That field now contains around 10,000 terrified migrants from various African countries, living in makeshift tents and hoping to find a safe route out of South Africa. After false rumors claimed that they were being given accommodation rather than deported, the camp last week came under attack from rioters, who had to be dispersed with rubber bullets.

Similar scenes have been unfolding across South Africa, where a grassroots campaign to evict and intimidate illegal immigrants has gathered steam since early May. Displaced foreigners — some of whom say they are in the country legally — have taken to huddling in large groups outside police stations and churches, or hiding in the bush and on remote mountainsides. Homes have been torched and businesses looted. Vigilantes have gone from door to door demanding papers. The protests are loosely fronted by groups such as March and March, led by the former radio presenter Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, and Operation Dudula, which has previously tried to obstruct illegal immigrants from accessing healthcare and schooling. The Zulu activist Nkosikhona Ndabandaba, who has more than 1.5 million Facebook followers, has donned traditional tribal garb to lead large crowds through the street.

The riots have so far left at least two dead — though the Malawian government claims the real number is five — while prompting other African countries, including Nigeria and Ghana, to evacuate hundreds of their citizens. In terms of death and destruction, the current unrest has yet to match some earlier waves of anti-immigrant violence, which have erupted periodically since 2008. Ominously, though, the vigilantes have declared a 30 June deadline for illegal migrants to leave South Africa. What they will do after that date is unclear.

In the past, Britain could look at such events with detached incomprehension, but it no longer has that luxury, given the incipient unraveling of its own multicultural regime. The riots in Belfast, where a Sudanese asylum seeker stands accused of a brutal knife attack, came on the heels of a furious response to the police’s handling of Henry Nowak’s murder by a young Sikh man, and against a backdrop of violent intimidation of British Muslims. Notwithstanding Andy Burnham’s opportunity to change the country’s mood following his victory in Makerfield — that mood became notably worse, after all, with the beginning of Keir Starmer’s ill-fated leadership in the summer of 2024 — there is a grim sense that it is only a matter of time until the next inciting incident turns the ratchet of civil strife a notch further.

Three years ago, when I argued in UnHerd that Britain was beginning to resemble South Africa in its institutional dysfunction and loss of social trust, I made an exception for ethnic tensions. “One only has to look at the frequent anti-immigrant pogroms in South African townships to see that, for all the anxieties over integration, British society remains a relative picture of harmony,” I wrote. Depressingly, the distinction no longer seems as obvious as it did.

More from this author

Britain is turning into South Africa

By Wessie du Toit

Commentary and debate surrounding the unrest in South Africa — which are generally described as “xenophobic” or “Afrophobic”, in light of the protestors and their targets both coming from black communities — has been uncannily similar to the recent discourse in Britain. In a speech on 7 June, president Cyril Ramaphosa attempted to walk the same tightrope as mainstream Labour and Conservative politicians in Britain, signaling attentiveness to popular grievances over immigration and crime, while portraying the aggressive expression of those grievances as alien to the nation’s values. Ramaphosa spoke of the “legitimate concerns” of South Africans being hijacked by “forces” seeking to “further their own personal, political, or criminal agendas”; he denounced “social media campaigns that spread misinformation, fake news and lies”; he emphasized the country’s legal obligations to refugees, and stated that immigration “is the reason for our diversity and contributes to our vibrancy”. At the same time, he announced measures to crack down on illegal migration and the illegal employment of migrant workers.

Ramaphosa has to attempt this balance because in South Africa, as in Britain, populist movements have sought to harness anti-immigration sentiments as a way of peeling off support from his African National Congress (ANC) party. With municipal elections taking place later this year, uMkhonto we Sizwe, the breakaway party led by former ANC president Jacob Zuma, and Action SA, a Johannesburg-based party that supports mass deportations, have both expressed sympathy for the protesters. Their relationship between these parties and the groups orchestrating the protests is opaque, but a source familiar with the political landscape in South Africa tells me that they are widely believed to be “connected somehow”. On the ground, meanwhile, interviews with anti-immigrant protesters in South Africa produce similar responses as those with disgruntled Brits on the high streets of market towns. They talk about pressure on public services and housing, a lack of jobs, and crime.

Obviously the differences between Britain and South Africa remain vast, and immigration is no exception. Most South Africans live with a degree of poverty still unknown to Britain, and the conditions in which they must accommodate newcomers — who come from still poorer countries — are therefore totally different. Migrants survive as entrepreneurs running small businesses in townships, often quite successfully, or meet a prolific demand for cheap labor in hospitality, domestic work, and agriculture. One farmer tells me that he fears losing his entire workforce due to the current protests. Anti-immigrant pogroms take place in the context of a society that is violent in general. Contacting a local politician in the Western Cape for his views on the recent unrest, I received an apologetic voice note explaining that he was busy because “one of our councillors has just been shot”.

Further reading

Reverse racism ruined South Africa

By Brian Pottinger

And yet, the scale of migration into South Africa has been far smaller than in Britain and other Western European countries. Whereas the latter have foreign-born populations comprising about 20% of the total, in South Africa the estimates are typically 4-5%, though the true scale of illegal immigration is difficult to assess.

These discrepancies make the similarities between the two countries all the more striking, and potentially instructive. Most obviously, the failure of the state to control or even to know who is crossing its borders has proven, in both cases, a uniquely potent source of anger and injustice. In South Africa, as with Britain’s Channel crossings, the governing classes have judged the management of an unwieldy border to be impractical as well as undesirable on ideological grounds, with the principles of Ubuntu, or solidarity and fraternity, playing a similar role in the South African context as the ethos of universal human rights in the British one. Just as protesters in Johannesburg and Durban demand adherence to proper legal processes and documentation, invoking the state’s duty to the safety of its citizens, so the British public consistently express far greater anxieties over the asylum system than over legal immigration.

But the problem of disorder goes beyond the border. In South Africa, fears over migration are amplified by endemic corruption — beginning with the routine bribery of officials for visas — which makes the country a magnet for unsavory characters and fosters a general sense of vulnerability to opportunistic outsiders. The same is increasingly true of Britain, even if straightforward corruption is less of an issue here than incompetence. Immigration and multiculturalism have become associated with a multitude of institutional failures, from two-tier justice and bogus asylum claims to universities operating as visa factories and the conquest of high streets by financially suspect vape shops and Turkish barbers. Such trends are bound to make people sensitive to evidence of migrant criminality, though it seems that this is not simply a problem of perception: even the Guardian has suggested that asylum seekers are likely commit crimes at a higher rate.

