By the time the survivors had emerged, 87 more lay dead, hinting at a horror not even Dickens could have conjured. Initial pathologists’ reports suggested some had died of starvation or dehydration, others from blunt-force trauma caused perhaps by factional fighting in deep hell. There have even been unconfirmed reports of cannibalism.

Anybody who has been to the lowest working levels of a modern South African gold mine — with its superb tunneling, air extraction and lighting — can still feel the claustrophobic weight of confinement. Imagine, then, these long-abandoned shafts: dimly lit, fetid and dangerous. Think of the desperation that would lead you to stay underground, amid mounting piles of corpses, rather than give in to deportation.

Ultimately, it was only a court order that ended the terror. Private sector and voluntary groups arranged for the extrication of the dead and dying. The authorities had no appetite to enter the shaft.

So how did it happen? For years, illegal gold mining has been endemic in South Africa’s historic gold mining areas, with impoverished foreign migrants grubbing poor returns from the country’s 6,000 abandoned shafts. In the end, though, this is a story that goes far beyond the Zama Zama, speaking instead to the disaster zone that is the modern South African economy.

South Africa’s illegal miners live in appalling conditions. Overwhelmingly illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Lesotho, and often underground for months at a time, they’re dependent on syndicate runners, usually children, to bring them essential supplies through hidden access points.

Many were once employed as formal miners before the sector faltered under African National Congress (ANC) misgovernment, and they ended up jobless. The gold, for its part, is sold to intermediaries who then sell on to syndicates. Much then ends up abroad: an estimated 25 tons of illegal gold is shipped from South Africa each year.

This traffic, meanwhile, is only part of a vast criminal state, one that has permeated every crevice left by the official South African government: transport, energy generation, road haulage, waste disposal, precious mineral extraction, national infrastructure, “protection” and so endlessly on. Much has been facilitated by the ANC’s catastrophically misguided program of race preferment, which has seen chunks of the economy and administration fall into the hands of politically connected but incompetent (and often corrupt) “cadres”.

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Reverse racism ruined South Africa

By Brian Pottinger

The broader context to last week’s tragedy, then, lies in an altogether too familiar tale. Since the advent of the ANC government, between three to five million African illegal immigrants have crossed the border, many of whom end up living in abject informal settlements in the peri-urban areas, or else in thousands of “hijacked” buildings in city centers.

These buildings have been abandoned by their owners, often the state, due to the collapse of services and the law. Warlords move in, many Nigerian, and rent out space to these shadow people. The consequences are as predictable and as terrible as at Buffelsfontein’s Shaft 11.

On the night of 31 August 2023, for instance, a fire swept through a hijacked five-story Johannesburg building. 76 people died, mostly African foreigners. A 29-year-old man was subsequently arrested. He admitted he had inadvertently started the fire — while burning the body of a person he had murdered in the basement on the orders of a drug dealer. In another grim harbinger of Shaft 11, survivors refused offers of sanctuary by the authorities because they were afraid of deportation.

By and large, South Africans are not xenophobic. Indeed, they welcomed their fellow Africans in a sort of quid pro quo for the support their countries had given the ANC in their long struggle against Apartheid. For their part, southern African immigrants are eagerly sought for household, construction or retail work. They are hard-working, reliable and often better educated and skilled than locals of a similar socio-economic level. The explosion of share-ride and home delivery services alone absorbs tens of thousands each year.

But this is changing. The continuing inability of neighboring countries to create job-generative economies has seen a trickle of immigrants swell to a flood, facilitated by the ineffectiveness of South African border management and epic corruption in the internal policing agencies.

As a flailing South African economy was also unable to create jobs on a sufficient scale for its own people, let alone foreigners, competition for low-level work increased — and so did lawlessness. Communities near the disused mines, for instance, claim foreign footpads hide in the shafts and prey on passers-by.

Enter a virulent form of xenophobia, driven by two nativist political movements: the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the infinitely more forbidding Zulu-based ethnonationalist uMkhonto we Sizwe Party (MKP). Together, they accounted for about a fifth of the electorate in the 2024 elections, but in terms of sheer vindictiveness and venom, they punch way above their weight.

As for South Africans generally — they may not be xenophobes, but the appalling indifference with which the tragedy at No 11 Shaft has been greeted by most people speaks to a real national crisis, both political and moral.

All of this has forced the somnambulant President Cyril Ramaphosa, now heading a government of national unity after the ANC lost its overall majority last year, into action.

Operation Vala Umgodi (“Close the Hole”), a crackdown against illegal miners in places like Buffelsfontein, is one tactic. Another was the recent withdrawal of nearly a million temporary work visas from Zimbabweans, subsequently overturned by court order. The latest tactic has been a state-sponsored drive against foreign-owned micro stores and businesses among black communities. The ostensible reason has been a recent spate of deaths and illnesses, allegedly from food bought at these shops. The culprit appears to be cross-contamination from illegal toxic rat poison, used by shop owners to protect their wares.

But here is the irony: the work done by the immigrants is largely that which locals refuse to do, and in any case have diminishingly need to do: a third of South Africans now rely on state benefits. The point is being reached where a poor but prudent extended traditional family unit can realistically expect to harvest sufficient benefits to indefinitely keep work from the door.

Billions of South African rands have also been poured into encouraging black businesses: with tragically little success. That’s even as foreign-owned “spaza” shops, the name here for small convenience stores, flourish despite the lack of support.

This begs the question: is all of this not the inevitable, albeit unintended, end point of the ANC’s grand vision of economic redistribution and “transformation”, the so-called Broad Based Black Empowerment? The first phase, the mandatory expropriation of wealth and opportunity from the old order, has created a vibrant new black consumerist middle-class, but at the price of the exhaustion, disillusionment, rebellion and flight of the donor class. It has also created no economic growth.

The second phase was state capture, whereby a secondary class of beneficiaries extracted rent directly through corruption of the state organs. It is now drawing to a close after the near collapse of an embezzled state.

We are now in the third and most dangerous phase. The left-behinders, those who benefitted neither by expropriation of private wealth or embezzlement of state resources, have formed their own group which, buoyed by 30 years talk of entitlement and redistribution, envious of those who came before, pursue their own style of “transformation” through the parallel criminal state — and, latterly, the expropriation of desperate fellow Africans.

Under orders from the Dutch East India Company not to antagonise the locals on whom it depended for trade, van Riebeeck restricted himself to planting a protective bitter almond hedge along the borders of his besieged encampment while continuing to negotiate with the enemy. Thus was early laid the pattern of future South African race relations: an equilibrium of teeth-gritting mutual tolerance mitigated by social distance and punctuated by sporadic violent irruptions, conquests and subjugation.

Remarkably, a single South African constitutional order emerged 340 years after van Riebeeck’s almond hedge through the Act of Union of 1910, and after another 84 years, in 1994, a functioning modern democracy. It is the one we have now, an imperfect and in many ways still teeth-gritting order, but somehow hanging together, somehow prevailing over a society where race may be the driving narrative but economic self-advancement, the consuming passion.

There have indeed been episodic attempts at creating a multi-racial system, such as the qualified enfranchisement of mixed-race people in the Cape Colony. The segregationist viewpoint, however, has long held sway: from its mildest imperial form under the famed administrator Sir Theophilus Shepstone, who created reserves in the Natal Colony for native populations in the mid-19th century, to the ruthless segregation of the Boers, who even trekked from their homes in the Eastern Cape in the early 19th century to escape what they saw as the iniquitous egalitarianism of the British.

But the policy of separation, Apartheid, was only officially crafted in 1948. Race, from then on, was no less omnipresent than it was in the previous century; it was just more complex. After the resurgent Afrikaner middle class, driven by the new Afrikaner nationalism, seized power as the National Party, a class alliance between the poor Afrikaners and poor black population was off the cards. Instead, the Afrikaner nationalists created tribal statelets in which the black population were supposed to be grateful to exercise their vote but still forced to export their labour. The scheme foundered on the implacable reefs of economic implausibility and passive African resistance.

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Ramaphosa has slain the Rainbow Nation

By Brian Pottinger

More successful was the way the National Party turned the state into a vast affirmative action engine for the working-class white population, so successful that three generations later their confident descendants, now affluent, educated and cosmopolitan, overwhelmingly voted in a referendum in March 1992 to surrender political power to the black majority, one of the few occasions in history when a dominant minority voluntarily cedes power to a dispossessed majority.

It would be pleasing to report it all turned out well in the end. It did not, or at least not as well as it could and should have. Racism, like all addictions, continually reinvents itself. In South Africa’s case it was through a corrupt political elite under the flag of the African National Congress that after gaining power in 1994 simply reversed the racism, legislatively favouring their rich black cronies and their children over all comers in jobs, educational opportunities and contracts. Nothing has exacerbated the problem of race relations in South Africa, and driven high skills abroad, as much as this policy of systemically placing race and patronage above any conceivable consideration of merit. It could not work and so, unlike their Afrikaner predecessors, the ANC failed miserably in uplifting their impoverished compatriots through a growing economy. Reverse racism proved to be a zero-sum game.

The dread price for this neglect was upon the ANC in May this year when it lost its majority in Parliament and was forced into a so-called Government of National Unity (GNU), although it is in fact a grand alliance representing two-thirds of the electorate, gathered in an uneasy partnership of the ruling party, liberals, mavericks and traditionalists. Another quarter is represented by the left-behind racist, nativist and anti-constitutionalist rump gathered in the two main opposition parties, the recently sprung Zulu-based Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK) and the Economic Freedom Fighters, the latter a diminished Gucci revolutionary movement now competing with the real deal guys in MK, those who actually do revolution.

The founding principle of our very fine Constitution, enshrined in Chapter One, is that of non-racialism, a notion that has been knocking around South Africa for decades. It embodies the liberal democratic ideal that a person’s worth and life opportunities should be determined by their character, not their colour, and that state institutions should reflect that self-evident truth. Non-racism is the mantra of the political elites, endlessly espoused by the luminaries of the ruling party and the liberal elements of the Opposition.

It has, however, scant basis in current South African reality. Considerations of racial identity infuse all hiring, investing and policy decisions. It is rare that a contentious point of public policy is not turned into a racial bun-fight; the appointment of a deserving white person to high office is not met with catcalls of “anti-transformation”; the announcement of a national sporting team not assailed for “lack of representivity”; an incautious word or action not maliciously turned into a racial cause célèbre by politicians. Is this a temporary malaise? Unlikely: racial preferment is now so embedded in the national psyche that it is hard to see its early demise. Where once the modest demand by black South Africans was equality of opportunity it is now the unattainable equality of outcomes. It is a worn plaint, universally replicated.

In May, the South African electorate voted overwhelmingly on racial lines. African National Congress support came 98% from Africans, Umkhonto we Sizwe 99.4% and the Economic Freedom Fighters 97.6%. The exception was the liberal Democratic Alliance which, although majority white, had a better spread of other races and thus qualifies as the only major South African party that is “non-racial”. As the DA has always battled to attract more than a fifth of the voters and as only 4.2% of African voters supported it in May, the prospects for a change anytime soon seem to be receding. The sobering lesson of the last three and a half centuries, and in particular the last three decades, is that non-racialism is, and always was, a non-starter.

And yet, and yet, the society and the nation shambles forward, often precariously, sometimes purposely and occasionally wondrously.

Partly this is due to the institutional foundations that help hold it together: an excellent constitution and impeccable Constitutional Court; a still largely competent high court system to which South Africa’s squabbling political elites turn with refreshing readiness to resolve their spats. There is also a vituperative and watchful media and many civil activist groups. These entities survive the rolling crises that periodically sweep the country like wild fires in the dry season.

Again, despite all the lip-service to non-racialism, and the failed attempts by the Left and the commercial advertisers to force an image of beery non-racial bonhomie, South Africans, although diverse, remain unrepentantly different. Unlike the United Kingdom, for example, where the establishment talks of diversity but savagely penalises any mention of difference, South Africans are quite happy to talk about their ethnicity, culture, clan, family name, tribe, likes, dislikes, prejudices and stereotypes, as long as one does not resort to pejorative colonial expressions of race or be condescending. Foreign visitors are often struck by how politely ordinary South Africans treat each other in their daily encounters, seemingly able to look beyond a fraught history, difference and a lived legacy of considerable inequality.

Indeed, South Africans have gone to the extent of recognising 11 official languages, one effectively extinct. They have created a Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Rights Commission, a Council of Traditional Leaders, an Equity Court and a Human Rights Commission. All of this is to protect difference and mediate conflict arising from our differences.

The Government of National Unity forced on the ANC mirrors this existent political, social and racial pluralism. It is not a non-racial alliance but a wary coalition of ethnic parties united in the common objective of enriching themselves and their groups and, along the way, hopefully and eventually, all of South Africa. It holds out the possibility of a fresh beginning after all the romantic hogwash about a Rainbow Nation.

Herein the irony: as a riven South Africa grapples to forge a set of national values that yet recognise historic, social and cultural differences, however imperfectly, the political elites in so many developed world countries, United Kingdom included, have done little in recent decades but deny, traduce or belittle the worth or even existence of such values.

