South Africa is what happens when a country becomes ungovernable. From endemic sexual crime to farm murders, rolling blackouts, and expropriation, the rest is just the details. What has come to be termed “South Africanization” is not the failed development of a Third-World nation such as Afghanistan or Somalia, but the structural de-development of a once fully modern state that had its own nuclear weapons program. President Trump’s support of Afrikaner farmers has brought global attention to the decaying state of the country and is perhaps the most high-level recognition yet that the 1990s “Rainbow Nation” dream is dead. What’s strange about it all is how much of it happened on purpose.
What may be worse is that the very system of law and government itself has become an instrument to be captured and used to further the mass looting of the country. South Africans of all races inherit a Western political culture and economy. The average South African experiences a strong civic identity, highly active political parties, popular national media networks, a market economy, and a parliamentary constitutional order. The last thirty years saw a coalition of political actors, patronage networks, and organized criminal gangs seize control of and use all the infrastructure of modern government for their own ends.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) oversees this coalition of forces at the level of state power. In practice, the party operates on a kind of folk Leninism: it invokes the grandiose language of twentieth-century party discipline to steer what amounts to a racketeering operation with a malleable progressive ideology attached that justifies the racket. Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s infamously corrupt former president, is alleged to have met with gang members in friendly meetings while organized crime came to pervade every aspect of the South African economy.
The forces of decay are parasitic on the social order that preceded it, even as they erode the conditions necessary for its existence. This imposes a massive and increasing cost on the work needed to maintain the same level of basic material productivity and civic life. The harsh reality is that it is much harder to run a power plant or a city in South Africa today than it was thirty years ago. In these conditions, there is a growing disincentive even to try.
The ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Marxism, fought for control over the means of production. In this de-developing society, the complex social infrastructure that underwrites industrial production ceases to operate altogether. As the economy shrinks, those who can distribute and gatekeep resources begin to hold the real power, and political competition becomes about taking over those gatekeeper roles.
While songs like “Kill the Boer” at rallies tend to grab headlines, the most consequential development of late is the passing of expropriation without compensation into law by the supposedly moderate President Cyril Ramaphosa. In addition to further eroding property rights, it emboldens a widespread movement that sees land redistribution as the sole resolution to the country’s racial conflict and views the presence of any white population as fundamentally illegitimate. The radicalization of race politics is the means through which political fights are won, since it plays on the country’s major divides and wins over those who feel left out of the spoils.
On the ground, reports tell of ANC officials tacitly allowing invasions of private and public land by squatters. Occupations of this sort have sometimes preceded the farm murders which have gained media attention internationally, and squatters have now begun to invoke the Expropriation Act. Such groups become the shock troops of political pressure: they can harass and pressure the occupants of the lands they occupy, or worse, while becoming a media story about the “landless oppressed” used to justify broader government action. The broad facilitation of ground-level conflict and crime by those with political power is the defining feature of South Africanization.
The events of July 2021 provide a useful vignette of how this dynamic can be used to undermine the state itself. That month, police arrested Jacob Zuma on charges of contempt of court. The arrest came after the findings of the Zondo Commission, an official investigation that uncovered the corruption of state enterprises and collaboration from companies like McKinsey and Bain & Company. Most embarrassing was the role of the oligarchic Gupta family, Indian-born patrons of Zuma who were allowed to make political appointments and even land their plane at a military base.
For a moment, it seemed that South Africa’s liberal democratic state had proven its impartiality. Then, two days after Zuma’s arrest, the northeastern region of the country erupted into the worst riots since the fall of Apartheid.
Police cowered in their stations in the face of large-scale looting and civilian roadblocks popped up. For nine nights, the convulsion spread across the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. Thousands of people joined mobs of looters that raped women, looted stores, and burned businesses, vehicles, and homes. Self-defense groups organized in response to the violence, confiscating vehicles and returning fire on looters. Ultimately, 354 people were killed, 5,500 arrested, and over a hundred thousand people impacted by the riots.
Rumors of instigation swirled in the aftermath. The leader of KwaZulu-Natal province stated that the rioting was “deliberately started and orchestrated.” Meanwhile, operators loyal to Zuma worked to racialize and polarize the riots. One declared that the “black majority… who went to malls and everywhere to loot” were in fact the “victims of war, victims of people who are shooting at them in the name of protecting private property.” In time, Minister of Police Bheki Cele publicly acknowledged that the “planned violence was intended to make the entire country ungovernable.” The British PR firm Bell Pottinger had even planted media stories about “white monopoly capital” to stoke racial tension to the benefit of Zuma and the Guptas.
And that’s the story of most of South Africa’s crises: they are a politically beneficial form of chaos. The ANC may be gutting its state capacity, but it remains the apex predator in the system. The productive leave if they can. The global South African diaspora numbers over 900,000 people; about 128,000 of those left just between 2015 and 2020. While the Trump administration’s overtures to Afrikaners as refugees got media coverage, leaving would mean the final loss of identity through foreign assimilation. Afriforum, one of the most prominent Afrikaner advocacy networks, replied that their goal is for Afrikaners to have a secure future in South Africa itself. Many of those South Africans who can and actually want to leave, already have.