Moreover, despite their economic differences, both South Africa and Britain have used foreign labor to compensate for their failure to educate and train their own citizens adequately, and both have maintained porous borders at a time of economic stagnation and high unemployment. The upshot is large numbers of newcomers arriving in societies whose outlook is colored by economic insecurity, and by the stress of competing for scarce resources and opportunities.

Further reading

Belfast after the ‘beheading’

By Aris Roussinos

To be sure, the situation in South Africa is worse. Education outcomes are poor even by African standards, and more than a third of young people are NEETs — not in education, employment or training. Rigid labor market laws have made it more attractive to hire illegal workers, who, besides being often better educated and having a work ethic born of desperation, cannot summon the authorities to investigate their employer. South Africans are therefore much more likely than British people to say that immigrants are taking jobs that they could and should be doing. But the situation in Britain is not good, either: 13.5% of 16-25-year-olds — more than a million people — are NEETs, and almost the entire increase in employment among young people since 2020 is accounted for by foreign nationals. Recent polling suggests that, as well as a majority of Brits being concerned about the impact on housing, a significant plurality sees immigration as having a negative economic impact, and thinks the numbers coming to work are too high.

Perhaps the most revealing parallel, though, concerns the loss of faith in established political parties. The ANC earned immense loyalty for leading South Africa’s black majority to freedom, but not infinite loyalty. The party’s loss of its absolute majority in 2024 came after a 30-year reign when it indulged in corruption and personal enrichment while failing to lift anything like a critical mass of South Africans out of poverty. Like most political movements, the ANC also has ideological commitments which clash with the views and interests of its voter base. The party’s commitment to Ubuntu, manifest in its reluctance to tighten its borders with other African states, stems from the historic connection of the anti-apartheid struggle with an ethos of pan-African solidarity. On taking power in 1994, the ANC welcomed refugees to South Africa. Over time, immigration has therefore presented populist parties with a wedge to drive between the ANC and some of its traditional supporters.

This story bears a more than passing resemblance to the decline of Britain’s two main parties, and especially to the post-Blair Labour Party’s estrangement from its traditional working-class base. We’ve become so accustomed to Labour as a party of progressive graduates, public-sector workers and minorities that we sometimes forget its purpose through most of its existence was to lead Britain’s workers in their struggle against the power of capital. The Party’s attitudes to mass-migration and multiculturalism show its evolution from a working-class liberation movement to a liberal cosmopolitan one, pushing a bloc of formerly loyal voters to the Right. In terms of voting patterns and geography, the party of the old working class is now Reform UK.

The untethering of political culture from its traditional party institutions, both Labour and Conservative, has helped to lead Britain to its current precipice, where further violent unrest seems increasingly plausible. As the authority of those institutions has waned, it has created space not so much for a politics driven by populists, but an anarchic and volatile form of mob rule, in which would-be figureheads seek to outbid one another for the attention of utterly disillusioned and frustrated audiences. The main mechanism, in Britain as in South Africa and indeed elsewhere, is of course social media. Yes, it is foolish to pretend that anger over immigration and related issues is simply an artefact of online misinformation and incitement; but it is equally foolish to ignore the role of social media in bringing that anger to a pitch where violence is tacitly accepted as inevitable, or even secretly welcomed.

In this context, recent events in South Africa are most salient not as a parallel, but as a warning. If political violence and vigilantism cross the threshold of normality, British society will be irrevocably changed.

“These people in the Transvaal would not pay a stiver of tax, there was in fact no government, the gaols were unlocked in order that prisoners might find elsewhere the bread which their gaolers could not get for them, the posts could not be continued because the Contractors were not paid… property was unsaleable, life was insecure, chaos was come upon the land.”

The year was 1877. In not entirely dissimilar circumstances, 147 years later, President Cyril Ramaphosa this week announced a South African general election for May 29. The answer to a now pressing question rests on its outcome: can the country resume its march to modernity after three decades of misrule and corruption under the ruling African National Congress (ANC)?

The election is a contest between two broad coalitions. On the one side stands a wide range of ethnic, religious, regional and class groups, unsteadily allied in a reformist and modernist Multi-Party Pact, dubbed the “Moonshot Pact”. It musters an estimated third of the electorate; the largest component is the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA), with more than a fifth of the total vote — according to an average composite of the six most credible recent polls. The alliance is concerned about state incompetence, corruption, and the combination of meagre economic growth and unsustainable state social spending.

Against them stands a larger polity far more exercised about the continuation of the extensive grant system — 45% of South Africans receive some form of welfare subsidy and that proportion will soon grow, with a minimum income grant — and the survival of the “black empowerment” policies that have seen the enrichment of a new parasitic elite class comprising about 1% of the population. This proportion of the population is unsettlingly similar to the 43.6% estimated share of the vote that a composite of the polls gives the ruling ANC in the coming elections.

More from this author

South Africa's infinite humiliation

By Brian Pottinger

The two wild cards are the 11-year-old Left-wing, incendiary and nativist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) — its leaders mostly expelled members of the ANC’s radical Youth League — and a new party, uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), cheekily named after the military wing of the struggle-era ANC. It is supported by the disgraced and corruption-plagued former ANC president Jacob Zuma, finally divorced from his birth party.

The EFF’s economic policies are extortionist and redistributionist, rather than growth focused. And its rhetoric is deliberately provocative to white and Asian minorities. Its estimated support, based on the last six polls, is 15%, but perhaps as high as 18.5%, which would make it the Official Opposition by some counts. The higher range is not impossible given that, of the 1.2 million names recently added to the roll in an official voter drive, 77% were under the age of 29, many no doubt enraged at the ruling party’s corrupt management of the national student funding agency. This is the fertile territory in which the energetic and agile EFF flourish.

The infant MKP leadership, meanwhile, is widely seen as an Alliance of the Seriously Miffed: a composite of Zuma family members, the criminal networks that flourished under Zuma but were displaced by Ramaphosa’s people, and even some renegade former National Intelligence Agency operatives. Yet it would be unwise to dismiss them, not least because some individuals are believed to have been behind the largely Zulu-supported failed insurrection of July 2021, and they may still have access to large amounts of skelm money. A recent poll showed that 63% of Zulus in the province of KwaZulu Natal are sympathetic to the 81-year-old Zuma and 12 times as many people think he was a better President than Ramaphosa. Such is the power of tribalism — or ethno-nationalism.