Disillusioned ANC supporters stayed home everywhere. The party lost its majority in Gauteng, the country’s economic heartland, and the populous and tumultuous KwaZulu Natal Province. An avenging five-month old radical party, Umkhonto we Sizwe, headed by disgraced and deposed former President Jacob Zuma, swept the polls in the Zulu heartland and emerged the third largest party nationally.

The liberal opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) held the Western Cape and a clutch of small ethnic and regional parties also made incremental progress. Another Zulu-based movement, Inkatha Freedom Front (IFP), increased its share and held its fastnesses north of the Tugela River. The big loser was the urban radical and nativist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) which bled copiously to the even more extreme and anarchic MKP. Socialist and redistributive voters trumped free market ones two-to-one.

The architect of the ANC’s decline is its own President, Cyril Ramaphosa, who was elected with the highest hopes in 2019 that he would be a reformer and an energiser after the eight years of plunder and decay of his predecessor, Jacob Zuma. He was neither, the country deteriorating by virtually every metric possible compared with the country’s halcyon days under former ANC presidents Nelson Mandela and, to a lesser extent, Thabo Mbeki. His weakness in failing to promptly extirpate the Zuma saboteurs from within his ranks years ago, and to lead a reformist national alliance, opened the gap for the extremists such as the EFF and MKP and disheartened even his most ardent supporters. He too has seen his gat.

Few will feel sorry for Ramaphosa. Perhaps fewer still for voters who seem wholly indifferent to either the competence or honesty of their public representatives and routinely vote for their own dispossession by marauding political elites. Such is the allure of tribalism and race.

All this has brought the country to a decisive moment. Initial hopes by the ANC that it could cobble together a majority from pliant smaller parties are dashed. Will the viviparous ANC, still kingmaker after 30 years despite everything, cast towards its offshoots like the EFF (sprung from the ANC Youth League) or the MKP (the former ANC Zulu diehards) to keep power? Or towards the DA and its liberal-reformist Multi Party Charter? If the former, it brings either 51% or 55% of the electorate and what analyst Dr Frans Cronje calls the Chernobyl Option, keeping power in the short term but sowing the seeds of its own destruction. If the latter, it brings 76% of the electorate and possible economic redemption.

A pre-poll survey by the authoritative Brenthurst Foundation found that South Africans rated weak leadership as a bigger threat than crime, more than three quarters were happy with a coalition Government, and 54% were in favour of a coalition which included liberal parties or ANC and liberal parties. This public expression should guide the ANC but probably will not, which is why it is in the position it is.

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South Africa's stagnant election

By Brian Pottinger

The ANC has declared itself winning to form a Government of national unity but, as always, the devil is in the detail.

The positive is that despite all past and looming threats, South African democracy is alive and functioning. There was little pre-election violence and a relatively stable, albeit sporadically dysfunctional, electoral process. There are numerous challenges but none that yet appears systemically threatening. The Judiciary intervened when called to defend the process and the media and independent observers were omnipresent and unfettered.

Vital indicators emerge from these elections. The first is the salience of identitarian or, in its South African context, tribal and ethnic mobilisation, its reality long denied or ignored by white liberals and the black elites. Black South Africans voted overwhelmingly for black parties; whites mostly voted for the DA and the Afrikaner dominated Freedom Front Plus (FF+); mixed-race people deserted the traditional parties to support “brown” and “first nation” parties, the most wildly popular headed by a convicted ex-bank robber who demands the return of the death sentence, and many Asian descended people, when not voting for the DA, voted for tiny local, religious, family and regional parties. With 54 registered parties contesting, there was an embarrassment of choice.

Zuma’s party did best in its Zulu heartland and Zulu-speaking regions in the eastern parts of the country. The ANC triumphed in the Xhosas-speaking Transkei region, its place of historic origin, and the northern parts. The DA benefitted from the huge counter-migration of whites back from the hinterland to the coast and abroad (74% of expatriates voted DA), fleeing the collapse of the northern metropolises. Ramaphosa’s indecisiveness and cowardice has thus decisively slain Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Rainbow Nation, if it ever existed. A catastrophically failed ANC leadership through decades has ensured that South Africa is demographically and politically reconfiguring itself back into the 19th century.

Underlying these election results has also been a significant generational aspect. More than two-fifths of the voters were between the age of 18-34. Initial surveys show significant numbers voted for either EFF or MK. To these young voters, the mystique of the ANC holds little allure: the prospects of jobs and a better life do, although, tragically, their political choices last week will certainly defeat their personal hopes. More, the advent of the young disconnected radical, no different from counterparts across the developed world, diminishes the power of the trade unions, historically one of the ANC’s key support pillars but now widely regarded by many unemployed young blacks as anachronistic as the ANC itself. The real face of the ANC thus emerges. It is old, raddled and utterly bereft of ideas.

These elections have consolidated another theme of recent politics in South Africa: localism at both the regional and metropolitan level, a trend which will be hastened by the next round of municipal elections. This process has been underway for some time. As the central State withers, private initiatives move to fill the gaps in education, security, health and most recently in utilities like electricity and water. At the core of this cantonal impulse at municipal level, graced by the name of co-governance, has been the DA and some smaller parties, modest gainers in the elections. The process may promise a sunshine option to the numerous wealthy quasi cantons stretched along the Indian and Atlantic shorelines, but it presages even greater disparities in income and lifestyle chances nationally.

So too at provincial level where two powerful secessionist streams are running, one in the Western Cape, where polls suggest between 46% and 70% of the people wish to break away, and the other in the ever-volatile KwaZulu Natal where a vociferous lobby, the Abantu Batho Congress (ABC), is calling for an autonomous Zulu Kingdom. The extent to which these movements flourish depends on whether the ANC goes into alliance with one of its offspring movements (spurring Western Cape independence) or whether it does not (driving KwaZulu Natal’s simmering revolt).

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South Africa is on the brink

By Brian Pottinger

KwaZulu Natal, a fiercely contested arena, faces a fraught and unpredictable future. The upstart Zulu-based MKP, patroned by the indestructible 82-year-old Jacob Zuma who is bizarrely still allowed to hold ANC membership, has made huge inroads, stripped the EFF of support (cruel, as the EFF galvanised the young who now vote against them), and annihilated the ANC in both its urban and rural strongholds, emerging with 45% of the provincial vote. The DA’s premier candidate, a presentable young, white gay man able to speak fluent isiZulu, had no chance against the flood.

Reasons for the MKP’s success is a volatile mix of blood, disillusionment and rage: Zulu chauvinism, attraction to the MKP’s policies of radical economic “transformation” (translation: expropriation of private wealth in favour of an avaricious and unproductive new black elite), a traditional Zulu respect for age, a sense Zuma has been wronged by Ramaphosa, but mostly because of an utter public weariness with the ANC’s violently factional and failed rule in the province. In the wake of the abortive insurrection of July 2021 in which the State went AWOL and left local communities to fend for themselves, a revolt inspired by some now sitting in the MKP, I wrote that this province would never forgive Cyril Ramaphosa for allowing it to happen. It did not, but incredibly, many now seek salvation from the very quarters that caused the tumult.

It is uncertain who will rule in KwaZulu Natal. An ANC-IFP-liberal alliance is still possible. If it fails we should expect an unappealing mélange of medieval kingdom (the recently anointed King Misizulu Zulu is severely miffed at the ANC for challenging his sole directorship of 2.8 million ha of communal land), a radicalised tribal party, and a shadow despot who was arguably the most corrupt President in South African history.

Zuma is prevented by law from holding public office for five years due to a recent conviction for contempt of court and this is likely to be the first violent bone of contention between the State and a party which in its short life, like its leader, trails a succession of criminal and civil litigation and has brought chaos everywhere it has gone. A second bone would be if MKP is denied power in the province by an alliance of opposition parties: the balance is knife-edge. Today, police and military reinforcements are deploying into a wary but uncertain calm. KwaZulu Natal, historically the most fought over patch of South Africa, home to my family for five generations, deserves better than this. The nation does.

Louw’s stint as mayor was short-lived, thanks to the fractious nature of municipal coalitions, but he remains active in politics. The son of a domestic worker and a warehouse worker, he belongs to a group known as the “coloureds”, whose mixed descent includes the Cape’s indigenous Khoisan people, Dutch settlers and Malay slaves brought to South Africa during the early colonial period. They share the language of the white Afrikaners who governed the country during apartheid, but under that regime endured severe discrimination similar to black South Africans. In my experience, few Westerners even know of the coloured people’s existence — and yet, they constitute about 8% of the country’s population, and more than 40% in the Western Cape.

When Louw joined the ANC in 2017, years of corruption and mismanagement had already tainted its image as the party of Mandela which ushered in democracy in 1994. But he believed the ANC was still the best vehicle for change. “There is more to do after 1994,” he tells me. “I wanted to implement what we were promised — not just freedom, which we have now, but economic freedom.” According to Louw, assistance has been too slow in reaching poverty-stricken rural areas. His own community of Dysselsdorp has recently benefited from a new housing project — but that was the first in 27 years. In particular, Louw wanted to fight on behalf of coloured people, many of whom feel neglected by the ANC. He even speaks of a “reverse apartheid”.

But in February this year, Louw left the ANC. The party, he says, has “become so toxic I don’t think that dream of economic freedom will be realised”. He found that political opportunities were distributed according to internal factions and personal relationships, while there was little interest in representing coloured people. Louw has now joined a small party called the Patriotic Alliance, which was established in 2013 and has been winning seats at municipal elections since 2016. The Patriotic Alliance has a strong emphasis on the interests of coloured people, though it says its populist stances on issues such as crime and illegal immigration resonate with ordinary South Africans more broadly. Louw, for instance, favours introducing the death penalty to counter South Africa’s severe problems with violent crime (the country recorded 27,500 murders last year), citing the precedent of El Salvador.

Louw’s story is emblematic of the ANC’s declining fortunes among young South Africans. Ahead of the national elections on Wednesday, which could well see the party losing its absolute majority for the first time, a survey of 18-to-24-year-olds showed a disturbing degree of disillusionment. Only 16% expressed optimism about the country’s future, the lowest score of the 16 African nations surveyed. Almost three quarters said South Africa is heading in the wrong direction, citing a bevy of grievances including government corruption, unemployment, the presence of undocumented migrants and problems with basic services such as water.

I have found a similar picture of frustration in my own conversations with members of the “born free” generation — those born after 1994, who have lived their entire lives under ANC rule. The electoral implications of these sentiments are still unclear, for they have contributed to pitifully low levels of voter registration and political engagement more broadly. But speaking to those who are engaged, the vision of national unity and gradual transformation which Mandela’s party stood for 30 years ago is now wearing dangerously thin. Among South Africa’s many different groups, there are few who do not feel in some way unjustly treated, and young people increasingly favour movements which speak to those injustices.

In Louw’s case, that movement is the Patriotic Alliance. But in South Africa at large, the most effective practitioners of youth politics are undoubtedly the radical-Left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). This party emerged in 2013 from the ANC’s own youth league, under the leadership of charismatic firebrand Julius Malema. Visiting South Africa in April, I found Malema’s portrait with its trademark red beret staring out from long rows of election posters at the roadsides. His movement’s irreverent stance towards Mandela’s legacy can be gleaned from its manifesto claim that “We are not part of the 1994 elite pact. We are a completely new generation, with new demands.”

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The EFF presents itself as the agent of an unfinished black liberation in a country where the white minority still controls a large proportion of the wealth. The “non-negotiable cardinal pillars” of its constitution include the expropriation and equal redistribution of land, nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, free education, healthcare and housing, and a move “from reconciliation to justice” across the entire African continent. The party registers around 10-15% in national polls, meaning that if the ANC fails to win a majority, it could become part of a governing coalition.

Hundreds of miles to the north east of Oudtshoorn, in the province of Mpumalanga, I heard about the issues shaping the politics of young South Africans. Unita Mdhluli works as a receptionist inside the Kruger National Park, a popular tourist destination, where she hopes to one day become a field guide. She is 24, and with her confident demeanour, she seems to be living proof of the opportunities available in post-apartheid South Africa. But Mdhluli credits her education largely to the private school she attended during her primary years. Her state-run secondary school, by contrast, was chaotic. She had to share textbooks, switch between classes taught in Xitsonga and exams set in English, and “spent most of my days fighting other pupils for something as simple as a chair to sit on in class”.

As a share of national income, South Africa spends more on education than the EU average, but experiences like Mdhluli’s remain common. “We grow up with the saying, ‘use what you have to your advantage’,” she tells me, but many find themselves with little to use. South African students struggle to achieve basic skills such as literacy, with around half of them failing to complete secondary education. Lacking academic or trade qualifications, “most of the youth try to start a business, and since they don’t even have the knowledge to do that, they end up selling alcohol without licence or selling drugs”. Youth unemployment stands at a staggering 45%. Another option is leaving South Africa altogether. But while some emigrants find success and become “the icon of the community”, Mdhluli says, others fall into criminality and “have ended up coming back home in a coffin”.

Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that young black South Africans are attracted to a movement promising radical change. Explaining the popularity of the EFF among her friends, Mdhluli tells me “its agenda is based on improving the lives of the youth of South Africa”. But she also observes that political engagement is concentrated among students in higher education. This, it seems, is the paradox of the EFF. While presenting itself as an authentically African movement fighting for the oppressed masses, some of its most committed supporters, like those of radical movements in the Western world, are educated young people who feel deprived of social mobility

These people observe that in South Africa’s poorer communities, the young are submerged in immediate material concerns and fail to engage with broader questions of governance. Louw calls this straatpolitiek — street politics — and characterises it as: “I just want my electricity to work, I just want to fix my burst pipe.” Despite its poor record with infrastructure in recent years, this localised field of vision probably works to the advantage of the ANC, since it has established relatively generous welfare entitlements during its decades in office. Almost half of South Africa’s 60 million citizens receive state grants, and the ANC is now promising to extend a monthly benefit dating from the Covid pandemic in the form of a basic income system. Similarly, state procurement contracts loom large in the politics of local communities, as small businesses and mafias demand a share of government spending.

This presents a stark contrast with the broad horizons that students encounter at universities. Here one finds South Africa’s peculiar circumstances merging with global trends in theory, activism and identity politics. In 2015, a major student protest movement erupted under the banner of “Fees Must Fall”; its main demands were for greater financial support, as tuition fees represent a genuinely intolerable burden for many South Africans. It achieved only limited concessions, but was more successful in changing the political culture of universities with its “decolonisation” agenda, challenging various forms of racial inequality and legacies of white rule. The protests even washed over to Britain, where students at Oriel College, Oxford, followed their counterparts in Cape Town by demanding the removal of a statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. It was during these convulsions that the EFF secured its place as the movement of choice for young radicals, not least within the Student Representative Councils (where, at South African universities, candidates are elected as members of political parties).

When I contacted EFF representatives at leading universities, I found young activists who were articulate, strident and ideologically committed. They reminded me of the erstwhile supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, though their brand of socialism is a much purer shade of red. Hlamulo Khorommbi, student council president at the University of Cape Town, said confidently of EFF policies on land appropriation, industrialisation and state capacity: “These are things that young people want to see happen.” He told me that his generation views the record of the ANC as “a complete failure”, whereas under Malema’s party, “prospects for the youth will be limitless”. These cadres also feel a strong personal connection to the cause. As a student representative at Wits University, Michelle Mbhalati, put it: “The EFF’s ideology resonates deeply with me, especially as a young black woman.”

The rise of the EFF is, of course, part of a wider fragmentation of South African politics. As dissatisfaction with the ANC has grown, no other party has looked capable of achieving a similarly broad appeal: the main contender, the Democratic Alliance, has never achieved more than a quarter of the vote. Instead, a plethora of smaller parties has emerged. Former president Jacob Zuma has formed another breakaway party from the ANC, with a programme similarly radical to the EFF, and a similarly militant name (uMkhonto weSizwe, once the title of the armed wing of the anti-apartheid movement). It has a tribal flavour, with its strongest support in the populous Zulu heartlands of the north-east. The overall picture here is that South Africans are moving into smaller political silos, responding to movements that represent their particular identities and experiences. The EFF is, at least in part, the movement that fills this role for educated and politically engaged young South Africans. As a number of my interviewees pointed out, it is the only party whose leadership prominently features young people with academic qualifications.

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Britain is turning into South Africa

By Wessie du Toit

But feeling represented is one thing, active participation quite another. Student activists such as Khorommbi say that “the attitude of the youth is that of thinking they can exist outside of politics”, describing voter registration drives where “we go out to the streets to humbly ask people to exercise their constitutional right”. Even within universities, the popular engagement of the Fees Must Fall period has all but vanished. Activists suggest that fellow students have succumbed to another kind of despondency by focusing on their personal prospects.

In any case, the EFF and its dubious figurehead are bound to disappoint their young supporters. Malema’s hardcore socialism, which would plunge South Africa into still greater chaos, is designed to secure a devoted following, not provide a programme for government. His movement will either continue to stoke division at the margins of politics, or it will enter a governing coalition and reveal itself to be another cynical player within a corrupt system.

Ironically though, the EFF has revealed a continuing strain of idealism within the apparent disillusionment of youth politics. Young radicals are most scathing about the empty dreams of 1994, but it is they who have taken those dreams most seriously, insofar as they still believe in politics both as a source of collective purpose and a means of pursuing justice. The tragedy is that South Africa’s governing class has become so enmeshed in games of patronage and personal enrichment that such hopeful energies can only find expression in minor parties and lost causes.

Such views miss the significance of the man who, together with former president Frederik Willem de Klerk, helped steer his country away from imminent disaster. The tragedy now playing out in the Middle East should remind South Africans how fortunate they were to have such visionaries at a unique moment in national history.

Mandela had three things going for him: he was a decent man; his long incarceration had kept him untainted by all the bad things that happened during his liberation movement; and, crucially, his only five-year term in office came while the sinews of the civil and security services of the departed apartheid system could still hold the state together — in a sense they bore him on their hands. His successors had no such luck.

Yet the former president had little interest in, or understanding of, the minutiae of government. He governed by halo reputation, charm and an engaging naiveté. All problems could be dismissed with an incomparable smile and a witty comment. It could not last of course; not in a multi-riven country like South Africa.

When I was editor of the South African Sunday Times during the political transition of the mid-Nineties, I engaged Mandela often, not always frictionlessly. He once chose to use a meeting of national editors to accuse white editors of telling black reporters what to write, which I pointed out was more demeaning to the latter than the former.

The subsequent frostiness was partly alleviated when I invited him to be the patron of a Sunday Times-sponsored expedition to put the first South African woman and the new flag atop Mount Everest. The expedition went haywire when its mercurial leader split the party at Base Camp 4, leaving only him and the two women members of the team to assail the heights. Our circulation rocketed but it fell to me to fly to Cape Town to tell our Patron the bad news.

“You mean the women are still prepared to go on?” Mandela asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then my patronage stands. Give them my best wishes.”

The policy legacies of his 111-year-old African National Congress (ANC) have, sadly, been neither as decisive nor noble. In a May 1990 address to the Consultative Business Movement, four years before taking office, Mandela sketched the broad strategic political and economic views of the ANC, emphasising the importance of full employment, maximum productivity, social consciousness, partnership between state and business, the growth of small businesses and of land reform. Although predictably heavy on old-style dirigisme, he insisted that nationalisation and redistribution weren’t the only words in the ANC vocabulary. “It is important that we should stop propagating the gloomy picture of South Africa that, as it is said, will inevitably sink into the economic crisis that afflicts many African countries,” he said.

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How has that worked out for South Africa, after nearly 30 years of ANC rule? The party to which Mandela belonged now faces its Venezuela moment after ignoring for decades the catastrophic impact of its administrative, ideological and race-based preferment policies. The Government’s recent Medium Term Budget Statement (MTBPS) illustrates this in a nutshell. In the first six months of the financial year, the main budget deficit has grown by more than 50% to a chasmic R53 billion (£2.2 billion). On this trajectory, South Africa will have to repay R242.5 billion (£10.2 billion) a year in finance charges.

To blame are runaway spending on benefits (45% of South Africans receive social grants) and public service salaries (on average nearly twice as much as in the private sector), matched by a huge drop in taxes due to industries crippled by power interruptions (forfeiting 5% of GDP) and collapsing port facilities (another 4.9%). Economic growth has stalled at 0.1% and unemployment is at 32%, its highest ever, while a recent World Bank Report claims 10% of GDP is being robbed through crime. About 36% of water in most municipalities is lost through broken pipes and nearly one fifth of the electricity sold by the national energy provider to municipalities is stolen through illegal connections in informal settlements.

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Meanwhile, vast amounts of state resources have been ploughed into stimulating micro and small businesses and rural co-operatives in line with Mandela’s vision. This has been overwhelmingly wasted through incompetence, corruption or indifference at both donor and recipient level. The latest, a mega-farm project for the Khutso-Naketsi Community Property Association, has collapsed through state tardiness and corruption by the trustees. Elsewhere, a lodestar job-creation programme is stalled due to a corruption probe, while KwaZulu Natal’s largest development agency, the 60-year-old Ithala, is poised to have its core functions closed by the prudential authorities because it has failed to report for two years. Its target customers are black youth and women.

Compared with middle-income countries, South Africa has a depressingly low number of black-owned micro, small and medium businesses. It is understandable: why bother starting your own business when the state will extort somebody else’s equity in an existing one on your behalf or, better still, grant you huge government subsidies that hardly hit the company accounts before ending up as a deposit on a SUV?

Mandela’s optimism was thus grievously wrong. And here lies the tragedy: inheriting a battered apartheid economy, Mandela and to a lesser extent his successor, Thabo Mbeki, appointed excellent finance ministers who pursued disciplined and productive spending in close co-operation with the business sector. That boosted growth and employment, bought significant benefits to the previously marginalised, and, at one point in the early 2000s, even wiped out the deficit and paid down apartheid-era loans. A still-competent state and parastatal network, capable of massive scaling to meet the new demands, was in place. Deep capital markets and an enviable skills base were available. The Australia (or Singapore) of Africa was ostensibly aborning.

But that promise was never fulfilled. The failure was largely the result of the ANC’s policy of racial preference in employment, investment, scholarships, tendering and trading. Under the guise of being a development project, black economic empowerment, or its buzzword, “transformation”, has been perverted into a multi-tentacled succubus, draining the economic life of the country and supporting a one-way flow of state sanctioned, expropriated wealth into the hands of a monstrously hungry and unproductive new business and public service elite comprising slightly more than 1% of the population. Exactly what Mandela did not want.

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This so-called empowerment process has different iterations. One was the prototypic past endowment by white capitalists of swathes of equity on selected black leaders — the incumbent President is merely the most luminous of the many beneficiaries. Another is “cadre deployment” which has seen the drafting of large numbers of direly incompetent and corrupt party “cadres” into the public service and the State Operated Entities. At every conceivable level of state administration party, “tenderpreneurs” have inserted themselves as pestilential middlemen. According to a recent report by Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard’s Growth Lab, these operators have raised the cost of state purchasing by 20% without a scintilla of benefit to anybody but themselves. The empowerment system, meanwhile, has cost approximately 3% of GDP. Crime, corruption, cronyism and cluelessness are thus robbing the country of nearly a quarter of its GDP, and this in a country not even at war. Ukraine, besieged and a third occupied, by comparison, lost 30% of GDP last year.

The empowerment system underwrote South Africa’s so-called State Capture phase which flourished under the malignant reign of former president Jacob Zuma and involved crippling levels of embezzlement of state resources. Despite facing countless criminal charges in the High Courts, Zuma is being quietly rehabilitated into ANC structures to retain the Zulu vote. A disemboweled national prosecuting service, meanwhile, has been unable to land a single high-level conviction in five years.

Yet, typically, the ANC remains unbowed by its spectacular failures, preferring to fall back onto its default posture of blaming apartheid, the private sector and whites. Indeed, with a contentious general election looming next year in which it may lose its overall majority, the ANC is doubling down on its race preference policies and on social spending: a national basic income grant now looms and, against Treasury advice, an early implementation of legislation to allow pensioners to draw down some of their pensions. Part of it is electioneering, but much is driven by the view at all levels of ANC public representation that the window for graft may at last be closing.

South Africa now stands at arguably the most dangerous yet logical end phase of ANC-style one-way “empowerment”. Criminal cartels have effectively privatised and democratised the state-sanctioned project of wealth expropriation for their own account. In the construction industry, for example, so-called Business Forums seek to extort 30% of the value of all construction projects by violence. Most of the mainly black-owned taxi and long haulage sectors are cartelised, untaxed and in some cases criminalised. The R90 billion-a-year taxi industry, for example, paid R5 million in taxes last year.

President Ramaphosa, elected five years ago on the promise of clean and effective government, is powerless to address this scourge because so many of his party colleagues are beneficiaries, nor will he admit that its genesis lies in the “empowerment” dogma he still, against all evidence, so assiduously promotes. Like Tancredi Falconeri in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s classic, The Leopard, he wants everything to be changed for nothing to change. Mandela’s vision has been betrayed, and by his own comrades.

Schreiner’s words would strike her countryfolk today with stark resonance. The white middle classes, confined to their urban or coastal bubble communities, have largely given up — those who can leave often do. The black middle class are hardly different: revolutionaries have become businessmen and sometimes not very honest ones. “I did not join the struggle to die poor,” proclaimed one senior ruling African National Congress (ANC) politician endlessly mired in sleaze allegations. The unions, meanwhile, are corrupted by greed and the “democratic movements” — a few courageous exceptions allowed — are knee-deep in self-enrichment.

It is now clear that whatever force drives public policy within the opaque and factional halls of the ruling party — which is certainly not the impressionable President Cyril Ramaphosa, who drifts like kelp in the coastal currents of the Western Cape seas — has come to three dreadful conclusions. Firstly, the ANC will stick to its catastrophic redistributive economic policies rather than pursuing growth. Secondly, knowing that its economic plan will cause chaos, the government will batten the hatches against capital flight and pre-emptively seek to chill free speech. And thirdly, it has accepted that what is left of developed world investment interest will dry up and a flailing South African state will have to find succor elsewhere. Enter the Russians and the Chinese.

