The ANC has betrayed South Africans

Thirty years on from the collapse of Apartheid, South Africa’s democracy stands hollowed out, stripped of purpose and pride. This dramatic decline has been overseen by the African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela.

According to the latest Afrobarometer survey, as reported in The Times recently, nearly half of South Africans would now prefer military rule to democracy. Seven in 10 are dissatisfied with how democracy functions.

It is a confession that is shocking but unsurprising. The government cannot deliver electricity, jobs or water, but it can provide corruption and graft in industrial quantities.

The ANC’s greatest betrayal is not material, but moral. It has destroyed the belief that democracy can work for the poor, and replaced it with cynicism, fatigue and now a longing for strongmen. The party that once liberated the people has trained them to expect so little that they would rather hand power to soldiers.

Last month, South African president and ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa gathered 6,000 ANC councillors in Johannesburg to deliver a public dressing-down. ‘It’s either service delivery or death’, Ramaphosa warned. He thundered that ‘the cooking of the books must end today!’. The crowd, well-versed in ANC culture, possibly misunderstood him, taking this as an invitation to the catering tent.

It was a speech that few in attendance would have paid attention to, regardless of how impassioned it was. Of South Africa’s 257 municipalities, only 13 per cent achieved a clean audit in 2024. The rest – many of them run by the ANC – are sinking as a result of debt and corruption. Ramaphosa even dared to praise opposition-run municipalities, provoking outrage from his own ranks. It appears that, in today’s ANC, highlighting incompetence is tantamount to treason.

The truth is unavoidable: the ANC has become a machine for patronage rather than progress. Its much-vaunted ‘cadre deployment’ policy has replaced merit with loyalty, ensuring that the least qualified often occupy the most critical posts. What was once the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ – the first stage of liberation – has devolved into what South Africans bitterly call ‘The Long March to the Buffet Table’ – the endless procession of ‘comrades’ from protest podiums to procurement offices.

The second stage of the revolution, once imagined as socialism, never arrived. What came instead was state capture – not by the working class, but by the ANC and its hangers-on. The result has been the liberation of the few at the expense of the many. As South African writer and public intellectual William Gumede has observed, his country is ‘in this mess because people have repeatedly voted for people with a record of incompetence, failure and corruption’. This is the tragic legacy of the horrors of Apartheid. Voting for any political party but the ANC has long been seen to be inconceivable.

The misplaced trust placed in the ANC has had dire consequences, visible everywhere. Water shortages, crime, unemployment and collapsing services have reduced daily life to survival. Problems such as poverty and violence have deepened. The dream of freedom has curdled into despondency, despair and demoralisation – the three new d-words that have replaced the original promise of democracy.

For the black majority in South Africa today, freedom feels more like abandonment than liberation. Citizens queue for hours, not to vote, but for water. They no longer trust the ballot box because every government yields the same decay. Democracy, once sacred, now seems a revolving door for looters. The ANC has not simply failed to deliver democracy’s fruits, it has poisoned the very idea of democracy for many.

This moral corrosion explains the ANC’s growing obsession with global causes – particularly its crusade against Israel. Having lost legitimacy at home, the party now seeks redemption abroad. Last year, it led the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, portraying itself as the conscience of humanity. The hypocrisy is unbearable: a government that cannot provide clean water in Johannesburg claims moral authority over the Middle East.

So as South African streets crumble, crime soars and people are left without electricity and running water, its leaders stand on international platforms denouncing Israel with theatrical fervour. The contrast is obscene. The ANC has traded responsibility to its own people for performative morality abroad.

The tragedy is that the ANC’s betrayal has not provoked rebellion, but fatigue. The people are not marching, they are retreating into silence. Half now say they would accept military rule – not out of ideological conviction, but because they no longer believe democracy works. The liberation movement has achieved what Apartheid could not: it has broken the people’s faith in freedom.

Thus ends the revolution: not in triumph, but in resignation. The party that once promised to free the people from oppression has instead freed them from hope.

Dr Norman Lewis is a writer and visiting research fellow at MCC Brussels. His Substack is What a Piece of Work is Man!.