For 31 years, the ANC has dominated South Africa’s political economy. It has also had great success in imposing its moral framework on the country. It has persuaded society that decent and acceptable debates can only exist within the set of boundaries it has constructed.
That is all changing. It is worth pausing to understand how extraordinary these times are and what opportunities and risks lie ahead.
As the government moves to take on the work of a new administration, the ANC’s parliamentary hegemony is crumbling, as is its control over what terrain is available for contestation.
This has been visible in the battle over the budget. For 30 years the de facto prerogative of an ANC finance minister and his people in the National Treasury, it had been routinely rubber-stamped by parliament after a speech presented more as a ceremony than a democratic procedure.
On every important topic, the ANC sees itself as not only in control, but also at an ethical ground zero. Stray too far and the party will impose what academics call “exit costs”. It is “cold outside” for “counter-revolutionaries”. That is not the case any more.
Being described as anti-transformation will not irk DA leader John Steenhuisen. Exit costs have not damaged Julius Malema or Jacob Zuma — between them, they achieved 20% of the national vote in 2024. As the ANC weakens, so the cost of ignoring its strictures diminishes.
That sense of the ANC being the centre of gravity persists across the aisle. Non-ANC ministers and deputies are said to be very quiet during cabinet meetings. This, no doubt, is because culturally, the “new GNU” cabinet members feel that they are unwanted guests in the ANC’s cabinet.
Fortunately for South Africa, even in its decline, the ANC’s founding idea of itself is nonracial, nonsexist and in favour of reconciliation and nation-building. Even if the ANC’s execution of this ideological DNA has deteriorated, it has nonetheless left the country in a fortunate position.
What has happened over the past few weeks is extraordinary. Where many countries have drifted from supremacist oppression to gangster regimes by way of a few years of democratic pretence, South Africa appears to be emerging from colonialism and apartheid comparatively intact — as a wildly fractious, deeply traumatised but nevertheless functioning democracy.
While retaining its founding ideas, the ANC also ingested the iconography of struggle. In response to declining fortunes, it has ramped up anachronistic messaging, as though it no longer knows what else to be. But what it has not done is try to steal an election. It has not imprisoned journalists and opposition leaders. Therefore, it has to accept, however reluctantly, that the future is a matter of contestation, not decree.
What markets should watch are the polls, not WhatsApp groups. If recent surveys are accurate, South Africans seek good governance — and this is less and less linked to the ANC, and more to those who sound like they mean it. That is an important change. It means the country has — for an atrocious price — survived colonialism, apartheid and liberation. Most countries do not.
South Africa has reached a sort of interstellar realm — beyond the gravity of the postcolonial transition and into something new. There is great vulnerability and opportunity in this moment.
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