The National Congress is responsible for the deterioration of political life in South Africa

Thirty years after the collapse of the apartheid regime, democracy in South Africa is at stake, stripped of values ​​and principles. This dramatic decline was overseen by the African National Congress, which was headed by Nelson Mandela.

According to the latest poll conducted by the Afro Barometer Foundation, the results of which were recently published in the British newspaper The Times, nearly half of South Africans now prefer “military rule” to “democracy,” and seven out of 10 people are dissatisfied with how democracy works.

It is a shocking but not surprising admission: the government cannot provide electricity, jobs, or water, but it has created a fertile environment for widespread corruption and bribery.

Moral crisis

The biggest crisis on the part of the ANC is not material, but moral. It destroyed the belief that democracy could work for the poor, replacing it with cynicism, boredom, and now a longing for strongmen. The party that once liberated the people made them expect so little, to the point that over time it began to prefer handing over power to the military.

Last month, South Africa’s president and ANC leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, gathered 6,000 of the party’s council members in Johannesburg to publicly rebuke them. “Either provide services or step down,” Ramaphosa warned. “The fraud must end today,” he shouted. The crowd, well-versed in ANC culture, may have misunderstood his words, taking them as an invitation to a tent to eat.

It was a speech that those present did not pay much attention to, no matter how enthusiastic it was. Of South Africa’s 257 municipalities, only 13% have a clean audit certificate in 2024. The rest, many of which are run by the ANC, are drowning in debt and corruption. Ramaphosa even dared to praise opposition-run municipalities, angering his party members. Highlighting the incompetence in the Congress Party today seems to amount to “treason”.

A machine for patronage

The truth is inescapable: the Congress Party has become a machine for patronage rather than progress. The party’s vaunted “cadre distribution” policy has replaced meritocracy, ensuring that the least qualified often occupy the most important positions. What was once the “national democratic revolution” – the first phase of liberation – has turned into what South Africans bitterly call “the long road to the dining table”, an endless procession of “struggle comrades” moving from the platforms of protest and struggle to the “procurement desks”.

The second phase of the revolution, which was imagined to be socialism, never happened. What happened instead was a state seizure of power, not by the working class, but by the ANC and its followers, with the result that the few benefited at the expense of the many.

As South African writer and thinker William Gumede observed, his country “is in this mess because people have repeatedly voted for people with a track record of failure, corruption, and incompetence,” a tragic legacy of the atrocities of apartheid.

Voting for any political party other than the ANC has always been unthinkable. The trust placed in the Congress Party had dire consequences, visible everywhere. Water shortages, crime, unemployment, and the collapse of services have turned daily life into a struggle for survival. Problems such as poverty and violence worsened, and the dream of freedom turned into despair and frustration, the new words that replaced the original promise of democracy. About “Spiket”

. The government cannot provide electricity, jobs, or water and has created a fertile environment for corruption.