South Africa stands at a precipice, not because of what our politics contains, but because of what it lacks, a compelling, coherent vision for tomorrow. The African National Congress (ANC), once the proud standard-bearer of liberation and architect of our democratic transition, has degenerated into something far more troubling than merely an ineffective governing party.
It has become what political theorists might call an “anti-future” political entity, an organisation that defines itself more by what it opposes than what it proposes, more by the past it resists than the future it wishes to build. This fundamental failure of imagination threatens to condemn South Africa to permanent stagnation just as we should be entering our maturity as a democracy.
Into the Anti-Future Cul-de-sac
This phenomenon goes beyond ordinary political failure or temporary governance challenges. We’ve seen governments stumble before, but what makes the ANC’s predicament particularly dangerous is that it has lost the ability to articulate what South Africa should become in concrete, achievable terms.
Instead, it governs through a series of defensive manoeuvres not to realise any particular vision, but to prevent alternatives from emerging and hold on to power. The party that once dreamed of liberating a nation now seems primarily concerned with preventing anyone else from shaping the country’s destiny, even as the country cries out for leadership and direction.
The symptoms of this anti-future mentality are everywhere apparent in our national life. Consider our endless, circular debates about economic transformation. Where we should be hearing bold, innovative plans for job creation, inclusive growth and industrial development, we get instead a tired litany of what must be resisted, “white monopoly capital”, “neoliberalism”, “Western imperialism”.
These may be legitimate and valid concerns in our historical context, but they are not in themselves a governing agenda. A party that only knows what it is against cannot build a country, cannot educate children, cannot keep the lights on, cannot create jobs. Yet this is precisely the cul-de-sac into which ANC policy-making has driven us.
Ideology vs Practical Solutions
Nowhere is this more evident than in our perennial energy crisis. For nearly two decades, the ANC has treated Eskom not as an essential national utility to be fixed through whatever means necessary, but as an ideological battleground to be defended against reform. The possibility of meaningful turnaround or restructuring is endlessly deferred, delayed or implemented without active political will.
Not because technically sound solutions don’t exist, but because any solution might benefit the “wrong” people or align with the “wrong” ideology. The result? We all still periodically sit in darkness, households, businesses, hospitals, schools while the party debates who to blame and which sacred cows cannot be touched. This is anti-future politics in its purest form: the elevation of ideological purity over practical problem-solving, even when the national interest demands otherwise.
This pathology extends to virtually every sphere of governance with depressing consistency. Our land reform debate, which should be a nuanced discussion about how to achieve both justice and productivity, has become mired in performative radicalism and empty gestures.
After 30 years, less than 10% of agricultural land has been successfully redistributed, not because the technical challenges are insurmountable, but because the ANC (the opposition is just as guilty) would rather weaponise the issue than implement workable solutions that might require compromise.
Similarly, anti-corruption efforts consistently falter not for lack of evidence or legal framework, but because genuine accountability might benefit political opponents or upset delicate factional balances within the party itself.
The ANC’s Playbook of Paralysis
The story of South Africa’s economic stagnation under ANC rule reveals a tragic paradox, a liberation movement that won political freedom but failed to transform economic bondage.
The apartheid system wasn’t just a moral crime; it was a meticulously designed economic architecture that reserved wealth and opportunity for a racial minority while excluding the majority. Thirty years into democracy, this fundamental structure remains stubbornly intact, merely with new beneficiaries added to the feast.
The ANC’s economic policies have become a cruel parody of transformation creating a narrow class of politically-connected black oligarchs while leaving millions trapped in unemployment and poverty.
No Vision For Economic Reform
Our economic indicators tell this story of failed promise in stark numbers. Official unemployment hovers above 32%, with youth unemployment at catastrophic levels of over 60%. Income inequality, already among the world’s worst under apartheid, has actually worsened since 1994. The World Bank consistently ranks South Africa as one of the most unequal societies on earth. A damning indictment of our supposed economic transformation.
What makes these statistics particularly galling is that they don’t represent the inevitable outcomes of a developing economy, but rather the consequences of deliberate policy choices and missed opportunities.
The ANC’s response to this economic crisis reveals its anti-future orientation in microcosm. Rather than pursuing bold structural reforms, meaningful land redistribution that balances justice with productivity, an education revolution to prepare young South Africans for the digital economy, or genuine support for small businesses, the party has retreated into the comfort zone of narrow, ideologically outdated policies.
Some of these policies, rightfully designed to broaden economic participation, have been distorted into a system of elite enrichment, where a small circle of politically-connected individuals rotate through the same lucrative positions, BEE transactions and tenders. The result is an economy that satisfies neither growth nor transformation imperatives. Too constrained for genuine entrepreneurship to flourish, yet too manipulated to achieve meaningful redistribution.
The Crippling Corruption Crisis
This economic stagnation finds its perfect counterpart in the ANC’s corruption crisis, which has evolved from sporadic scandals to a systemic feature of governance. The Zuma-era state capture project wasn’t some aberration or an isolated phenomenon in an otherwise clean system, but rather the logical culmination of years of institutional decay. Corruption was never a Zuma problem, but an ANC problem.
What makes this corruption particularly destructive is how it has been institutionalised into the ANC’s operating system. The phenomenon of what Zurich-based South African Economist Siyabonga Hadebe terms ‘Political Entrepreneurship’, where political connections rather than merit determine access to state contracts has become so normalised that it barely raises eyebrows anymore.
