (Nusas) while at Stellenbosch University, eventually becoming the Nusas Local Committee chair at the university. I was in this position when Senator Bobby Kennedy made his famous visit to South Africa and so was a member of the stage party when he gave the Academic Freedom lecture in Jameson Hall, University of Cape Town.

While at Stellenbosch I was able to listen to two very great speeches, clandestinely brought into the country – Mandela's “Speech from the Dock,” somewhat improbably read by actor Richard Harris (who later starred in the 1970 movie A Man Called Horse), and Martin Luther King's great “I have a Dream” speech.

Then in 1978 I had the good fortune to be appointed to the staff of the South African Council of Churches. At that time Bishop (now Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town) Desmond Mpilo Tutu was the General Secretary of the Council and it was a wonderful experience to work with him.

All of these experiences combined with my reading has convinced me of the importance of the rule of law, of how critical this idea is to freedom and democracy. Without it despotism and arbitrariness become the rule in the state, and politics become smothered in graft, favouritism, nepotism and greed.

When Cope split from the ANC towards the end of last year my understanding of what happened was that the leaders who led the breakaway were reacting to what they saw as the erosion of the rule of law and constitutionalism in South Africa.

The election of Jacob Zuma to the presidency of the ANC at Polokwane (the capital of the Limpopo Province of South Africa) in December 2007 was not the first intimation of the moral dubiousness within the party, but it was the most serious. There is no doubt that having a person under grave suspicion of rather serious illegal acts and moral lapses represent the “face” of the party and, potentially, president of the country, has implications for the moral and political life of the country.

Without wanting to judge or pre-judge the man, who seems to be a likeable enough person, do we really need a president who will knowingly have unprotected sex with an HIV-positive woman, a woman who is, indeed, staying in his house, under his protection? What does that say about his sense of moral, or indeed, of practical judgement?

Even if the whole episode were a trap, as it seems likely that it was, he must have been incredibly naïve to walk so easily into the honey trap.

Then the actions of his acolytes since Polokwane, the desperate efforts to keep him out of court while all the while saying he wanted his day in court, these did not inspire much confidence in me, to say the least.

In addition Mr Zuma has been charged with a number of counts of rackateering and money laundering. He has successfully avoided actually facing his accusers in a court of law over the past seven or eight years by various legalistic tactics. The ANC has consistently maintained that these charges are politically motivated and that Mr Zuma is innocent - his strenhuous efforts to stay out of court, though, have left many people wondering.

Now that the NPA has announced its decision to halt the prosecution of Mr Zuma in the light of the allegations of political interference in the prosecutorial process the ANC is claiming victory, claiming that their insistence on Zuma's innocence has been vindicated.

My take on the situation is somewhat different, as I expressed it on a South African political blog:

A sad day for South Africa

Despite the noisy celebrations going on in many quarters of our lovely country, this is in reality a very sad day for our country and its new democracy. It is also a sad day for the leading players in the sorry saga of the so-called “Arms deal” and the charges against Mr. Jacob Zuma.

• For former president Thabo Mbeki, although no evidence of positive political interference in the Zuma case has been forthcoming, he was certainly either by commission or omission guilty of not having his eyes firmly on the activities of his lieutenants or of certain people allegedly acting in his name, in the Zuma case;

• For Jacob Zuma himself, who, despite vociferously demanding his day in court, spent millions of taxpayers rands in efforts to keep himself out of court and now has the unfortunate fact hanging over his head that his innocence, while presumed, has not been demonstrated to the country and the world;

• For the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) whose reputation is now in tatters, because it has seemingly bowed to political pressure;

• For the ANC, which for so long stood for the rights of all to fairness and justice, and is now revealed to be a bully only interested in saving its own electoral skin;

• For us as ordinary citizens who,besides having our taxes wasted by big political guns in waging their internecine wars, have been left with diminished trust in the very organs of democracy which ought to be giving us the assurance that we will not be subjected again to the kind of arbitrary and capricious administration of justice that characterises non-democratic societies, such as the apartheid one we so recently got rid of.

The NPA apparently still believe that Mr Zuma has a case to answer and therefore it would seem that they could have let the prosecution continue and let the court make a finding on admissability or otherwise of the evidence. After all, that evidence pre-dated the so-called abuse of the process by (former National Director of Public Prosecutions) Bulelani Ngcuka and (former head of the Directorate of Special Investigations, also known as the “Scorpions”) Leonard McCarthy.

So we go into an election with the ruling party's presidential candidate still not exonerated, and now having no chance of presenting his side of the case.

And we have absolutely no reason to trust Mr Zuma or the ANC any more. And no assurance that the organs of State meant to protect us as ordinary citizens are still capable of doing so in the face of massive manipulation by the big boys of the ANC.

So I am supporting Cope in the hope that it will provide something of an alternative to the ANC, an alternative that does not carry the baggage from the past that most other opposition parties carry with them, an alternative which is strongly in support of the rule of law, a party which will not use bully-boy tactics which could threaten our hard-won and still rather fragile democracy.

The ANC has for the past 15 years provided good policies but has been dogged by poor delivery on those policies.

It seems to me to be time for a change, a change that might bring some hope to the millions of people in this country who have been left behind in progress made over the last decade and a half.