Let’s start with the ANC’s disastrous economic policy. The recently passed National Health Insurance Act seeks to impose a complex and unaffordable R256 billion (£11 billion) national health insurance system on a state which has utterly failed in key governance functions for nearly 30 years due to epic corruption and maladministration. This has been most prominent in healthcare, where criminal cartels have operated with impunity for decades in securing tenders and, in one recent case, assassinated a whistleblower. The new measures, meanwhile, threaten to displace the extensive and highly successful private healthcare system on which the middle classes and many formally employed workers depend, black and white.

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Other draft regulations, this time by the Department of Labour, allow the government to set employment targets for every business to reflect the precise demographic profile of the country, both an absurdity and an impossibility given the uneven spread of skills and demography. On top of this, draft regulations by the Department of Water and Sanitation require businesses and farmers applying for water rights permits to prove that between 25% and 75% of their businesses are black-owned: the equivalent of asking multi-generational Devon farming families to cede chunks of the value of their farms to Tory cronies for the future right to draw water from the Tamar.

And this comes on the back of a failed land restitution programme, which has seen a catastrophic decline in productivity and employment in the millions of hectares handed to new crony or communal ownership. Millions of other hectares, 2.8 million in KwaZulu Natal province alone, remain under communal tenure systems dating to Victorian times. The ANC is too afraid of a rural insurgency to touch the power of the traditional leaders who have the right to rule over this land: the whites are an easier target.

All of these measures will certainly be fought tooth-and-nail up to the Constitutional Court, and may well be defeated: the Court, some brave opposition politicians, and a small band of intrepid and independent investigative journalists remain the only deterrents to South Africa becoming a badge-bearing failed African state. But in the interim, the proposals are creating enormous uncertainty.

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This explains why, on the eve of Easter this year, the South African Revenue Services quietly published amendments to its capital export rules. Whereas once individuals could export R10 million (£431,000) a year as offshore investments, now the transfers are classified under the same terms as those dealing with formal emigration: a vastly more complicated and expensive process. The authorities insist the measure is simply to tighten up on cross-border movement of securities after the country was grey-listed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for laxity when billions of rands of embezzled state money flowed out of the country in the freebooting days of former president Jacob Zuma.

Yet it forms part of a trend. Regulatory changes in 2021 prevented emigrating pensioners from having their pensions paid abroad for three years after leaving South Africa. This effectively kept them hostage, denying them the opportunity to fund the waiting periods to get foreign residency rights. If the young are fleeing, grab the old folks. The government, meanwhile, is pushing ahead with amendments to the Prevention and Combatting of The Crime of Hate Speech Act, which free-speech advocates argue could be used to suppress genuine dissident opinions. Given that the ANC routinely dismisses as racist all criticism of its actions — no matter how valid — this is not an unjustified concern.

The effect of all this will be to hasten the already terrifying skills exodus from South Africa. Nearly a fifth of white South Africans have emigrated since the political transition in 1994; the white proportion of the population is now almost half what it was then. With them went a significant slice of current and future high-level skills. Emigration rates among the talented and hugely entrepreneurial Indian-descended community is reaching similar proportions, limited only by their sense of family duty. This exodus is comparable to the rates of migration from Ireland in the mid-19th century, Italy in the early 20th-century and Syria during the civil war.

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Collapsed state educational and training institutions cannot feed demand quickly enough with young black replacements. The coy phrase “capacity crisis” runs through all state justifications for its universal institutional failures, yet it is a self-induced crisis caused by the systemic discrimination against whites and latterly Indians — many of whom were not even born during apartheid — in access to state jobs, tenders and bursaries, and in the preferential employment policies forced on the private sector. In the place of the departing whites have come an estimated 3 million migrants and economic refugees from the rest of Africa, sparking xenophobic outbreaks from black South Africans and the recent panicky withdrawal by the government of 834,000 temporary work permits for Zimbabweans, who have traditionally done the menial and artisan work black South Africans prefer not to do.

The impact on the tax base is visible. Only 12.3% of South Africans pay income tax, and this figure is diminishing. Meanwhile 47% of all South Africans draw state grants, rising to 62% of the black population, and this is growing. Unemployment is at an all-time high of 32.9%. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts a growth rate of 0.1% for this year, far below that of African peers. We don’t need Yeats to grasp that the centre cannot hold.

That reality was abruptly reinforced last week by the IMF’s annual Article IV Report on South Africa, which warned that the country urgently needed to get its financial house in order lest its current “moderate” risk of sovereign distress deteriorates. The warning coincided with historically low rates for the rand and the first signs that the government may not be able to find enough local buyers for the bonds, which foreign holders spooked by the ANC’s inexplicable policies have been dumping since 2019. Retailers speak openly of bread riots. The Arab Spring is invoked.

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The response of President Cyril Ramaphosa has been typical: an emergency meeting last week with South Africa’s captains of industry to hammer out a new contract of mutual support. This time, the ANC ostensibly accepted the long-standing offers of the private sector to provide high-level administrators for state functions: perhaps an admission by the government of its abject inability to govern; perhaps just a ploy with an eye to next year’s elections.

Few here have any confidence it will make a difference: the last man drafted from the corporate world, in this case to head up the national power utility, gave his notice in December last year after a failed poisoning attempt on his life. He was then summarily dismissed when he publicly alleged high-level collusion between senior ANC figures and criminal cartels leeching the entity. Many ask why Big Business has not demanded an end to the government’s reckless economic redistributive policies as a price for cooperation, but then since the Act of Union in 1910, it has always rolled over for its tummy to be rubbed by the politicians. The cash registers must ring.

The situation is now dire. South Africa’s postal services, rated worse than Nigeria’s by the Universal Postal Union, is about to file for bankruptcy. The ports are rated in the bottom 10 out of the 370 facilities listed on the Container Port Performance Index. The national electricity supplier is technically bankrupt after years of plundering, racial preferment in jobs and tenders, and sabotage. Power outages of 12 hours a day are common. This week it was confirmed that impoverished Mozambique, languishing towards the bottom of the UN Human Development Index (HDI), would be asked to supply power to South Africa, once the most successful economy in Africa.

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Every financial metric has weakened under Ramaphosa’s tenure, which is ironic when one considers it was the business community that bankrolled his presidential ambitions in 2017 on the promise he would cleanse the ruling party, create a reformist alliance, and put the country back onto the path of modernity. Pity his backers did not insist on money-back guarantees. The betrayal of the promise of the democratic transition in 1994 is complete, the humiliation absolute.

It is not surprising, then, that the ANC government, bust, broke and bereft of old allies, has turned to new friends who can be relied on not to raise inconvenient questions about governance or human rights or competitiveness: Russia and China. South Africa has refused to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, its navy took part in joint operations with China and Russia in February this year. More intriguingly, in December last year, an embargoed Russian ship, the Lady R, secretly loaded a consignment of munitions from the Simonstown naval shipyard, according to a public accusation made on 12 May by Reuben Brigety, US Ambassador to South Africa. Subsequent reports suggest the cargo may have been bound not for Russia, but for the Russian-Wagner-supported Rapid Support Forces fighting a civil war in Sudan for the reinstatement of their old boss and the ANC’s friend, Omar al Bashir. The deposed president, now imprisoned for corruption, is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged human rights violations in Darfur Province during his tenure. Typically, President Ramaphosa, nicknamed here “Cyril The Silent”, smartly shuffled the issue into a secret Commission of Inquiry whose findings, he assures, will not be made public.

What is not in dispute, however, is that Russian oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin, some on the US embargo list, are now the main financial backers of the perennially bankrupt ANC. Nor is it contested that a mysterious cache of dollar notes stolen from a sofa inside Ramaphosa’s private game lodge two years ago originated from a Sudanese businessman, Hazim Mustafa, identified by Sudanese media in 2017 as once being close to, yes, Omar al Bashir.

This diplomatic shift has not been a considered strategic response. Like all ANC initiatives, it is a survivalist cringe in the face of a self-induced crisis: panicked, clumsy, shortsighted, self-serving, and harmful. Inevitably, it ends in farce or tragedy as has happened with South Africa’s turn to host Brazil, Russia, China, and India at the BRICS summit in August. The event, which Ramaphosa wanted to make a jamboree of for his new best friends, has turned into a Ruth Rendell-type nightmare in which the host might technically be expected to arrest a main guest, Putin, on a warrant issued by the ICC of which South Africa is a member (but not Russia or China).

South Africa faced the same dilemma in June 2015, when the ubiquitous al Bashir attended an African Union meeting in Durban as Sudanese President while confronted by an ICC arrest warrant. A South African court ordered that he be detained pending clarification as to whether he be handed over to the ICC, but the South African government let him walk away with no more than a tut-tut from the liberal press and opposition.

Now, however, the stakes are far higher, with a vastly displeased United States watching closely. In a typical piece of diversionary fandango, President Ramaphosa has rustled up four other African Heads of State for a lightening “peace mission” to Moscow and Kyiv next week. The summit may move to China or go virtual or be held in South Africa with an immune Putin in attendance, in which case the US will certainly exclude South Africa from the benefits of the Africa Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA), which gives South African exporters, primarily agricultural, a free ride into US markets. Indeed, a bipartisan group of Congressmen have asked Washington to boot South Arica now. One of the country’s top banks, meanwhile, has warned that the government is imperilling up to R32 billion in foreign trade because of its dalliance with Russia. Whatever the outcome, it will either lead to national humiliation or to further economic devastation.

Is there a way out of this nightmare of serially dashed hopes? General elections are to be held next year. The ANC’s share of registered voters has dropped from its high of 58% in 1999 to 37% in 2019. If no more than one in five ANC voters chooses to go to the shebeen rather than the polls next year, party support will drop 31%. Even in coalition with its natural ally, the nativist Economic Freedom Front (EFF), an organisation with, if possible, a more elevated sense of entitlement than even the ANC, it leaves a pool of between 55% and 59% of registered voters to build a possible winning reformist and modernist coalition from four of the main liberal and conservative opposition parties. That is if they too do not engage in what Schreiner diagnosed as a “lifeless striving for gain for themselves” and if, crucially, a defeated ANC complies with the last great rule of democracy: go when you are licked. The record is not encouraging.

When he won the Nobel Peace Prize with Frederik Willem de Klerk in 1993,  for demolishing apartheid and laying the foundations for a free society, Mandela talked movingly in his acceptance speech of how people inside and outside South Africa “had the nobility of spirit to stand in the path of tyranny” since they saw that “an injury to one is an injury to all”. He spoke about fighting for a world of democracy, freed from “the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees”.

How sad, then, to see the betrayal of this legacy by his party and protégé, Cyril Ramaphosa, who now runs the country as President. The African National Congress promised “a better life for all”, but instead seems terminally corrupt and incompetent, something symbolised by the power cuts lasting up to 16 hours a day, as winter looms in a country that is cursed by high crime rates, rampant inequality, raging unemployment, grinding poverty, and woeful schools. Meanwhile, its flailing leader, Ramaphosa, is doing his utmost to smooth the path of tyranny for Vladimir Putin.

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It is no wonder that, after three decades in power, the ANC is widely expected to lose its governing majority in next year’s election. Voters know that the party, founded 111 years ago to fight for rights of black Africans, is to blame for the energy crisis in the continent’s most industrialised nation, following years of mismanagement and theft. Typical was the $27 billion construction of two big coal-fired plants, where costs tripled under Jacob Zuma’s presidency as his cronies plundered the country and yet still failed to deliver their planned power due to delays and defects.

There is toxic talk on the Left of revolution sparked by the power shortages that are blamed for bankrupting businesses, water shortages, huge traffic jams, opportunistic robberies, rotting food, and even decomposing corpses in morgues. Last year, South Africans experienced more than twice as many power cuts than ever before, reducing the nation’s GDP by about 5%. This year has already been worse. Eskom, the state-owned electricity generator, is warning people to prepare for even more blackouts as the cold weather arrives.

Many voters hoped that Ramaphosa, a former trade union leader who became a rand billionaire after apartheid, might set the country on the right track after Zuma’s corrosive nine-year stint in office. Yet the outgoing chief executive of Eskom fled after surviving an attempt to poison him with cyanide in his coffee six months ago, then blamed ministers of covering up corruption by gangs stealing $50 million a month from the firm. But the president’s image was shredded by the “farmgate” scandal, in which he was accused of covering up the theft of between $580,000 and $5 million in foreign currency that had been hidden in sofa of his luxury game ranch. He acknowledged that the cash had been stolen and, having failed to inform the police, claimed it was payment for buffalos sold to a Sudanese businessman. He avoided impeachment due to the loyalty of his MPs.

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Even as the scandal broke last summer, Ramaphosa was calling on South Africa’s 60 million citizens to remember and respect Mandela’s legacy — pretty hypocritical given the stance he had taken on the Kremlin’s assault on democracy in Ukraine. Rather than “standing up to tyranny”, Ramaphosa posed as a peacemaker and leader of non-aligned nations seeking a solution to the conflict. South Africa abstained in votes on five key United Nations resolutions on the war, even in the shocked days after last year’s full-scale attack when more than half the continent’s 54 states voted to reaffirm Kyiv’s sovereignty and demand unconditional Russian withdrawal.