The same poll indicated that the MKP could take half the ANC vote in KwaZulu Natal, opening intriguing possibilities for coalitions and devolutionist bids for a Zulu homeland. However, this assumes the MKP could fully mobilise in time for the contest, which is doubtful, and that ANC court action to deny it of its name fails.

KwaZulu Natal, home to five generations of my family, is historically one of the most militarily fought-over patches of turf in South Africa. And once again it will see a contest, hopefully peaceful, for the support of the Zulus, which is the country’s largest ethnic group, , totalling 10 million people. The sympathies of the new Zulu King, Misuzulu kaZwelithini, are unknown but could be influential. Three of the four main parties are launching their manifestos here, including the resurgent Zulu traditionalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP).

More from this author

Britain is turning into South Africa

By Wessie du Toit

This situation is complicated even more by recent changes to the Electoral Act which make it easier for smaller parties to stand. More than 350 parties have registered, a reflection of the widespread disaffection with mainstream parties and the emergence of a muscular localism as communities seek to “state-proof” themselves from a failing and largely despised central government. A third of registered voters in one poll say no political party represents their views.

Meanwhile, the ruling party brings to the hustings a luminous record of failure. This was symbolised by President Ramaphosa’s humiliating State of The Nation Address (SONA) on 8 February this year, which was held in the Cape Town City Hall. The graceful 114-year-old Parliament building it usually takes place in was torched two years ago, by an allegedly deranged homeless person who for three days roamed the empty building unchallenged before finally burning it down.

It is not a good time for the ruling party to go to the electorate, but the law requires that the general election take place before August this year. Virtually every economic and social metric is negative; the only thing flourishing is state and social spending, so much so that even the National Treasury warns it is unsustainable. A sere budget precedes the elections. Yet Ramaphosa claims that it is mostly due to external and structural factors and “State Capture” under his predecessor, ignoring the fact he was Deputy President during the worst years of ANC corruption. Bizarrely, he points to the massive growth in poverty relief programmes as an achievement rather than what it is: an indicator of dire state failure.

In a modern democracy such a record of governance would cast the ruling party into oblivion. Not so in South Africa. To many, particularly poor and rural black people, the ANC is a powerful, even mystical brand. There is nostalgic pride in the ANC’s 112-year-long struggle for black emancipation and dignity — which is why the partly is fighting furiously through the courts to forbid the MK Party from appropriating the hallowed name of its military wing. (Ironically, that wing was so ineffectual that it played little part in bringing about a democratic South Africa.)

Yet the ANC, from a high of 72% of the vote in 2004, will most likely lose its overall majority in May for the first time in 30 years, and be forced into political or voting coalitions to retain control. Such coalitions under the country’s proportional representation system have proved unstable and unproductive at local government level in the past. Stakeholders vie, sometimes violently, for access to the patronage and corruption networks which are endemic in state institutions and indeed the society.

Suggested reading

Cape Town before Rhodes Must Fall

By Gavin Haynes

Still, optimists put forward a possible reformist and modernist coalition led by the DA — with its excellent track record of governance in the Western Cape — sans the ANC. The numbers, at about 35% of the vote share, do not stack up yet, but this may well change by polling day. A significant number of voters are uncommitted, and the impact of the MKP remains uncertain. If the ANC does gain the support currently predicted, it would have first crack at forming a government. If it were to choose the DA and the Moonshot Pact, it would represent, effectively, a government of national unity not dissimilar to the Pact Government in South Africa in the Twenties, formed to confront a national crisis.

Yet six years of President Ramaphosa’s rule, once naively welcomed by reformers and modernisers, has put paid to any such hope. His tenure has been marked by indecisive and ineffectual leadership, a collapse of state infrastructure and a willingness to drive impractical and destructive redistributive and anti-growth policies to keep his flailing party together and to please his entitlement-driven electorate. His ineptitude has created the space for toxic organisations such as the EFF and now MK to flourish.

Internationally, he grandstands in support of the least appealing members of the so-called Global South, even at the risk of alienating powerful allies and investors. And South Africa is paying the price. Nigerian bonds have for the first time proved more attractive to international traders than South African ones. In recent years, R1 trillion in foreign investment has fled the country (1 USD = R19) and every impoverished southern African neighbour has, according to World Bank numbers, outperformed ANC-run South Africa in terms of GDP growth in the last 30 years.

If it loses its majority, the ANC will hope to cobble together a political or voting alliance with the fickle and biddable minority parties who are expected to claim about 6% of the vote. If this fails — and the showing of the MKP may be the scupper factor — the ANC’s natural partners would either be the EFF or, at a stretch, the MKP. In which case South Africa, once considered the Singapore of Africa, must contemplate an uncomfortable foreland in which a stalled process of modernity is managed by an alliance of corrupt mass-based rural parties and a pillaging urban elite. One does not have to look far for an uncomfortable parallel. It is across the Limpopo River in Zimbabwe where Trollope’s Transvaal chaos has for decades come upon the land.

The Brics acronym was coined more than two decades ago by Lord Jim O’Neill, formerly Goldman Sachs’s head of global economic research, and it has stuck — unlike the initial expectations for the group. Only this week, O’Neill himself suggested that the collective of emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — has not “achieved anything since they first started meeting”.

Yet the aggregate numbers remain impressive. Jointly, the group holds $4.4 trillion in reserves. Its New Development Bank (NDB), a counterpart to the World Bank, is capitalised at $100 billion, and the Brics Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), equivalent to the IMF, also stands at $100 billion. Between them, Brics countries are home to more than two-fifths of the world’s population.

Despite this success, Brics members disavow any competitive or confrontational aspirations against the developed world in general, or the G7 in particular. Sotto voce, they make it clear they regard themselves as the new kids on the block, emphasise their common purpose and extol their bountiful resources. Look deeper, however, and one finds more conflicting sub-agendas in Brics than the group lets on.

First, the two biggest players, China and India, are prickly neighbours. Apart from the ongoing 60-year border dispute that has claimed hundreds of lives, the two are highly competitive in developing world countries, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, and are certain to clash at this year’s summit over China’s ambitions to expand the group to bring in more “non-aligned” members. Twenty-two states have formally applied to join, among them Iran, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. India — which, in terms of GDP, would beat France, Italy and Canada to a seat at the G7 — wants to keep things reasonably tight.