In other words, decay is a burden without benefit. There is no “rock bottom.” Business, political organization, social fabric, and all other forms of Western cultural life just face increasing costs. Some are direct, while others are opportunity costs: how much doesn’t happen because almost no one can guarantee electricity? In a relatively developed country, there’s still much more to break down and expropriate.
The combination of social progressivism with an economic model of managed decline has become orthodoxy in many establishment parties across the developed world. South Africa is a study of the political phenomenon in its advanced stage and a demonstration of what is at stake in defeating it in the rest of the Western world. Flip Buys, leader of the Afrikaner trade union Solidariteit, was likely prophetic when he foresaw that South Africa would become home to the “first large grouping of Westerners living in a post-Western country.”
The ANC’s Road to Power
When Nelson Mandela became president on May 10, 1994, a generation of politicians formed in revolutionary struggle took control of the state. Since that first election victory, the ANC has been South Africa’s dominant party. They govern in a Tripartite Alliance with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which gain government positions in exchange for not contesting elections.
Attaining this position is an incredible political achievement. Only twenty years before its victory, the party had been banned domestically and was reduced to moving its headquarters in exile between friendly African states thousands of miles from home. The party had almost no presence within South Africa itself. The ANC had all but merged with the South African Communist Party, or SACP, a relationship that extended into the highest ranks of both parties and continues to this day. African nationalists and other non-Communist members of the ANC always resented this merger, but were never able to reverse it.
From their exile headquarters in Tanzania, the ANC controlled uMkhonto weSizwe, an armed wing called MK for short. MK fell into the hands of the ANC’s Communist faction, with future SACP chief Chris Hani serving as its commander. In addition to its many police and military targets, MK also attacked numerous civilian locations, including shopping centers, supermarkets, restaurants, banks, and public roads.
Were that the whole story, the ANC would have remained just one more of the ragtag militant groups that littered post-colonial Africa. But its turning point came in 1976 with the Soweto Uprising: mass anti-Apartheid protests in South Africa involving thousands of young people. While the ANC had little to do with the making of Soweto, they reaped the uprising’s benefits. As newly radicalized activists fled northward into exile, the ANC leadership positioned its emissaries to meet them. Funneled into ANC camps in friendly nations like Tanzania and Angola, this younger generation received political education and MK military training. By the end of the 1970s, the ANC ranks swelled to over 9000 active members.
Newly emboldened, the ANC leadership realized that a change in strategy was needed to unify its disparate factions. ANC delegations to Communist Vietnam, which included future president Thabo Mbeki, found their inspiration in the program developed by Võ Nguyễn Giáp and the Viet Cong. Their victory was won through the strategic integration of political and military struggle in a doctrine called “People’s War.” Instead of large-scale conflict, this strategy emphasized institution-building, limited guerrilla operations, and aggressive propaganda. Political and military operations were unified under a chain of command led by the political leadership.
These tactics combined strategic diplomacy with extreme violence. The Vietnamese Communists had leveraged their cell networks to create a ground-level presence that slowly displaced the South Vietnamese state, killing around a hundred government officials per month, as well as thousands of Vietnam’s traditional village chiefs. When reprisals occurred, the rebels used civic opposition front groups to sell stories of “human rights violations” to sympathetic Western media. This combination of ground-level violence, international charm campaigns, and multi-front struggles for power would soon become familiar scenes in South Africa.
In 1979, the ANC leadership summed up its reforms in a document called the Green Book. It outlined a multi-stage “national-democratic revolution whose essence is the national liberation of the black oppressed.” The Green Book demonstrates why one cannot think of the ANC as a “normal” political party like those in most Western democracies. It is built upon a wholly different political culture, organizational structure, and approach to its goals. Even electoral victory was only one more front of struggle from which to take control of state bureaucracies, redistribute wealth, and transform society.
ANC leaders made the tactical decision not to declare in favor of socialism formally, but noted that “no member of the Commission had any doubts about the ultimate need to continue our revolution towards a socialist order.” This tactical moderation became particularly useful in securing Western liberal support for the ANC. In reality, all but one of South Africa’s post-Apartheid presidents also held prominent roles in the Communist Party. Only Cyril Ramaphosa’s ascension in 2018 broke this trend.
The revolutionary career of Jacob Zuma, the third post-Apartheid president, provides an insightful look into how People’s War strategy operated in practice. In 1987, Zuma was named ANC chief of counterintelligence. He had already been a member of the Politico-Military Council that applied the People’s War strategy. Security had become a priority for the ANC leadership in the face of infiltration by Apartheid agents and ongoing dissent within the MK ranks. Mutinies had even occurred in ANC camps in Angola.
The Department of Intelligence and Security was the hammer the ANC brought down on its people: the rank and file nicknamed it Mbokodo, the Xhosa name for the stone used to grind down maize. The epicenter of the ANC campaign was Camp 32, also called Quatro. Stationed in northern Angola, its prisoners were systematically beaten, starved, and set to hard labor. Prisoners crawled through red ant nests. Women could expect sexual assault and degradation.