Pretoria’s stance contrasted sharply with Kenya’s astute critique of Putin’s “expansionism”, which condemned the dangers of trying to stoke the “embers of dead empires” with “new forms of domination and oppression”. The ANC government claims its refusal to condemn the attack is based on a long-held belief that conflicts should be resolved through negotiation — yet both Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, rightly condemned the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq for undermining democracy and setting a dangerous precedent. Ramaphosa, by contrast, is shifting South Africa closer to Moscow, infuriating other democracies even though Russia is of minor economic importance, accounting for less than one-hundredth of the value of trade with Europe alone.

First Ramaphosa echoed the Kremlin’s line by blaming Nato expansion for Putin’s attack, ignoring the desire of Ukrainians to determine their own future like South Africans. Then came 10 days of naval exercises with Moscow and Beijing, timed to cause maximum offence on the anniversary of Putin launching his full-scale invasion, complete with military vessels bearing the loathed pro-war “Z” symbol docking in Cape Town. “It is a slap in the face of our trading partners to be this clearly on the side of Russia on the anniversary,” said Kobus Marais, defence spokesman for the opposition Democratic Alliance. “We’re the useful idiots.”

Next came accusations from the United States that a sanctioned Russian ship clandestinely collected weapons under cover of darkness from a base near Cape Town six months ago. An investigation by the Financial Times found no signals coming from the vessel’s transponder over the dates of mooring, implying that it switched off the device that allows tracking of its position — although the ship was seen at the military site. Now South Africa, which denies the allegation, has responded by accusing the West of fuelling the conflict by providing military aid to Kyiv. And in the coming weeks, there are reports the government plans to change the law to enable Putin — a dictator wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court over genocidal child abductions — to attend an August summit of the BRICs economic bloc without being arrested.

So much for Ramaphosa’s protestations of neutrality. South Africa, sometimes seen as the de facto leader of sub-Saharan Africa, has slid steadily closer to the Kremlin over the past decade. ANC officials often refer to Moscow’s historic support for their liberation movement, admire Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric, and speak of Russia as “a friend”. The disgraced Zuma even wanted a Russian energy giant to build several nuclear plants in South Africa, which would have given the Kremlin a grip on the economy (and presumably offered hefty kickbacks).

Thirty-three years ago, Ramaphosa was beside Mandela as the anti-apartheid hero left prison and those powerful images of hope and optimism were broadcast around the globe. He even held the microphone as Madiba famously greeted the crowds “in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all”.Today, having made his fortune and reached the pinnacle of power, he is trampling over the idea of democracy with his support for a dictatorial regime trying to crush freedom in a neighbouring nation. As Mandela said, “to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others”.

“All that is mine in Zululand has been overturned and spoiled. My children and wives have been put in misery by the chiefs now ruling. The English were merciful, but not the Chiefs now ruling. I wish the English to look to this.”

Things may not be quite as bad for his descendant, Misuzulu Sinqobile kaZwelithini, who last week was crowned King of the Zulus. But the 48-year-old King is already in trouble. He is embroiled in the first and most bitter royal succession contest in a century, waged in a province of South Africa that is flood-ravaged, violence-prone, and has only just emerged from a failed insurrection. It is also suffering the economic consequences of a disastrously and corruptly managed Covid outbreak.

It is a tough neighbourhood, no question. And the situation is only growing more complicated. There are currently several claimants to the Zulu throne, which reigns over the ten million or more Zulu-speaking people of South Africa. When the late King Goodwill Zwelithini ka Bhekuzulu died on 12 March 2021, his wife, Queen Mantfombi Dlamini Zulu, became Regent and by the King’s will was mandated to name his successor from among his 28 children. The Queen, herself of Swazi royal line, died soon after her husband, hence Prince Misuzulu’s appointment.

Not everyone was pleased with the decision. Two of the late King’s daughters by his first wife claimed the will was fraudulent and tested it in court. They lost. Another son of the King, his first-born but not from the Great House, Prince Simakade Zulu kaZwelithini, has claimed the throne and cheekily enacted one of the ancillary ceremonies of inauguration. Then there is Prince Buzabazi Zulu from the KwaDlamahlala Royal House: he says neither are rightful heirs.

Unable to ignore the threat of instability, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa acted with uncharacteristic decisiveness and on 16 March this year recognised Prince Misuzulu as the rightful claimant. It is unlikely to have smoothed the ruffled Blue Crane plumes, centrepiece of the royal regalia.

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This untypical royal succession row has again turned attention to one of South Africa’s most enduring and enigmatic institutions. The country is awash with traditional leaders; indeed, they are represented in a state advisory assembly and recognised in the country’s fine constitution. But none have the stature, allure and influence of the Zulu monarchy, despite it having no effective executive, judicial or legislative authority.

Part of this quasi authority stems from a past that is rich in drama, even by South Africa’s standards; part comes from the fact that Zulu nationalism is a living and volatile political reality, but mostly, the aura stems from the fact that the Zulu monarch, as Chair of the Ingonyama Trust, holds on behalf of the Zulu people 11,000 square miles of land, equal to 30% of the province. This land in the early 19th century was ruled by King Shaka Zulu, the founder of one of Africa’s greatest military empires. It was recognised by successive white administrations and later incorporated as a “Bantustan” under the apartheid-era plan for homogenous tribal authorities with decentralised powers.

The Trust was hastily set up to administer the tribal lands on the eve of the first democratic transition in 1994. The tetchy Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, then Chief Minister of the KwaZulu homeland and head of the traditionalist Inkatha Freedom Party, insisted on its creation as a condition for his taking part in the elections. He had no intention of surrendering this vast ancestral land to a polyglot new ruling party such as the African National Congress.

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The ANC destroyed South Africa

By Brian Pottinger

The rolling country and mountain terrain held by the Trust provides some of the country’s most vauntingly magnificent scenery, but is currently occupied by small plot-holders, shack-dwellers, squatters and impoverished hamlets. Erosion, population density alongside major arterial routes, water purity and soil fertility are common problems there. Little is produced beyond subsistence needs and street-side stall trading.

The ruling ANC party has long seen the Ingonyama Trust as anachronistic in a modern constitutional state. Its plan is to create farming and tourism initiatives through black co-operatives or private ventures. But this scheme is violently opposed by the Royal family, Inkatha and the hierarchy of Chiefs, sub-Chiefs (Indunas) and Headmen who rely on the power and patronage the Trust accords them. Their right to allocate land usage allows them to supplicant inhabitants of the Trust lands.

Recently, the Trust caused an uproar by seeking for the first time to levy rents on this previously free usage land. The rents have since been suspended by court order, and the status of this huge swathe of potentially valuable agricultural and game land is now in limbo, with the central government afraid of provoking more Zulu outrage. (Meanwhile, the ANC government appropriates highly productive commercial farmland for transfer to elite cronies, with catastrophic consequences for productivity, rural employment, and food security.)

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Whatever the outcome, there are big bucks at stake, dwarfing the R70 million-odd (£3.5 million) in annual transfers to the royal family from the central and provincial governments as stipends. With the ANC’s unbroken record of dodgy state entrepreneurship and the abysmal productivity of previous rural co-operative initiatives, there are few who do not think this will end badly, especially for the poor.

There are also political concerns for the new King. Ever since Jacob Zuma, a Zulu, was ousted as leader of the ANC and president of the country by Cyril Ramaphosa in 2017, there has been a growing insurgency in the province waged by Zuma loyalists, gangsters and, it appears, current and former members of the State Security Agency (SSA), which had become Zuma’s in-house intelligence agency during his reign.

Tensions came to a head in July last year, during a five-day period of looting and anarchy. More than 330 people died, some shot by home and business owners, but the majority were crushed to death in the stampede for loot or murdered in tussles over contraband. The police, army and local ruling party officials went AWOL, leaving local communities to fend for themselves in hastily pulled together militias, eerily reminiscent of the ones found in emergencies on the early 19th-century frontiers.

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Full stability has not yet been restored. The province awaits a High Court of Appeal judgment as to whether the medical discharge of former president Zuma from prison should be revoked. If he returns to prison, many expect a repeat of the violence orchestrated last year.

This may well be the new King’s first challenge. Attempts are underway to drag him into the fray on one side or the other. Already, last year, two royal regiments, informal and clan-based militia, reported to Zuma’s headquarters at Nkandla to defend him against attempts by the government to take him into custody. They were quickly ordered to stand down, but it was indicative of future problems.

KwaZulu Natal province, within which the King’s domain lies, is the most unstable part of the country. It ranks the highest proportionately on the country’s state corruption and incompetence scales and is prone to violent outbursts. Most recently, it was shaken by a series of mass shootings in township taverns. Police intelligence suggest they may have been the result of gangster extortion attempts or fight-backs by local citizenry against the gangsters. Police say the shooters are the usual suspects: from family-owned assassination businesses in the remote and mountainous northern area of Ingwavuma, where killers can be hired for a few hundred pounds — weapons and munitions included.

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But there is still hope for the new King. Although he has no institutional power, his office holds relevance for many of his widely dispersed Zulu subjects as an articulator of traditional values, a reminder of past imperial glory and an anchor in a world seen to be increasingly adrift morally, socially and politically. In this he is no different to many European monarchs.

It is an uneasy crown the King must wear, but he can at least take comfort that his earliest ancestors had it a lot tougher. Of the new King’s eight ancestors, two died violently, including King Shaka Zulu, the founder of the nation, who was killed by one of his own stabbing spears in a coup organized by his half-brother Dingane. Dingane was later decisively defeated by Boer forces at the Battle of Blood River in 1838 and killed by Boer tribal allies while on the run. Another two ancestors were exiled and a fifth, Mpande kaSenzangakhona, the half-brother considered too stupid and obese by Dingane to be worth killing, skillfully played Boer and Briton off against each other for 32 years to protect his kingdom. His son, Cetshwayo kaMpande Zulu, presided over the definitive defeat of Zulu arms in the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War.

The last serious Zulu uprising was in 1906 and was crushed in three months by colonial forces through a combination of excellent intelligence and a brutality that brought nearly 120 years of relative peace, at least until last year’s Troubles.

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It is this stability which is now at risk. The new King, elevated in a confused succession, remains an unknown quantity. His immediate predecessors chose political neutrality as the best protection for the institution: they rebelled neither against colonial nor apartheid powers, nor chose sides in the apartheid era between the revolutionary forces represented by the African National Congress and the evolutionary ones driven by the Inkatha Freedom Party. When the King’s late father was asked to choose between Cyril Ramaphosa’s faction of the ruling ANC Party or Jacob Zuma’s insurrectionist one, he declined.

Herein lies King Misuzulu kaZwelithini’s only chance of safeguarding his stewardship and perpetuating the institution in these turbulent times. The monarchy has no executive power, its warriors are ceremonial, its writ is limited to those who reside in the trust lands and the Royal House is utterly dependent on state subsidy, or at least until it is able to raise its own revenues from the trust lands, itself unlikely.

There is meanwhile no political pressure for the dissolution of the royal institution. The reverse: the majority of South Africans, if they bother to think about the Zulu Royals at all, regard it is as a rather picturesque legacy of a heroic history. The new King has therefore every chance of surviving if he keeps in his lane — and succeeding, perhaps spectacularly, if he pioneers the development of the trust lands in the interests of the landless poor. But he must first find a way to make people listen to him.

Mbeki, it must be said immediately, has his own form. During his 1999-2008 form, he disbanded the country’s highly effective anti-corruption special task team, The Scorpions, when it was getting close to the criminal activities of some senior ANC members (including the National Police Commissioner). He introduced a state-sanctioned system of race-based extortion of wealth and opportunity under the guise of black empowerment, ushered in a new era of political cronyism, and gave rise to a new and truly avaricious economic elite, a multi-tentacled screen of parasites through which little national wealth percolates to the masses.

In The Mbeki Legacy, I labelled Mbeki a de-moderniser, for the simple reason that through ideological misdirection, he severely weakened the country’s institutional capacity, something the entirely malignant former president Jacob Zuma later took full advantage of to create his gangster state. Yet it would be unwise to ignore this attack from a cantankerous 80-year-old ex-president on the basis that a pot should not call a kettle black. It comes at a time of acute fragility in the life of the presidency, ruling party and nation — and has found wide resonance across racial lines. It is the stuff on which history sometimes hinges.

President Ramaphosa, once hailed as the modernising saviour of the country after the depredations of his predecessor, has not turned the country away from its trajectory towards a failed state. Institutional collapse is obvious in many state and para-state institutions and physical infrastructure is dire. Those citizens who can afford to have turned to private suppliers of health care, security and education. Going off-grid is now a staple of dinner conversation. Recognising the danger of a collapse of the national energy grid, Ramaphosa has belatedly sought support from private energy producers, primarily renewables.

In short, for many years now the country has already been undergoing an Arab Spring of its own as people take charge of their own communities: sometimes orderly, often chaotically and occasionally violently. The feuding ANC and its bankrupt state apparatus have lost real influence in the lives of ordinary citizens: so much so that an organisation called Afriforum, initially an Afrikaner civil rights group but now enjoying wide support across all race groups because of its feisty legal defence of wronged citizens, has stated its intention to make communities “state-proof”, ending their reliance on state-provided services.