Second, embattled Russia hopes to use the Summit to push its own agendas, primarily garnering developing-world support for its imperial ambitions in Eastern Europe and driving a de-dollarisation of the international financial markets, possibly through some form of Brics currency. This might seem a forlorn hope in the short term, but it’s perhaps obliquely attainable in the distant future, through the strengthening of the Chinese renminbi against a weakening dollar. Again, India, alarmed by Russia’s putschists methods in Africa and locked into deep market relations with the US and the Middle East, is unlikely to be convinced. The absence from the meeting of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, because of the possibility of arrest under an International Criminal Court warrant (he is expected to appear by video link), indicates exactly how embattled his country’s position is.

Third, the Brazilian and South African governments will likely pursue a narrative aimed at creating an ostensible “non-aligned” lobby in world geopolitics, inside or outside the Brics group, that is, in reality, an anti-America front, something that may become too confrontational for India’s liking. They hope, perhaps erroneously, this will play well with the punters back home. Yet the duo is unlikely to be making any of the big calls: Brazil and South Africa’s combined shareholding in Brics, if measured by nominal GDP, amounts to 7.3%; South Africa is at 1.62%, which is perhaps why O’Neill has always argued the country should not be part of the club at all.

Lastly, the Brics are divided on key issues of energy policy. Resource-poor India and China favour alternative energy systems. Russia and South Africa are prodigious producers of coal, and, in the case of the former, oil.

So, what does Ramaphosa hope to gain from this gathering of fraternal yet deeply wary confreres? He certainly hopes to use it to add weight to his public argument that, regarding the Ukrainian war, there is a middle way between blind support for the United States and Europe on the one hand, and Russia and its silent sponsor, China, on the other. Amid a resurrected Cold War, he wants a resurrected “non-aligned” movement — or, to use the buzzword, “Global South states”.

Suggested reading

The next financial crisis will get ugly

By John Rapley

Few in the developing world would disagree with the objective; many feel the US has acted badly in attempting to lead-pipe third-party nations into picking sides. But Ramaphosa also seeks to use the Brics Summit to promote Africa, to advance Russian interests in Africa, and to divert focus from the multiple self-induced crises that confront him at home. Sixty-nine heads of Global South states, including all African heads of state but no developed world ones, have been invited as “observers”.

The extent to which African leaders respond to the invitation will be a guide to some key questions: the attraction of the Brics option, the resilience of US influence in the Global South, increased Russian and Chinese activity in Africa and, lastly, the status of Ramaphosa himself at both home and abroad. His vulnerability, ironically, may well be his chumminess with Russia.

The nature of South Africa’s relations with Russia hardly needs rehearsing: its persistent refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the holding of joint naval exercises with Russian naval forces, clandestine arms trading between the countries, and the unhealthy predominance of Russian oligarchs financing the perennially cash-strapped ruling African National Congress. Ramaphosa was also instrumental in organising a quick-fire “peace mission” to Ukraine and Russia in June, with seven rounded-up African heads of mostly minor states. He was also front and centre in the recent Russia-Africa Summit in St Petersburg, though attendance by African heads of states was down — 17 this year, compared to 43 at the Sochi 2019 Summit, which had heralded Russia’s new and ardent embrace of Africa.

As his gofer efforts continue to be coolly received by the majority of African leaders, Ramaphosa’s Russophile position runs the risk of sidelining him and South Africa from the doyen position that the country and its president has always assumed since liberation. Indeed, if India has claims to a place at the G7, Nigeria has an even greater claim to Africa’s seat at Brics: its GDP is now larger than South Africa’s.

Suggested reading

Why South Africa is siding with Russia

By Brian Pottinger

Samuel Ramani, in his new book Russia in Africa, intensively tracks Russian post-Cold War engagement in Africa. The theme of that diplomacy, although sometimes erratic, is a long-term strategy: patience in ambition, opportunism in deployment and lupine in execution. “By combining counterinsurgency operations, arms sales, autocracy promotion and soft-power tools, such as media outreaches, educational diplomacy, debt forgiveness and humanitarian aid, Russia could remain an attractive partner for African countries and preserve a unique niche between France, the United States and China,” he writes.

The target countries for such attention share certain disfiguring features: fragile states under weak leadership, volatile internal politics, collapsed national institutions, despairing polities, emigrating elites, biddable security services and vacuums created by the departure of agencies once able to guarantee sovereign stability. To these tottering autocratic regimes, Russian Private Military Companies (PMCs) make an offer they cannot refuse: private security support to maintain power in return for control or shares in mining operations and preference in infrastructural contracting.

Since its renewed interest in Africa in 2019, Russia’s fingerprint can be seen wherever there is existent chaos: in Libya, Burundi, Congo, Central African Republic, Guinea, the Sudan and, most recently, in Niger. This is particularly true in the Sahel and Maghreb, where the West’s reckless and naïve support of the Arab Spring in 2010 destroyed stable autocratic regimes and left a mishmash of theocratic zealots, bandits and irredentist nationalists, opening the way for the independent and muscular Russian PMCs such as the Wagner Group, with its billions of dollars in revenue from its mining and oil operations in Africa and the Middle East. A Blackwater on steroids, Wagner is dangerously independent and ferocious. In asymmetrical warfare, they offer their clients something the judicialised military of the West cannot: brutal, indiscriminate efficiency.

Suggested reading

A Halloween ghost story

By Philip Pilkington

The involvement of Wagner in coup or counter-coup activities on the continent has raised huge concern among African leaders, most recently in the Niger coup which the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) vows to crush. But curiously, and damagingly, President Ramaphosa — known here as “Cyril the Silent” — has not taken a firm public position on Wagner, despite the fact mercenary activity is outlawed under the African Union’s Covenant on Mercenarism, effective since July 1985. Indeed, one of Ramaphosa’s predecessors, Thabo Mbeki, was the driving force behind its implementation and instrumental in closing successful white South African mercenary operations across the continent following the democratic transition in 1994.

After its bizarre, two-day quasi mutiny in June, Wagner’s role as Putin’s stormtroopers in Europe appears to have run its course. It now proclaims that Africa is its future, another troublesome legion consigned to the farthest part of an empire. Thinking South Africans, watching the complex forces at play in their Brics summit, conscious of the fragility of their nation and alert to the possibilities of tumult at the elections next year, pray that they remain out of reach.

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.

More from this author

Will South Africa's sullied President survive?

By Brian Pottinger

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.

More from this author

Anarchy rules South Africa

By Brian Pottinger

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.

Suggested reading

Why Africa welcomed the Wagner Group

By Justin Ling

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.

Suggested reading

How Wagner plundered Sudan's gold

By Martin Plaut

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.