Litany of Crises
Perhaps most damning is the ANC’s policy paralysis across every critical sector of national life. On energy, we’ve gone from occasional load-shedding to permanent periodical electricity rationing, with no credible plan to resolve the crisis beyond empty promises and shifting blame.
Our education system, rather than being the great equaliser, continues reproducing apartheid-era inequalities, failing poor black children generation after generation.
Crime has become so normalised that South Africans now live behind electric fences as standard practice, with police and intelligence services too under-resourced and politicised to provide basic security.
In each of these crises, the ANC’s response follows the same anti-future pattern: substitute slogans for solutions, and blame-shifting for accountability. “Radical Economic Transformation” becomes a meaningless mantra rather than an actual program.
“Apartheid legacy” serves as perpetual excuse for current failures rather than as a challenge to be overcome. The party’s rhetoric remains stuck in 1994, endlessly refighting old battles while new crises multiply.
Perpetual Factional Battles
This paralysis stems in large part from the ANC’s internal decay into warring factions more concerned with resource capture than national development. The much-publicised battles between internal ANC factions aren’t ideological contests about South Africa’s future direction.
They’re naked struggles over access to state resources and patronage networks. The party has become what analyst Prof Richard Calland calls a “coalition of the corrupt,” where internal politics revolves almost entirely around dividing spoils rather than governing competently.
The tragedy of this factionalism is that it consumes all the oxygen that should be going to actual governance. While ANC leaders jockey for positions and resources, municipalities collapse, infrastructure decays, and millions of young people face lifetimes of joblessness.
The party that once mobilised a nation towards freedom now can’t even keep the lights on not because it lacks the technical capacity, but because it has lost the moral and political will to put national interests above factional and personal interests.
This comprehensive failure across economic transformation, governance integrity, policy formulation and political leadership reveals an organisation that has lost its animating purpose.
The ANC no longer exists to transform South Africa, it exists to perpetuate itself. In doing so, it has become the perfect embodiment of anti-future politics: an entity so consumed with preserving its own power that it cannot conceive of, much less build, a better tomorrow for the country it claims to serve.
Perhaps most tellingly, even within the ANC’s own structures, factions increasingly define themselves not by what they would do differently, but by whom they oppose in the next leadership contest. This inward-looking, oppositional mindset has left the party intellectually bankrupt, unable to generate new ideas to address South Africa’s mounting challenges.
Devastating Betrayal Of The Freedom Charter
The tragedy is that this represents such a profound betrayal of the ANC’s own history and traditions. This was, after all, a movement that literally imagined an entirely new society into being against all odds. The Freedom Charter wasn’t just a document of resistance, it was a detailed blueprint for construction, covering everything from education to healthcare to economic justice.
Figures like Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela combined principled opposition to apartheid with serious, rigorous thinking about what should replace it. Today’s ANC has forgotten how to build, and remembers only how to block, how to prevent change rather than how to direct it productively.
We’ve seen this dangerous political trajectory before in other post-liberation contexts across Africa and beyond. Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF long ago ceased to offer any coherent vision for Zimbabwe’s future beyond resisting regime change and clinging to power.
Even the Indian National Congress, which led that country to independence, spent decades in decline as it became more focused on protecting the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty than articulating a vision for India’s future.
In each case, revolutionary parties became prisoners of their own rhetoric, unable to make the transition from opposition movement to competent, forward-looking government.
On The Verge Of A Failed State
What makes South Africa’s version of this syndrome particularly worrying is that we are not yet a failed state, but we are clearly on that trajectory. Our institutions, while weakened, still function. Our democracy, while threatened, remains vibrant. Our economy, while stagnant, still has tremendous underlying strengths. But the ANC’s anti-future posture means we are squandering these advantages day by day, preferring the safety of oppositional rhetoric to the hard work of actual governance.
The question facing South Africa is whether we can break this cycle before it’s too late, before we join the ranks of nations that wasted their potential through leadership failure. The ANC still has within its ranks thoughtful individuals who understand that governance requires more than just saying “no” to alternatives.
But they are increasingly drowned out by those for whom politics has become purely defensive. A game of protecting privileges and preventing change rather than driving progress. The recent national election results, which saw the ANC’s support dip below 50%, suggest that South African voters are beginning to recognise this failure of vision.
In To The Future
What our country desperately needs now are leaders willing to do the hard, creative work of political imagination – to articulate not just what we’re against, but what we’re for; not just what we won’t accept, but what we will build. We need a politics that offers more than warnings about the past, but actual pathways to the future.
This requires moving beyond the lazy dichotomies that have dominated our discourse between “radicals” and “reformers,” between “pro-business” and “pro-poor”, none of which actually describe how to govern a complex modern economy.
The solutions to South Africa’s crises are knowable, if not always easy. On jobs, we need to support labour-intensive sectors while finally fixing our broken education system to prepare young people for the digital economy.
On corruption, we need consistent enforcement across party lines rather than selective prosecutions. None of this is rocket science. What’s missing is the political will to look forward rather than backward.
The future belongs to those who show up to build it. If the ANC can’t remember how to do that, if it remains trapped in its anti-future posture of opposition without construction then South Africa will have to find other political movements that can. Our nation deserves more than just an endless argument about what it shouldn’t be.
After 30 years of democracy, it’s time we started having an adult conversation about what could be and how we might get there together. The alternative is continued decline, not because anyone wills it, but because no one in power can imagine anything else. That would be the ultimate betrayal of our hard-won freedom.
(Dube is a political economist, businessman, and social commentator on Ukhozi FM. His views don't necessarily reflect those of the Sunday Tribune or Independent Media. Read more of his articles here: www.ncodube.blog)