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All of this is a direct consequence of Ramaphosa’s refusal to reverse the core drivers of collapse and the enablers of corruption: race-based economic empowerment policies, inappropriate state appointments, expensive social welfare programmes, land seizures and a culture of impunity at all levels of state and elected office.

Perhaps more terminally, Ramaphosa’s integrity itself is now at stake. A bizarre incident, mischievously exposed by Zuma’s former head of State Security, himself accused of corruption, has emerged about hundreds of thousands of dollar bills (perhaps millions) being stolen from the President’s bush lodge two years ago. The theft, confirmed by Ramaphosa, was apparently not recorded by the police and the villains were pursued secretly by state intelligence agencies and bounty hunters in a bid to recover the loot.

Ramaphosa has thus far refused to give his version of this Netflix-type drama: typically, he hides behind a ponderous police inquiry to avoid having to personally deal with the criminals in his party. For years there has been little doubt about the President’s inability to control his cabinet, parliamentary caucus, party and country. But now not even his holiday home?

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Last weekend, he finally lost control of the ANC KwaZulu Region, the largest bloc in his party and the strongest supporter of the ousted KwaZulu-based Jacob Zuma. The new grouping is largely pro-Zuma and headed by Siboniso Duma, a young and energetic man, who voted for Ramaphosa in the 2017 party elections but now, perhaps exasperated, has turned to the rebel and indeed insurrectionist faction grouped around Zuma.

None of this was entirely surprising. The Zulu traditionalists who make up a large part of the provincial ANC constituency have taken badly the usurpation of their man, Zuma, three years ago. The majority believe Ramaphosa is manipulating the legal system to persecute his opponents within the party. The province itself has been buffeted by a violent but failed insurrection in July last year, devastating 60-year floods, rampant politico-criminal gangs a la Sicily or Colombia, best-of-breed state corruption and high unemployment following the pandemic.

In the face of this growing crisis, President Ramaphosa, now widely and cruelly dubbed Cyril The Silent, has done virtually nothing more than offer trite homilies, anodyne solutions and occasional bunches of money. The people gathered at the ANC Conference, then, represented both the architects and the victims of their own misfortune. Either way, they have had enough of Ramaphosa.

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Wenzeni uZuma (What has Zuma done?), the delegates to the regional conference in Durban sang when Ramaphosa arrived, a rather surprising question given the complex and wide range of criminal proceedings now underway against the 80-year-old Zuma. The conference also moved that the party’s “Step Aside” rule, requiring elected officials charged in criminal court to step down, should itself step aside. That something so glaringly right and necessary should be contested is a measure of how far the provincial party has drifted from modern tradition and how much they distrust Ramaphosa.

But the loss of KwaZulu Natal support will not necessarily end Ramaphosa’s bid for a second term as ANC Leader at the elective conference in December this year. He seems to have the other regions pretty much on side despite, perhaps because of, KwaZulu Natal’s bolshy stand. But the tumult, this further example of Cyril The Silent’s inability to control his party, certainly affects the ANC’s chance of retaining power in the 2024 general elections.

The consensus view is that the ANC will not win a majority, opening the way for a novel coalition-based form of government. The optimists foresee the prospect of a resurgent modernising coalition, perhaps including reformist elements of the ANC, the sort that Big Business had hoped Ramaphosa would deliver when they massively invested in his campaign for ANC leader in 2017 but did not get. The numbers from the municipal elections this year in which the ANC lost heavily, support this possibility.

The pessimists foresee things being pretty much the same after 2024: the ANC in alliance with like-minded groups, just more and different fingers in the till, a continuation of South Africa’s shambling march to irrelevance. The incorrigible simply do not believe the ANC would vacate office if voted out.

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With all this looming, Mbeki’s reference to the Arab Spring is intriguing. Then, Arab despots were thrown out by a popular democratic uprising. Despite the limitless optimism of Western liberalism, most of the countries subsequently relapsed into either civil war or a re-engineered authoritarianism. All South Africans can do is pray that in 2024 they get the first part without the latter.

Ultimately, it may not matter much who governs South Africa. The existential threat faced by the country is the terrifying loss of skills, much of it driven out by the ANC’s affirmative action policies. Collapsed state training and educational institutions cannot introduce black candidates at sufficient a rate. There is the rub.

Yet South Africans are by and large a patient people. Even their rage tends to be expressed through activist forums, marches and legal channels. The prospects of a general insurrection, an Arab Spring, are thus limited. After all, the nation had that chance in July last year when KwaZulu Natal and parts of Gauteng burnt. It remained quiescent.

But without a competent state the nation will devolve into communal zones. The rich will live well. The poor will endure. The gaps will grow. This cantonising of the country is already happening and it is still largely around apartheid-era geographical divisions. The threat is therefore not popular uprising but decay: social, economic, political and cultural, just like the old days.

“There are two kinds of egoists in the world,” wrote Rowan Williams after meeting Tutu. “There are egoists who are so in love with themselves that they have no room of anyone else and there are those egoists that are so in love with themselves that they make it possible for everybody else to be in love with themselves.” Tutu was the second sort of egoist. Desmond Tutu loved being Desmond Tutu, but in such a way that he encouraged other people to believe that they could also be in love with who they are and take joy in it.

This cuts across what many in his generation thought about being a priest. When I was taught to celebrate the Eucharist, for instance, I was encouraged not to show any personality in my recitation of the holy words of consecration. The important thing as a priest is to get out of the way, to be a conduit between other people and God. Don’t put yourself, your personality, between the congregation and the divine. Don’t modulate your voice, don’t try to inject meaning into your words. Your job is to disappear. Say the words like you are reading from the telephone directory. The congregation don’t come to church for you.

Tutu did it very differently. Some in the old school thought what you got with Desmond Tutu was the Desmond Tutu Show, and they slightly disapproved. But this wonderful little man from South Africa, with his impish sense of fun and Old Testament prophet morality, had a totally different theology from that of the Old School. And it was from this theology that all his activism and politics cascaded — “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”, as the second-century church father Irenaeus put it. Tutu loved that line and it often cropped up in his sermons. It captured his theology in a nutshell.

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In other words, Desmond Tutu was very much a Christmas Christian. God comes into the world as a human being so that human beings might regard themselves as divine, a part of the divine life. Tutu once remarked that as all human beings contain the image and likeness of God, we ought to genuflect before everyone we meet.

Tutu often told the story of his parish priest in Johannesburg, the legendary Fr Trevor Huddleston, once doffing his hat to his mother — a white man simply acknowledging the humanity of a black woman being a revolutionary act in the context of South Africa in the Forties. It was a genuflection, of sorts. And this is where Tutu’s theology and politics grows from: all human beings reflect God’s glory, all of them. His hatred of apartheid was at root theological, rather than political — though this is a false binary, of course. His point was that apartheid was a heresy. It was a failure to see God in others; in those who are of a different colour, in those who are lesbian and gay, and most radically of all, in the oppressor too.

But this theology of the person was in no sense individualistic. Perhaps the most important contribution that African Christianity has made to Christianity has been through the development of the idea of Ubuntu — the idea that “I am because you are”. We are not individual cells of separate Godliness, but through God’s presence within us all, we are all brothers and sisters. And so in order to be fully what God intended, we have to be reconciled with those from whom we have become estranged. Forgiveness was not some sentimental touchy-feely emotional weakness, but a tough-minded determination to recognise our own humanity as inescapably bound up with others. Confessing past wrongs with the hope of some sort of reconciliation was a way of putting the pieces of the self back together.

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Tutu was hated for this insight as much as he was loved. When he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he was putting into practice a version of this theology: that only through forgiveness could a community find the gift of a common future. Forgiveness meant breaking the cycle of tit-for-tat revenge. It wasn’t about having warm and fuzzy feelings about those that had participated in the evil that was apartheid. It was the belief that a future was possible, but only through a process of confession and forgiveness in which the image of God is restored in others. This was a basic priestly insight turned into a political process.

There were times when he got it wrong, of course. His extension of the apartheid tag to the situation in Israel/Palestine was a mistake. Perhaps inevitably, he saw the world too much through the lens of his own history, and was sometimes blind to its differences. That’s why many Jews think of Tutu as a much more morally ambivalent figure.

He was also hated by the hard Left as much as by the Right. Tutu had absolutely no time for Marxism. At heart, he was a prayerful cassock-wearing Anglo-Catholic Anglican priest of a very familiar sort. He wasn’t a political radical, but a faithful servant of the church, with a huge personality, preaching what he saw with enormous courage in wicked times. And it was because he was a priest that the apartheid regime never dared to touch him. He called it as he saw it, including in his vociferous condemnations of the ANC as they descended into corruption and petty infighting. Tutu could be the friend of anyone, yet he was no one’s patsy.

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Tutu once said that if he ever walked on water, the South African press would have chosen the headline “Tutu cannot swim”. We forget now how much he was hated and traduced by the whole apparatus of racist apartheid. How his life was threatened. He is now seen as a hero of human rights, which isn’t quite accurate. Yes, he used the secular language of human rights, but it was the Imago Dei — the imprint of God in us all — that was his basic guiding insight.

Will we see his like again in the Church? These days our bishops are largely chosen for their management skills and abilities to run a spreadsheet. Tutu showed us God by being so wonderfully himself, a human being, flawed no doubt, but fully and magnificently alive. His theology and his personality were perfectly aligned. That’s why we loved him. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

The former event brought the country’s warring white tribes together in a wary equilibrium of mutual benefit which lasted through more than seven decades of economic growth and modernisation. The latter cobbled together all the nation’s tribes — black, white, Asian and mixed-race — into a fragile comity that, despite a weakening State, has yet somehow survived its first quarter century; frayed, hissy and bowed, to be sure, but somehow miraculously still alive.

The Act of Union was forged less than a decade after a bitter war, described either as a noble, imperial mission, or one of Africa’s great freedom struggles, depending on which side of the kopje one sat. The critical fault-lines at the National Convention called to give form to a united South Africa were between a Cape liberal vision of South Africanism, which included a very limited form of “Native” representation in Parliament, and a bleaker, exclusionary view by the Boer Transvaal and Orange Free State delegates. English-speaking Natal, from which many of the imperial combatants had come, was also exclusionary: it wanted to exclude itself from Union altogether.

The Boer approach won and thus was early laid the contours of the apartheid state which, in various guises, survived two World Wars, The Great Depression, two fringe Afrikaner rebellions and a bruising white national strike in 1922 which was eventually suppressed, literally, by artillery fire. It also survived decolonisation, international sanctions, two decades of simmering internal rebellions, two States of Emergency and a 15-year-long defensive wars along the borders of Angola and Mozambique which consumed huge amounts of national resource and the time, although not many of the lives, of my generation of young white males.

How on earth did it hold together?

A healthy devolution of power to provincial level helped mollify Cape Liberals and “Natal Stand” reactionaries, as did a mutual respect for language, culture and religion. International sanctions also solidified a sense of unity: it is amazing what indiscriminate vilification can do to engender a sense of common purpose amongst otherwise diverse people.

But the real glue, despite all challenges, was the trajectory of the country towards modernisation, economic growth, rising employment in all sectors, burgeoning physical infrastructure and growing national prosperity, although grievously unequally distributed. Money, the balm to nearly all wounds, softened the edge of communal antagonism between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking whites; there was a quantum improvement in living standards across the board, initially for whites and then increasingly for other marginalised groups.

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International sanctions in the Eighties spurred a surge in internal industrial manufacturing and high tech development from which Afrikaners were disproportionately the winners. Sanctions thus won not by making white South Africans poorer, as liberals predicted, but by making Afrikaners richer and more amenable to the tides of history.  This was not the generation of 1948 that brought the Afrikaner’s National Party and Grand Apartheid to power. This was an educated, richer, more cosmopolitan generation which accepted the absurdity of a small racial minority trying to dominate a much larger, restless and offended majority. The Afrikaners started dealing for an inclusive future South Africanism, a broadened and modernised Cape vision if you will, that would bring stability and profit.

In the early Nineties arose the perfect confluence of event, circumstance and personality.  The border wars ended with the advent of Glastnost and the end of superpower meddling in the region: everybody went home. The internal rebellions were snuffed out by two brutal States of Emergency during which the State had assumed virtually limitless powers of arrest, detention and censorship. Stellar political leadership arose in the opposing camps. The two most important western leaders, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, threw their weight behind the project.

It succeeded in a way it could never have done now. Catapult this moment forward to today and the African National Congress would be incited to up the ante by Western governments and a feral social media: armed resistance groups would be equipped and trained to “equalise” forces, human rights groups would have piled into the fray, white politicians would have been threatened with the Court of International Justice and progressives would have sought to virtue-signal the people of southern Africa into oblivion. Whites, like the Israelis, would have gone back to the trenches.

It never happened. Three years of intense negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa brought a genuinely and proudly homegrown solution: no local leaders being forced with gritted teeth to shake hands before some benign United States President here.

But this new Constitution, celebrating its 25th anniversary last Friday, differed from its original version in significant ways. And therein lay its strengths and its weaknesses. Its legacy, a sorely tried one, now lies intimately connected to the central question of whether South Africa will reemerge as a modern state.