Suggested reading

Who is winning the scramble for Africa?

By Thomas Fazi

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.

Suggested reading

Will South Africa's sullied President survive?

By Brian Pottinger

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.

Suggested reading

Why South Africa is siding with Russia

By Brian Pottinger

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”.

Not happening, said Vincent Magwenya, spokesperson for South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. There were no legal grounds for refusing the Nord docking permission. In this, he was right. But the row has served to remind us what drives the ruling African National Congress’s policy towards Russia and its allies: ideology and nostalgia, self-interest and greed.

The old guard of the ruling African National Congress, who still haunt every crevice of government here, have not forgotten that Russian support was crucial in their 80-year anti-apartheid struggle, finally won in a negotiated settlement in 1994. Many of the ageing elites studied at Russian or Bloc country universities. They may have forgotten the USSR’s egalitarian mantras in their rush to become wealthy, but nostalgia still lingers. The Russians have not been slow to capitalise on it.

Jacob Zuma, the disgraced former President currently facing criminal charges over alleged corruption in a 1999 arms deal, commissioned Russia’s Rosatom energy company to build eight nuclear plants in 2014. If completed, at a cost of £50 billion, the plants would have provided 23% of South Africa’s energy — and given the Russians an effective stranglehold over the country’s economy. Karyn Maughan and Kirsten Pearson, in their 2022 book, Nuclear, suggest the deal was clinched after Zuma received medical treatment in Russia for poisoning. The former President alleged a toxin had been administered by one of his wives at the behest of the CIA. No proof of this poisoning has ever been provided, but there is plenty of evidence of a strong bond forged between presidents Zuma and Putin afterwards — the latter reportedly knowing a bit about poisons.

More from this author

Anarchy rules South Africa

By Brian Pottinger

The nuclear deal was eventually scuppered in April 2017, when the Western Cape High Court, in response to two applications from activist environmental groups, declared that any such agreement needed the approval of Parliament. The Treasury, which had opposed the deal as unaffordable and unlawful from the start, breathed a sigh of relief. The decision was, however, catastrophic for the finances of the ruling African National Congress. Even before Zuma’s tenure, many major donors to the party’s coffers came from the legions of shady businesspeople who benefitted from what became grandly known as State Capture — that is, put simply, the embezzlement of public money. The nuclear deal, dwarfing in nefarious intent the infamous 1999 arms deal in terms of potential kickbacks, would have set up the ANC for decades.

Worse was to follow. The new President, Cyril Ramaphosa, launched a laudable if achingly tardy crack-down on corruption four years ago, insisting on transparency in party funding. This instantly deprived the ANC of its steady flow of murky money. And donations have dried up: the big corporations who had generously funded Ramaphosa’s bid to wrest the ANC leadership from Zuma in 2017 have long since given up on him, out of exasperation with his hesitant mismanagement of the country. Attempts to raise funds from within the party have also failed. The ANC and its supporting elites have proved in nearly three decades to be far better takers than givers.

The party is now technically bankrupt. Among other debts, it owes a court-ordered £1.5 million to a poster manufacturer for services rendered in the last elections. Staff are regularly unpaid, and they spontaneously strike and picket their own party conferences — wreaking havoc on efforts to prepare for the crucial Elective Conference later this year, at which an embattled Ramaphosa will go for a second term. Neither can the party’s former Treasurer General help much: he is fighting his own corruption charges relating to the procurement of protective equipment during the free-for-all that was South Africa’s Covid response.

Much conjecture surrounds the origin and purpose of a cache of dollar bills, allegedly worth in the millions, stolen two years ago from inside a sofa in Ramaphosa’s game lodge. The whistleblower was Arthur Fraser, the former head of Zuma’s privatised State Security Agency. Fraser also served as head of the prison services, during which time he unlawfully let Zuma out of prison on health grounds while he was serving a sentence for contempt of a commission into state corruption — a commission which Zuma had himself appointed. Sound bizarre? Not for South Africans. The theft of the dollars is under a typically ponderous investigation by law enforcement authorities, but nobody expects a result before the Elective Conference. If the moola was intended as the ANC’s bailout money, from whence came it?

Suggested reading

How Russia's elite bought Biarritz

By John Lewis-Stempel

The only discernible source of legitimate income for the ANC is via Chancellor House, the party’s in-house investment company. Its biggest stake is in the South Africa’s fourth-largest manganese miner, United Manganese of Kalahari. UMK was the sole declared donor to the ANC in the 2021-22 financial year, to the tune of £500,000, as disclosed in the latest Parliamentary filings. And UMK — wait for it — is part-owned by the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg’s conglomerate Renova Group.

Vekselberg ostensibly sold off his interest in UMK after sanctions were imposed on him by the United States in 2018: he ranks near the top of the United States’ Least Favourite Russians list, primarily for his inner-circle place in the Kremlin, and for leading a technology hub that was subsequently deemed by American authorities to be a front to access US intellectual property. But he remains invested in UMK through a new vehicle, a trust of which he owns 25%. And the oligarch may well object to the seizure of yachts: his motor yacht Tango was impounded in April by Spanish authorities.

Still, it is not only these skeins of party and personal interest that inspire South Africa’s position on the Ukrainian invasion. At its heart lies something broader: realpolitik. South Africa is a proud member of the BRICS club, alongside Brazil, Russia, India and China. It is Africa’s token member of a group which is widely seen on the continent as a counterbalance to the historic power and influence of the developed western nations. The BRICS’s New Development Bank, set up in 2014, has a loan book only slightly smaller than the World Bank’s, while not being encumbered by a $160 billion commitment to patch up Western economies after their self-immolation in the pandemic. Neither is 35% of its investment tied to the chimera of climate change mitigation.

South Africa has a $25 billion share of the bank — which has not been sapped, as the IMF has in propping up the euro. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) gives unlimited drawing rights to club members that need to stabilise their currencies. China and Russia’s foreign currency reserves are eight times larger than the US and Europe’s combined, give or take a few problems on Russia’s side in accessing its share while sanctions remain. China has the four largest banks in the world and owns 55% of the world’s shipping. Russia, despite having a Third World army, is self-sufficient in energy and food. These nations are, in short, worth keeping on-side.

Suggested reading

China has given up on the West

By Bill Hayton

Russian trade only comprises a minuscule 0.4% of South Africa’s total trade — and Russian investment in South Africa is a puny $1.5 billion compared to South Africa’s $5.13 billion stake in Russia. But South Africa’s dependence on Russia isn’t straightforwardly economic. Rather, it stems from a need to keep the BRICS club happy, particularly China and India — the latter having extensive personal and financial dealings with South Africa’s hugely entrepreneurial Asian minority, much of it through Dubai.

China has been investing heavily if not always ethically in Africa. So far it has sunk $70 billion in the continent, $25 billion in South Africa alone, creating an estimated 400,000 jobs. In February this year, it promised another $300 billion. The problem, a big one, is that its targets remain largely in the extractive industries and its practices are generally rip-and-run. There is little skill transference to the locals and limited social investment. And the increasing number of expatriate Chinese workers-turned-settlers do not easily assimilate wherever they land in the continent.

South Africa still takes money where it can find it: most recently $497 million from the World Bank to bail out its crippled electricity grid, and $4.3 billion from the IMF in emergency post-pandemic support. But the financial and fraternal allure of the BRICS club to South Africa is still overwhelming — and it is more important, Ramaphosa’s government firmly believes, than taking sides in a distant, intra-Slav war over an old border dispute. Besides, the argument goes, why should South Africa trust the US and Europe? A fair question, given America’s friends once included Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq.

So, while Russia moves to the next stage of total and irreversible war and China uses the pandemic as an excuse to keep its borders shut and reduce its exposure to the global economy, South Africa, like many other non-aligned nations, is manoeuvring. The aim is to be on the winning side of the real conflict behind the one involving tanks: the battle between old Western and new Eastern money. And while that battle is playing out, no fugitive Russian super yacht is ever going to be refused safe harbour in Cape Town.

“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.

More from this author

Anarchy rules South Africa

By Brian Pottinger

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.

More from this author

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.)

More from this author

Is Giorgia Meloni an EU puppet?

By Thomas Fazi

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.

More from this author

Catholics for clout

By Ann Manov

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.

More from this author

The West needs to grow up

By Paul Kingsnorth

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.

More from this author

Writers shouldn't submit to Islamists

By Leïla Slimani

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.

More from this author

How the ANC lost South Africa

By Brian Pottinger

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?

More from this author

South Africa's looming vaccine revolt

By Brian Pottinger

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.

Suggested reading

The Jihadists of the Caribbean

By Simon Cottee

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.

Suggested reading

How the Moonies took over Japan

By Philip Patrick

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.

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.

Suggested reading

The good news about the Omicron variant

By Tom Chivers

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.

Suggested reading

The good news about the Omicron variant

By Brian Pottinger

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.

Suggested reading

South Africa is on the brink

By Brian Pottinger

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.

More from this author

South Africa is on the brink

By Brian Pottinger

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.

More from this author

The return of South Africa's militias

By Brian Pottinger

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.

Suggested reading

The ANC destroyed South Africa

By Wessie du Toit

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.

More from this author

South Africa is on the brink

By Brian Pottinger

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).

Suggested reading

Cape Town before Rhodes Must Fall

By Gavin Haynes

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.

Suggested reading

The dictator who fooled us

By Ian Birrell

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.

Suggested reading

Why South Africa shrugs at the mutant strain

By Gavin Haynes

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.

Armed volunteers mount barricades at the entrances to my village while youngsters on trail bikes scout through the perimeter cane fields. There is no available food or fuel and the chat groups buzz with an incessant flood of posts about destroyed buildings, burnt cars and roaming mobs. The State is entirely absent.

For the first time, ordinary South Africans, bomb-proofed through decades of tumult, appear afraid for the future.

The democracy bought into existence 27 years ago after a negotiated truce between armed contestants, only some of whom were white, is facing its biggest challenge. Now it is not only the disgraced Zuma that is in the dock. It is also the current President, Cyril Ramaphosa.

The immediate spark for the conflagration was when, on 29 June this year, former President Jacob Zuma was ordered to serve 15 months in prison for refusing to appear before the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture — ironically a commission appointed by Zuma himself to investigate allegations of widespread corruption.

The response from political and even criminal forces, some of their leaders once office-bearers in the ruling African National Congress, was swift. They have mustered under the banner of something called Radical Economic Transformation which translates in method to the violent appropriation of wealth and in consequence to utter desolation. It is a more ambitious form of looting than the one currently on our television screens.

The incumbent, President Cyril Ramaphosa, was widely hailed on his election as leader of the African National Congress in 2017 as the saviour of the nation, a Mr Fix It Extraordinary with a luminary history in the trade unions, business and the negotiations that led to political emancipation. His promises of a New Dawn struck a resonance with a public desperately tired of the collapse in public morality and the accelerating race towards a failed state. Tragically, it has thus far proven a false dawn. The public anger is now palpable and dangerous.

I knew Cyril Ramaphosa when he was Chairman of the publishing company in which I was Editor and later Publisher of the South African Sunday Times, then the largest circulation newspaper in the country. I believe him to be an honourable and decent man, but not an effective one. He showed an almost obsessive desire to avoid confrontation, a preference for working through third parties and, later, a fierce aversion to taking tough decisions if it would affect party unity. More than once he privately confessed that he was a master at dancing on eggshells.

The hard decisions, like weeding out the criminals in his party, were outsourced to the Courts, the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture, the media or political hitmen in his own party. Thus, he retained a serene, surreal aloofness amid the growing signs of chaos, division and policy-failure around him, restricting himself largely to sepulchral public utterances on safe-zone topics like gender-based violence, Smart Cities, Covid-19 and platitudinous statements of good intent. This rule-by-remote has born a bitter fruit.

Suggested reading

Cape Town before Rhodes Must Fall

By Gavin Haynes

Shortly after my appointment as Editor of the Sunday Times in 1996, I made a point of engaging the newly-elected ministers in the ANC Government. Invariably I was asked what I perceived to be the greatest challenges facing the infant government. Always I replied: the loss of the nation’s precious skills and investment resources. The caution was obviously lost in the translation.

Under the guise of redistributive economic programmes, the ANC ushered in the policy of Black Economic Empowerment. Whatever its good intentions, it turned into a one-way flow of money extorted with state sanction from private or public purses into the hands of a monstrously avaricious new elite. The proceeds were instantly monetised and consumed in a style that would put a Byzantine court to shame. This has not gone unnoticed by the people burning the malls today.

To gain control of the state, the ANC followed a policy of “cadre deployment” of party faithful to occupy every level of government. Unable to even manage its own party affairs, they had no hope of managing a modern state. Everywhere there was dysfunction, collapse and corruption, the burden again borne most heavily by the poor. Across the spectrum, the internal party factionalism was replicated by the “deployees” in the State Departments.