The first change was a major concentration of power at the central level: the powers of the nine newly created provincial units — ironically created more on a geo-tribal basis than the old four provinces had ever been — are vestigial. When centralised systems do not work, through State weakness or lack of central political coherence and mission, as in contemporary South Africa, it creates damaging centrifugal forces throughout the polity.

A recent survey of Western Cape residents showed half wished to cede from South Africa. In the Zulu homeland of KwaZulu Natal, a low-level insurgency has been underway for two years, culminating in the bloody July Troubles for which the instigators have not yet been caught. The only thing stopping a renewed 1910-type Natal Stand is the fact that the rebels are a discredited faction of the ruling party with whom nobody wants to associate.

So bad is the collapse of the centre, that more than 60% of South African voters in a recent poll said they want a committee to run the country, if only they would deliver jobs, security and services.

The new constitution also eschewed the attempts by the then ruling whites-only National Party to entrench “group rights”, by which they meant race vetoes. Faith was instead placed in a durable constitution embedding individual rights and an impeccable Constitutional Court to defend those rights.

The Constitution and the Court has worked just fine for 25 years: the ruling party, on the other hand, has not. Massive public sector incompetence and corruption has crippled state and para-state entities; eroded confidence across the board in institutions (particularly criminal justice ones); forced a skills exodus and a foreign capital investment hiatus and driven unemployment: another benchmark in joblessness was reached last week when it officially topped 34.4 % and a heart-stopping 66.5% for those between 15 and 24 years old.

The minorities, meanwhile, are being systematically discriminated against by statute in terms of job opportunities, study grants, internships and other opportunities, a process in which craven corporates seek to outbid each other. Many of the victims were born long after apartheid. Many of the beneficiaries, meanwhile, are children of wealthy black parents; they also never knew apartheid nor indeed poverty.

Under those circumstances, it is not surprising that individuals are falling back on the oldest safe zone redoubts: family, community, tribe. Last month’s local government elections saw a significant drop in the support of the ruling ANC and surges of support for the extremist black socialist and conservative Afrikaans-speaking white and coloured parties. Independent candidates representing ethnic neighbourhoods did well.

So where should hope be sought, on this 25th anniversary of the new democracy’s founding document?

Two anecdotes and a comment.

One: in the run-up to the first democratic election, the African National Congress and members of the Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party engaged in a midday shoot-out in the centre of Johannesburg.

I found shelter behind an armoured personnel carrier with a young rifleman from a Cape regiment.

“So what do you think?,” I asked the soldier.

“Sucks”, he said, “and I haven‘t even had my fucking breakfast.”

So, it is a tough and resilient nation, bomb-proof, that has survived a thousand predictions of Armageddon.

Two: a few months ago I was invited to a Founder’s Day celebration at my once all-white, all-boy state school. The Head Prefect was white, her deputy Indian and the rugby captain black. And we won the memorial match. If it took 80 years for the white tribes to come up with the current constitution, perhaps we need to be patient a bit longer for the younger generations to have a shot.

And lastly. The toxic ruling party that has done such damage for so long is in free fall, its internal organisation is in a shambles; so toxic is it that not one of the major parties would enter coalitions to save its control of the country’s major metro’s.

Only in Ethekwini, largest metro in KwaZulu Natal, with its former Mayor and 16 councillors on bail for alleged fraud, did the ruling party hold on by its fingertips by allying with a tiny party sympathetic to the faction in the ANC’s own ranks that instigated the July Troubles. But that is the Natal Stand.

Last week, 26 ANC Parliamentarians broke ranks and voted against a constitutional amendment that would have allowed seizure of land without compensation. Small green shoots, perhaps, but potentially heralding the beginning of a seismic re-alignment in South African politics that could see a split in the ruling party and the emergence of a coalition of modernist parties committed to turning back, after so many wasted years, the country’s race to irrelevance.

Only 40% of the South African population has been jabbed against Covid — a slow take-up which is euphemistically described as “vaccine hesitancy”. It is anything but: it is enraged rejection.

There are a number of reasons why it is so hard to get South Africans to take the umjovu, the injection: appalling technical management of the outbreak, a prevailing scepticism towards science, wariness about the Government and a wide-spread apprehension by the poor and marginalised that this is at best another form of repression and at worst witchcraft. It is a dangerous brew in a country already in a state of great political, social and economic instability.

In common with the rest of the world, South African epidemiological estimates of fatalities at the outset of the coronavirus outbreak verged on the fantastical. Initial predictions were for between 87,000 and 350,000 fatalities in the first phase. There were 103. Two years later, with the virus in retreat, fatalities attributed to Covid (but by no means vouchsafed) are only now beginning to touch the lowest initial estimates.

Yet the South African Government imposed one of the longest and most severe lockdowns, supported by a baying national and social media. The decision has proved inappropriate in nature, premature in timing and catastrophic in impact. In a country where many depend on ad hoc daily or weekly subsistence wages, the sudden cessation of economic activity wreaked havoc amongst the poor and self-employed. A failing state was unable to deliver on its promise of subsidies, responsible policing or effective containment.

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It took more than a year for the first subsidies to individuals or small businesses to start coming through. And even then they were erratic, corruption-prone, inadequate, and according to many attested reports, distributed on a racially biased basis. Nearly a quarter of small businesses have gone to the wall and unemployment has rocketed.

An entire section of the population was effectively criminalised: in the first four months of the outbreak, 230,000 citizens, 0.4% of the population, were charged with infringement of the Disaster Regulations for breaking the restrictions, 311 of them policemen. All the charges were later dropped: the criminal justice system simply could not cope.

For every reported infection to the end June last year, seven citizens were arrested for breach of regulations; for every 100 infections, one police officer was arrested; and for every 1,200 infections there was a High Court urgent application. Seven people had been killed in heavy-handed enforcement.

When two doctors working in a Government hospital were forcibly interned in one of the state’s make-shift rural isolation camps, the High Court ordered they be allowed to self-isolate at home: it accepted the doctors’ deposition that they stood more chance of dying from the conditions of incarceration than from the virus.

Small surprise, then, that the general population, particularly the poor, headed for the hills. Take-up of the crucial HIV-Aids retroviral dropped from 95% to 30%; malaria medication showed the same path. Attendances for tuberculosis screenings dropped by two-thirds, while consultations with GPs were down 60% and tens of thousands of urgent surgery procedures were postponed for the coronavirus patients who never arrived.

Emergency procurement of personal equipment, meanwhile, opened the door to the corruption lurking in every interstice of the State. The  heir-presumptive to President Ramaphosa has resigned: a state investigatory agency accuses him of directing a R350 million (£16.6 million) Personal Protection Equipment account to friends. The Gauteng Health Department, industrial heartland of the nation, is embroiled in a R560 million (£26.5 million) fraud inquiry. The female whistle-blower was assassinated within days of the inquiry’s launch.

The begging question, whether President Ramaphosa, a decent man, is presiding over a ruling party in the throes of a Robert Kennedy versus The Mob has at least been definitively answered.

At the same time, a public service already perilously compromised by patronage, corruption, incompetence, and the dismissal of key white personnel for affirmative action reasons, went into a long recess. Two years later it has still not properly returned.

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Enforcement of traffic licencing rules have also been in abeyance for 18 months as 500,000 drivers’ licences await clearance. Estates cannot be closed, forensic inquiries completed, crimes prosecuted (including culprits in the so-called State Capture project of former President Jacob Zuma) and property transferred. More than half a million school children have quite simply not returned to school.

As for the burden of this failure of service delivery, it has been carried disproportionately by the poor, mainly black but increasingly also by white citizens, judged by the street corner beggars. There is little doubt that the effect of the containment strategies advocated by South Africa’s warrior scientists facilitated the July Troubles this year, which claimed 357 lives in a scourge of looting, arson and violence and has directly accounted for the drastic decline in ruling party support in last month’s municipal elections.

South Africans have endured, if never condoned, the absurdities and atrocities of this misjudged, exploited and needless panic to date. The ebb and flow of the global debate about the course of the pandemic has been intensely watched here by the literate and online portion of the community.

They have followed, like many others in the world, the way the arrogant scientific certainties that locked up the world are dissolving in the face of measured science and empirical fact. They understand one cannot follow a “science” when the scientists are hopelessly at odds. They are aware of the abuse of both language and statistics, particularly the new phenomena of snatch-stats whereby mortality from other causes is snatched for Covid-19, or the natural path of an expiring virus is used to justify the efficacy of an antidote or Excess Deaths are annexed to justify a lost cause.

They note the irony whereby their government, correctly, tells the world not to be alarmed by the Omicron variant, while it simultaneously contemplates a grievous assault against the rights of its citizens to contain it, egged on by the usual howling suspects who demanded total lockdowns. Citizens have minutely followed recent reports of how Pfizer arm-twisted their desperate government into signing legal indemnities for its product: who ever heard of citizens being forced to be vaccinated when the supplier is absolved of any responsibility for the consequences?

Most South Africans are not conspiracy theorists but their history teaches them one certain thing: uncontained power always gets one screwed. And many feel screwed now by a confluence of forces (not a conspiracy) that — from Big Pharma, to Big Tech to authoritarian governments — seeks rent from this incomparable tragedy.

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But another, far more important constituency of hesitaters and rejectionists exists. Those who take the time to talk to the black poor and marginalised are astonished by the extent to which, scarred by their lockdown experiences, they regard the current scare as yet another means to oppress them. Curfews, liquor and tobacco bans and the outlawing of political meetings under the guise of fighting Covid-19 support their case. And, for many, the umjovo is nothing less than ubuthakathi or witchcraft.

President Ramaphosa enters dangerous territory here. Take-up of vaccines is higher among the minorities for a variety of reasons and it is a section of the white minority who are the most vociferous supporters of vaccinate-at-all-costs. Banning access to public spaces will instantly translate, as it always does, into a political and racial rumpus. Pieces of paper that permit or restrict certain people’s movements have a terrible record in this country’s history: a bitter resonance for every black person.

Proven and restless forces in South Africa are today looking for chances to reignite the insurrection of July. These are people who do not protest by way of orderly marches, posters and pram-pushing. They seek only opportunity; the consequences brought by the human attempts to contain the pandemic is a revolution.

But revolutions always eventually consume their children. Time will certainly consume the reputations of the architects of this epochal tragedy: the scientists, pharmaceutical companies, politicians and media. And if Ramaphosa isn’t careful, it could also consume the fragile nation of South Africa.

The turning point was the municipal elections in which the 110-year-old ruling African National Congress failed to gain a majority of the vote. The party is, despite its manifest failings, still custodian of the liberator’s mantle among many black South Africans — a recent survey showed that although 60% of ANC voters associated their party with corruption, they would nonetheless vote for it; such is the brand loyalty — but the party’s once hegemonic power is in retreat. The decline over the years is neatly in tandem with the nation’s trajectory towards a failed state. At its peak in 2004, the ANC pulled nearly 70% of the national vote. This week, it could barely pull past 46%.

The party has lost majority control of all the major metropolitan areas; across 62 municipalities, desperate, if informal, coalition negotiations on power and patronage are underway. And the collapse is being blamed on the fact that so few ANC supporters bothered to vote.

This is surely the result of catastrophic declines in public trust across all institutions of state — and particularly in the political classes during President Cyril Ramaphosa’s term. According to some under-reported polling in August, two thirds of respondents said they were willing – 46% were “very willing” — to give up elections altogether in favour of a non-elected government that could provide security, houses and jobs.

So after decades of banging on about how it suffered to bring democracy to South Africa, the ANC has succeeded in destroying both the substance and the allure of democracy for two out of three South Africans. No wonder the punters stayed in bed on polling day.

But the truth is, the ANC was never remotely fit to manage the complexity of what was once Africa’s largest and most successful modern economy and State.

President Nelson Mandela’s post-liberation administration winged it for five years on the back of public euphoria about the Rainbow Nation and the administrative sinews left by the departed apartheid state.

Then President Thabo Mbeki, his successor, sought to impose a sere, technocratic and welfarist vision on his realm, drawn directly from his experiences in Left-wing UK universities. Problem was that while he taught the newly enfranchised all about their rights as modern citizens, he somehow did not get around to talking about their duties. As a result, a boundless sense of entitlement has become an irreducible, damaging and informing fact of South African life, killing initiative and personal agency. Meanwhile, the technocrats who could give content to Mbeki’s vision were leaving state service in droves: victims of his racial affirmative policies.

After him came Jacob Zuma, former head of intelligence of the ANC’s military in exile, the army that somehow managed to wage a decades-long war during the apartheid years that few South Africans ever noticed. His cronies came into government trailing the odour of the Angolan military camps; the paranoia, secrecy, expedience, manipulation, fear, brutality, corruption and hopelessness.

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It is estimated that during his eight-year term, Zuma benignly presided over the embezzlement of between R400 billion and R1.5 trillion of public money (1 GBP = R21) by a coterie of crooks gathered around his presidency, and by others appointed to the State services under the guise of affirmative action and “cadre deployment” (yes, they still speak like that).

The major public utilities crashed, public services withered, the security and intelligence services were infiltrated, the criminal justice system was eviscerated, the tax authorities captured, local authority areas became cesspools, in some cases literally, and public health and education systems imploded. Under Zuma, the ANC went straight from liberation movement to an organised criminal conspiracy without stopping at go and certainly not at jail. South Africa became trapped somewhere between 19th-century Sicily and late 20th-century Columbia. As always, it was the poor that suffered.