The amounts stolen in the so-called State Capture project is dwarfed by the loss of wealth, tax, opportunity and confidence caused by the twin policies of black empowerment and cadre deployment, the core enablers of State Capture. Yet a generation after political emancipation, President Ramaphosa still refuses to renounce or even modify either policy. That has been his first great lost opportunity.

The second was not to appeal over the heads of his own party to the country for support for a genuinely reformist programme when elected in 2017. Granted, his election as leader of the ANC was a near-run thing and to this day there persists the claims by his opponents that he bribed his way to victory in the party’s elective conference.

Others suggested that he needed time to win over his suspicious caucus, many members with bank accounts that could hardly bear forensic scrutiny; more time to dance on eggshells. Perhaps, but the delay has proved mortally damaging to the nation

The Commission of Inquiry into State Capture under Deputy Judge President Raymond Zondo has ploughed its way through thousands of hours of testimony in its 38-month existence, minutely confirming the media’s decade-long reporting about how bad things really were during the Zuma years. If this was intended to placate the public, it did not.

Suggested reading

The dictator who fooled us

By Ian Birrell

The endless delays in commencing criminal procedures because of the devastation of the criminal justice system by a toxic combination of “cadre deployment” and criminal intent, further eroded confidence. Thirty or so good investigators, auditors and prosecutors with support staff, immediately hired from the private sector or from abroad, would have done what the Zondo Commission could not do: put the culprits in prison quickly and at a fraction of the cost… but that would have required a hard decision from President Ramaphosa.

Enthralled by the Soprano-style tale of warring ANC factions daily playing out in the Zondo Commission, the public easily forgot to ask the big question: how well was President Ramaphosa governing?

The answer: badly, very badly.

He has failed to repudiate any of his predecessors disastrous policies: seizure of land without compensation; the Government’s land redistribution policy which has seen productivity of transferred land fall by 87%; the free tertiary education policy which has turned once great universities into day-care centres for uneducated young people; the highly restrictive labour policies or the huge state social welfare and public service bills. All of this compounded by a mismanaged and inappropriate State response to the various recent coronavirus outbreaks. Serial lockdowns have massively affected employment and driven urban and rural poverty, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal.

The consequence has been stuttering economic growth and the highest youth unemployment rate in the country’s history, many of the unemployed now playing cameo roles on our television screens as the malls burn. No society can or will endure such casually-inflicted pain.

But perhaps the worst consequence of Ramaphosa’s rule-by-remote, and expulsion-by-commission, has been the creation of space for his opponents to mobilise, mainly in their heartland, the province of KwaZulu Natal, from whence Jacob Zuma and many supporters hail, where his main ethnic power base lies (although by no means do all Zulus support Zuma) and where my family has lived for five generations. Throw in legions of unemployed and one has a volatile mix.

The violence has completely overwhelmed an already incompetent police force: there have even been instances of local communities supporting recently arrived reinforcements with food and munitions because they arrived so unprepared.

Suggested reading

Why South Africa shrugs at the mutant strain

By Gavin Haynes

For years the ANC-controlled province, often cruelly dubbed the Sicily of South Africa, has been the site of growing insurrectionary activity: hijacking of transport on main routes, seizure of schools and universities, xenophobic outbreaks, sabotage of municipal infrastructure, mafia-style blackmailing of construction companies, violent factional wars by ANC claimants to office, and wholesale corruption in public affairs (even as Zuma was entering incarceration, the pro-Zuma mayor of the province’s largest city was facing charges of corruption, along with 16 councillors). The perpetrators have acted with impunity and a growing boldness presaging today’s crisis.

All of this has been compounded by a hiatus of authority in the Zulu Royal Family, traditionally a source of stability in the province’s rural areas, albeit a prickly one. The recent death of King Goodwill Zwelithini has brought a disputed succession and a fracturing of loyalties.

In short, the province is destabilised and trapped in a classic first phase of revolution, driven by what appears to be a determined yet still shadowy alliance of usurped politicians and opportunistic criminals. In the frame right now for being the instigators are renegade former — and possibly current — elements of the State Security Agency, which during Zuma’s years became a virtual in-house close protection unit to serve his personal and nefarious interests. Army and police loyalties are still unclear.

President Ramaphosa’s response to all this growing chaos through the months has been a Herculean detachment, punctuated by a few anodyne homilies, not unlike his unctuous and comfortless national television address on Monday night.

The insurrection will no doubt be suppressed, my province will return to its fraught peace but the damage to South Africa and the country will be lasting. This province, certainly, will never forgive President Ramaphosa for sacrificing it on the altar of his own weakness and unpreparedness.

And the bigger question will remain: will the Dancer on Eggshells see the latest outbreak of insurrectionary and criminal violence as a reason for another instinctive compromise? Or will he see it as an invocation to move forward with a bold programme of renewal which must inevitably include splitting his party, dumping many of its discredited and failed policies, and taking all necessary measures to return the country to stability. Those are essential precondition for progress. It is not looking hopeful.

Three days after Christmas, at around 7pm, President Cyril Ramaphosa performed his version of Boris Johnson’s code red speeches: the ornate briefing room, the national flag, the fatherly tone of a GP proffering a late stage cancer diagnosis.

The situation had devolved, he announced. Rates were rising. Hospitals were filling up. Effective immediately, bars would close. There would be a national curfew of 9pm, and all the beaches would be closed. Alcohol, it almost went without saying, would be banned again. Only this time, to beat the bootleggers, the transportation of alcohol would be banned along with it.

Suggested reading

Africa's catastrophic Covid response

By Ian Birrell

South Africans largely shrugged. Every country wraps Covid around its national character, and here there is little of that John Bull spirit, of Magna Carta and “on whose authority”. In a perverse sense, it makes the whole experience much more doable — without the grinding cognitive dissonance of Brits begrudging every fresh filing down of their liberties.

Here, recent memory is more of the Native Beer Act, of dry Sundays and the rolling curfews of the 1980s State Of Emergency. Freedom may be hymned publicly, but the reigning ANC is at heart merely a different kind of corporatist state to the National Party that preceded it, with the same fetish for public ownership, the same centralising tendencies. What it lacked, till now, was the same cold steel of authoritarianism. Covid may have decisively changed that.

In March, the country had the luxury of a few weeks’ notice as to what was about to hit. Back then, it seemed obvious that Africa would be the hindmost that the devil took. Countries that were a virtual fiefdom of health NGOs, with the globe’s highest HIV rates, would be the driest tinder. The world wished the continent luck, and waved it goodbye.

Only, it didn’t turn out that way.

For a start, Ramaphosa was decisive and bold, as were many of the continent’s leaders. Nigeria was already screening airport passengers in February. Rwanda closed its frontiers on 19 March. South Africa would be put into strict lockdown, and the response would be overseen by a panel of medical advisers: SAGE, but with some direct authority.

A big gamble, for a place where there were no Rishi Bucks falling from heaven. Britain’s AAA credit rating means it can still defer its debt reckoning. But since South Africa was downgraded to junk in 2019, it has had to balance its books carefully. Eventually, a relief grant was settled upon for those left unemployed. It would be R350 a month. That’s £17. Not a typo.

Suggested reading

How dangerous is the Covid mutation?

By Tom Chivers

But what had seemed like a Western luxury good, lockdown, did seem to work. By 20 June, only 1,877 deaths had been recorded, in a country of 57 million. And despite comprising a billion people, the continent as a whole made up only 4% of global fatalities. Even now, 195 million-strong Nigeria sits at just 1,324 deaths. Back then, people began talking about “the African Paradox”. In township slums that made real distancing impossible, the question became: why weren’t people dying?

“A young population” was one obvious answer. It’s hard to reach the average age of a fatality — 82 — when life expectancy is 63. But even infection rates remained persistently low.

In part, it seemed that this was because of early and forceful government action. In South Africa, borders were shut totally until October, and even now, entry is provisional on a PCR test, special travel insurance, and notification of abode. Britain did none of this. The same strictures also apply internally. Right now, key roads between the nine provinces are subject to police roadblocks. Passengers are temperature checked. The hot ones are immediately PCR tested.

In a land of cheap labour, many shops have employed staff to spritz every patron’s hands as they enter. Outdoor masks are compulsory: a measure about as scientifically useful as throwing your shoes at the sky to dislodge the clouds, but one that sets a tone, constantly drawing the bead of danger back to the front of the public mind.

This fit of decisiveness has come with some positive consequences. Hotheaded Police Minister Bheki Cele was mighty impressed, back in April, at how endemic burglary rates had tumbled thanks to the simple expedient of imprisoning everyone in their homes. On New Year’s Eve, the southern hemisphere’s biggest hospital, Chris Hani Baragwanath, received precisely zero trauma patients. A minor miracle.

Sometimes it seems as though South Africans themselves have been stunned by their sheer compliance. The long arm of the law has always felt stunted here. Without the dense norms of Europe, people tend to just do what they feel. Yet now, a full hour before curfew, the suburbs are tumbleweed. Could it be that this country is suddenly falling into a mesmerism of law abiding? That something coltish is being tamed?

More from this author

Whose Great Reset is it anyway?

By Gavin Haynes

Deep down, the rule of law is nothing written down so much as a feeling: the uneasy sense that you will be made to answer, somewhere, somehow. Covid has demanded an unprecedented degree of surveillance. In the same way that Peter Hitchens is right when he argues that masks are symbols of assent to government policy, the pandemic has served to re-frame the kinds of people who have lived entire lives beyond the aegis of bureaucracy as being subjects of the state. This year, even the goatherds of KwaZulu have had to interact with the man from the ministry of mask-face-space.

As Aris Roussinos points out, state infrastructure and state competence are seldom correlated: the UK has all the gear and no idea. South African infrastructure is patchy, state competence is positively holey. But there is another quality beyond that, which comes into play in rare moments like these, when all the pieces are chucked up anew. It’s the question of what ordinary citizens actually perceive “common sense” to be — how the national character reacts to setbacks.

With far fewer resources, South Africa kept its exam system going through lockdown. In November, school leavers wrote their finals. The marking emphasis has been on maintaining standards, so that learners will have an equally valid qualification. Compare that to the quivering heap of cancellations and grade inflations that has slithered through British schooling like The Blob.

But all good things must pass. This week, the African Paradox resolved itself via an infection spike that is almost double that of the previous mid-year peak, and still climbing. Ambulance drivers are waiting eight hours to discharge their cargo. There are rumours of an oxygen shortage.

As it happens, our new wave also blows up what you might call the Ivor Cummins theory — that, as a respiratory disease, Covid-19 tracks winter very closely — which was sort of borne out by Covid’s return in the Northern hemisphere. Here it’s braai weather every day, yet the bug rolls remorselessly on. Increasingly, it feels as though Covid’s favourite victim is master-narratives. As we stagger into year two, it’s as if we now know less about the nature of our enemy.

Yet still almost none of the chatter here is about the “Mutant Strain”. In England, so far as I can gather, the Mutant Strain practically has its own talk show, Matt Hancock’s constant companion. But in SA, the government still has a measure of trust on the issue of the pandemic, and a huge majority in Parliament. The need to soft-soap each fresh lockdown to the public is absent. Mutancy or otherwise remains only a footnote to what’s playing out.

Suggested reading

Why 2021 will be a false dawn

By James Kirkup

After all, why worry about an incrementally different transmission rate when there is still no finishing line in sight? In the vaccine bidding wars, Ramaphosa’s administration was reluctant to put multiple chips on the roulette table by laying down non-refundable deposits for various pharmaceutical trials. So it now finds itself at the back of the queue. For 2021, the aim is to vaccinate 67% of the population (to reach “herd immunity”). Even that can feel optimistic. An ANC administration that coined its own word for a crooked procurement contractor — tenderpreneur — will have to deploy all of its decisive authoritarianism to get that long-awaited vaccine distributed, and none of its talents at graft.

Of course, if there isn’t a more rapid vaccine rollout, then there will be time enough for the appearance of The Mutant Son Of The Mutant Strain, and so it could roll endlessly on, into 2022 and beyond in a kind of poverty trap.

In another sense, the finishing line was only ever the starting line to a new set of dominoes tumbling. In October, as economic activity finally surged back to life, so too did the rolling blackouts that have plagued the country for a decade. Once, we exported electricity to the continent. Now, years of chronic under-investment have crippled the power grid.

It was a reminder that, in fact, South Africa teeters between twin abysses. No one could really forget that, with a 28% unemployment rate going into the crisis — a worse figure than under Apartheid —  it has effectively added a nose dive to a nose dive. Through the pandemic, every state has had to find a pax between the economy and public health. Few others illustrate that dilemma quite so well, of how the two can become locked in a downward spiral.