Ramaphosa’s election as party leader and President in December 2017, was widely hailed by modernist forces — and particularly big business — as a turning point: after all, they had paid heavily to fund his bid. Sadly, his promised New Dawn turned out to be in every sense a False Dawn.

During his term, employment has reached the highest levels ever; flight by the high-skilled racial minorities is now proportionately equal only to the great southern European migrations to America in the previous early century; capital flight and insolvencies are at historic highs and inward investment at equivalent lows. Not one of the damaging policies introduced by Zuma and his predecessors has been reversed.

Last month, the World Bank ranked South Africa’s once excellent ports at the bottom of the 351 ports surveyed and the Universal Postal Union conveyed the warming news that the South African postal service is now officially worse than Nigeria’s.

In his nearly four years in office, Ramaphosa has failed to decisively deal with the criminal and pre-modernistic forces in his party. They struck back in the traumatic July Troubles this year where insurrectionary forces allied to the Zuma camp and possibly involving renegade elements of the State Security Agency, unleashed a wave of pillage and arson across the Zulu heartland of KwaZulu Natal.

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The State evaporated and has failed to bring a single major instigator to book, even as criminal prosecutions against Indian-descended citizens accused of killing looters proceed apace.

President Ramaphosa now enjoys the distinction of being the only South African President since the Act of Union in 1910 to preside over both a fully-fledged secessionist movement in the opposition-held Western Cape and a first-phase revolution in KwaZulu Natal.

His predecessors — Thabo Mbeki, P W Botha, John Vorster — all had the courage to split their parties to move ahead with what they saw to be reformist policies. Not the incumbent. He lost the one opportunity to save South Africa: to appeal above his party to the country and to unify all the modernist forces against the criminal, pre-modern and racist ones, most of them in his own party.

He is now offered another chance for redemption in the 50 or so undecided municipalities thrown up by the elections. Will his party align itself with the modernist elements on those councils or throw its weight behind the extremist Economic Freedom Fighters? Past form is not promising.

That form shows only excruciating anomalies: three of the most senior ministers implicated in “State Capture” during the Zuma years sat in judgment on the ethics of the party’s nominees for this year’s municipal election.

The man who was head of Zuma’s effectively private State Security Agency has popped up as prison boss and against the advice of the medical parole board, signed Zuma’s release from prison where he was banged up for refusing to answer for his sins before a state commission of inquiry into State Capture.

Zuma, meanwhile, has taken time off from another criminal case in which he is accused of corruption in a 25-year-old arms deal to hit the hustings trail in support of …. the ANC. No wonder so many South Africans believe their politics are beyond either parody or redemption.

Twenty seven years into the ANC’s divisive misrule, the political movements have solidified as never before into their racial components. The ANC is now an entirely black party: the tiny residual support from the racial minorities evaporated when Ramaphosa failed to deliver.

The EFF is unashamedly black and exclusivist: a nativist and racist organisation of provocateurs canvassing for support among the poor while wearing Gucci jeans, literally. Its support sits at an estimated 10% in these elections: a 20% improvement since 2016.

The classically liberal Democratic Alliance has made heroic attempts to break out from its strongholds in the white, Indian and coloured areas. It has failed: black support has been historically negligible and the party has seen a decline in national share in these elections from 24% to 21%.

The Inkatha Freedom Party, rooted in traditional and conservative Zulu areas, has stayed constant at about 5% of the vote, and had the unalloyed pleasure of claiming the ward in which Zuma has his mega-million state-provided home. The Freedom Front Plus, unambiguously representing conservative white, primarily Afrikaner, and Afrikaans-speaking coloured interests, has trebled its support.

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A late-comer, Action South Africa, led by a personable black former DA Mayor of Johannesburg and proclaiming its multi-racial profile, has created a stir by winning a significant share of votes in Johannesburg but made little national headway at below 3% of share. In any case, its core constituency is also primarily amongst urban minorities tired of the DA.

Thanks to the long-tail legacy of apartheid’s policy of residential segregation, many of the country’s suburbs are still largely racially defined. These are the citadels into which the minority communities retreat to enjoy their lives, ply their politics, conduct their businesses, pray, shop, school their young and, if necessary, take up arms to protect themselves when Ramaphosa’s State goes AWOL, as it did in the July Troubles.

For decades now these informal cantons have become ever more self-sufficient: they have private police, hospitals, schools and an army of fixers to mediate between them and a truly appalling bureaucracy. So-called Public-Private Partnerships control large public business and tourist spaces, property developers build public roads, private companies manage water reticulation and major road routes are maintained by private enterprise.

Recent Government policy allows for Independent Power Producers: energy self-sufficiency is now within the grasp of these localised and internally expatriated communities.

And thus the contours of a new and informal cantonal South African state is emerging after 27 years of ANC misrule: self-sufficient and defensive pockets of privilege scattered in the interior and in a coastal arc from the Mozambican border on the Indian Ocean to the Namibian border on the Atlantic. All of this new South Africa is set in a sea of rural and urban poverty presided over by a ghostlike State managed by a collapsed and indifferent bureaucracy and a squabbling and corrupt political class. The old feel-good notions of a non-racial South Africa, Archbishop Tutu’s famous Rainbow Nation, were naïve and are now dead. Cold reality rules.

The immediate spark for the crisis was the incarceration, on 29 June, of the disgraced former president Jacob Zuma for his refusal to give evidence to a Commission of Inquiry into the corruption which had flourished during his baleful term. It followed years of rising and unchecked insurgency in KwaZulu Natal, Zuma’s ethnic heartland, which began after he lost control of the ruling African National Congress party to the “reformist” Cyril Ramaphosa in 2017.

This is how it played in my largely white community, one in a straggling group of languid villages along the Indian Ocean known for its surfing, Natal curries, seafood and laid-back attitude to life:

As always, there were early rumours of war. Over the weekend of 10 July domestic workers and staff from the townships throughout the province called their employers to advise they would not be in on Monday. Friday night saw the torching of 25 trucks on the N3 highway between Durban and Johannesburg. Sporadic arson and looting also took place. By Sunday, the local taxi association decided to withdraw their vehicles from the streets. There is an old saying here, gleaned from serial tumult: When the taxis don’t run/get ready for the fun.

Then, on Monday, it kicked off. Within two days more than 631 premises and an equal number of liquor outlets had been looted. An estimated 340 people were dead, nearly all of them looters shot by vigilantes or crushed to death in the rush for free goods.

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The modus operandi was almost always identical: initially, small groups of saboteurs entered the malls, intimidated the security personnel and broke open a few shops. Whatsapp did the rest: literally tens of thousands of otherwise quite ordinary, peaceful people poured into the malls on foot and by car and completed the looting and firing of the shops. It was structured, deliberate and hugely successful in its bid to destroy food security and scupper communication channels: it was, in short, insurrectionary.

My community’s Whatsapp groups and local news channels kept pace with the mayhem and at mid-afternoon on Monday the expected call went out for all armed citizens to gather at designated points. Our hastily appointed commander advised us that all roads had been cut off by rioters and efforts to raise support from the police, army and local ruling party civic representatives had failed. The State had gone AWOL.

Within 24 hours, a functioning operational command had been set up, barricades were erected at six access points and stickers issued to emergency workers to speed progress. A communication system operated through a mobile app with military efficiency and infrared drones surveyed the surrounding bushland, their operators trying to separate human forms from bushbuck. Pickets guarded mobile phone towers, water points, electrical substations and schools. All of this had been cobbled together in hours by local neighbourhood watch groups, policing forums, private security and businesses.

By the third day, as food, fuel, cash and medicines ran out, armed convoys went out to collect supplies which were rationed and distributed. Some of the wealthiest began helicoptering out to more peaceful havens. And then assistance arrived from the most unlikely quarter: the taxi industry.

This extraordinary sector is alternatively loved and hated by the broader public. Its drivers are dangerous, the bosses dodge taxes and the business is in endlessly violent contest for routes (in the same week KwaZulu Natal burnt, taxi bosses in the Western Cape were continuing a conflict which had already seen 80 dead).

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In short, they are tough guys. So when on Wednesday they called a halt to the mayhem, it had the force of a brigade of troops. The local taxi association boss (the fourth in as many years, all three predecessors chasing fares in heaven), negotiated with the local command structure and that night heavily armed taxi men were joining the weary volunteers on the Control Points to screen the taxis for potential troublemakers amongst the passengers.

The next day, the situation had stabilised enough to open the major supermarkets and petrol stations to the local community: 20 items of food per person and 15 pounds of fuel per car. Thousands queued but there was no panic or complaining.

Later the State returned in the shape of police and army reinforcements and at last ANC public representatives came to the barricades to thank the volunteers for saving the shops and infrastructure. The numerous charity and voluntary organisations in the region began preparing to return to the townships to work with civic leadership to help clean up, patch up and make up. On Saturday — almost a week later — the roadblocks were removed.

Before the last barricade was dismantled, however, this factual narrative began to be distorted to conform with the liberal perspective of what should have happened.

First, we were told by the Minister of Defence, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, that this well-planned attack on food security and communication routes — likely instigated by former and perhaps current members of the State Security Agency, once Zuma’s in-house dirty tricks department — was not an insurrection at all, implying it was little more than a spot of over-boisterous looting by the poor.

This account does not work on two levels. Why was it only the Zulu poor who rioted while the rest of the country, equally poor, stood wary but quiescent? And how does it explain the deeply disturbing fact that large numbers of middle-class black people chose to loot rather than join the barricades?

President Ramaphosa’s government is itself divided on the issue, but it is instructive that his first and typically meaningless response to the mayhem was to offer a monthly living allowance to all, an offer the State cannot afford and which will most certainly be seen in the townships as a reward for violence.

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Poverty and inequality is a reality in South Africa and both have been immeasurably compounded by 27 years of ANC misrule. But for President Ramaphosa, the poverty mantra serves as a convenient get-out-of-jail card to avoid the unpleasant reality that he has failed to deal with a violent and insurrectionary pro-Zuma action of his own party.

Second, the revisionist narrative presents a united nation standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the barricades against the forces of anarchy. It is not true. The communities that protected their neighbourhoods were overwhelmingly white and Indian-descended. Those that did not were overwhelmingly black.

This stark reality can only play out one way. Racist perspectives by the minorities will be confirmed, together with a vow never to be caught short again: already there is talk of resurrecting, with or without Government permission, the old commando system of district militias which were dismantled immediately after the ANC came into power, with a catastrophic impact on rural security. Black South Africans’ sense of impotence, humiliation, envy and failure will once again be deepened.

Race, the sub-text to everything that is said or done in this country, is now put under the spotlight in a way that not even years of discrimination by the ANC — in terms of its affirmative action policies — could do. The actions of the armed citizens who defended their infrastructure for the benefit of all, are recast as that of selfish and dangerous people. The Indian community is particularly in the firing line as the heaviest toll of looter deaths occurred in their areas, probably because they were most immediately at threat — seven alleged vigilantes have already been arrested for murder. Marches against the communities are being organised to protest the number of black looters shot during the days when the State absented itself.

Meanwhile, the looting mobs are described as ethereal, aggrieved, morally-neutral groups who just happened to be around when some bad things went down. Personal accountability and agency disappears. The ANC likes it: the country is run that way.

A third distortion in the narrative involves the role of tribalism. Zuma is a Zulu and mobilised sub-nationalism to win the leadership of the ANC in 2009. He then drove a huge recruitment of Zulus into the ANC, meaning KwaZulu Natal regions are now the largest bloc in the party. In power he shamelessly promoted crony Zulus into cabinet, public service and, worryingly, into senior positions in the security forces.

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Yet not all Zulus support Zuma. His support base is primarily rural and traditional: urbanised Zulus are wary of him. In the run-up to the first democratic elections in 1996, there was severe violence between Zulu nationalists and ANC Self Protection Units in KwaZulu Natal and those spots around Johannesburg with a large Zulu presence — the very same spots where there was violence this month.

President Ramaphosa prefers not to address this issue for fear of offending the largest bloc in his party and rekindling Zulu tribalism in KwaZulu Natal. This reticence prevented him from acting decisively years ago when the province started slowly spiralling into insurrectionary and criminal activity. The price for Ramaphosa’s political cowardice was paid in blood and treasure last week.

All of this has led to perhaps the most frightening realisation of all: Ramaphosa’s State is a sham. Beyond the limousine cavalcades, inherited institutions and traditions, speeches, postures and grand plans lies… nothing.

Public health, utilities and education are now largely smoking holes. That it should also be true for law and order, the last redoubt of the State, has proved shocking and enraging for many ordinary people. An angry open letter to Ramaphosa from a white South African under the headline Gatvol, a more robust Afrikaans expression for Belly Full, went viral and gained 200,000 hits in six hours.

In the meantime, responsible South Africans will pick up the detritus left by its wilful fellow citizens; they always do. The country will return to a tense peace and will continue to stumble towards an uncertain and hopefully not inglorious future. And the African National Congress will most probably remain in office for no better reason than people ask: if this is the damage they can do in power, imagine what they would do without its constraints.