While Zuma’s leadership came near the end of the camp’s existence, he and other ANC leaders tried hard to suppress public inquiries into its activities in the final years of Apartheid. The fight divided imprisoned leaders like Nelson Mandela, who supported the inquiries, from those who had been active during the exile, like MK leader and Communist Party boss Chris Hani.
Mandela and Zuma represented two very different formative experiences within the ANC. Mandela had become active during the party’s early years as an anti-Apartheid protest movement and spent much of its exile in prison. But that exile led the ANC to operate as a law unto itself, duplicating the institutions and functions of a state within its organization. Those functions did not mirror those of Western democratic nations, but instead those of the Soviet bloc, Vietnam, and other socialist states that trained men like Zuma and Hani. Loyalty to the ANC and its discipline took precedence over ties to other institutions, such as trade unions, civic organizations, and the South African state itself.
In 1990, the reformist South African President F. W. de Klerk re-legalized the ANC and SACP, allowing their public return to South Africa. Zuma traveled to the Zulu-dominated region of Natal. As a Zulu himself, Zuma could be a useful agent in the ANC’s fight against its local rival, the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP).
This rivalry spilled out into one of the most widespread and violent domestic conflicts in the final days of Apartheid. Both sides used tactics like “necklacing,” or filling a tire with gasoline and setting it alight around a victim’s neck. In one infamous case, Nelson Mandela’s second wife, Winnie Mandela, ordered the kidnapping and torture of a 14-year-old, who was killed in the process.
These tactics were a matter of policy. ANC operatives created Self-Defense Units, militias nominally meant to guard against IFP attacks. In practice, these became the vanguard in the ANC’s displacement of both Apartheid and Zulu governing structures, much as Viet Cong front groups had done in Vietnamese villages years earlier.
ANC operatives also organized protests of tens of thousands of people to invade “Bantustans,” nominally self-ruled black African territories set up by the Apartheid government. The ANC saw these territories and their leaders as Apartheid regime puppets and intended to reintegrate them into South Africa. When these protests inevitably provoked violence between activists, police, and territorial governments, the ANC recycled such events into their international propaganda.
But even as it fought a low-level war in black townships, the ANC was slowly disciplining the domestic multiracial opposition movement through a series of charm tactics. While the Apartheid regime had permitted a number of “loyal opposition” parties to the ruling National Party, the ANC was able to drive a wedge between conservative and reformist factions in the Apartheid ruling elite itself. At the same time, it displaced “loyal opposition” front groups with pro-ANC institutions.
Soon, leaders of the United Democratic Front, the major civic opposition organization to Apartheid, found themselves on the ANC’s National Executive Committee. The strategy was an unqualified success. In the three decades since Apartheid ended, the ANC has held control over the state and enjoyed international prestige.
As the party completed its rise, ANC hagiographies tended to concentrate on the work of suave diplomats like Thabo Mbeki and the optimistic politics of Nelson Mandela. But under People’s War doctrine, these were merely variations in tactics suited to different fronts of the same struggle. In reality, comfort with violence and enlisting those capable of violence has never left the party. It is estimated that as many as 15,000 people died in the power struggles between the ANC and its rivals.
A Political Economy of Extraction Rather Than Production
During its time in power, the ANC has tried to restructure the national economy and appointed party loyalists to key government functions. Its position as the country’s dominant patron in political and economic life is its most important source of power.
This, in turn, defines the pattern of elite reproduction. The party’s political culture reproduces an elite primarily skilled at maneuvering and running redistributive patronage networks. The incentive on the margin is not productivity or even competence at governing. It is the ability to capture resources for oneself and one’s friends. The result is a comprehensive social corruption that infects all major institutions.
Formal ideology is not the most important aspect of this process. The ANC has always been a coalition of broadly radical-left ideologies, pivoting between them as is convenient. What matters more is the organizational culture that conditions people into particular kinds of action. This, in turn, impacts how one should expect them to operate in power.
When someone operates under the assumption that wealth is fundamentally something that is extracted rather than developed, and when they have spent decades seeing all interactions as fronts of struggle, there is no reason to think that winning an election should suddenly condition them into liberal political and economic norms.
Two of the most explicit manifestations of this political culture are the cadre deployment system and the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) program. The precise details of cadre deployment have always been hard to verify. Five whole years of minutes from the ANC’s Cadre Deployment Committee are still missing. But the Zondo investigation into state capture under President Zuma revealed that the committee has exercised powers far beyond its on-paper mandate. In practice, it can recommend appointments at all levels of government, throughout the civil service, ambassadorial appointments, and even onto independent committees. The decision-makers receiving these “recommendations” are often ANC members under party discipline.
It’s unknown exactly what the economic cost of the cadre deployment has been. A dozen state-owned enterprises interfered with by the committee have collectively faced billions of dollars in bailouts and insolvencies. The political opposition has challenged cadre deployment in the courts, but the damage is done. The effects of energy sector degradation alone, like the regular rotating power cuts known as “load shedding,” destabilize the entire economy. In the capital city of Pretoria, a non-ANC mayor recently chose the political fight to replace such apparatchiks with competent, non-partisan professionals. He was immediately faced with a municipal strike that saw garbage pile up for weeks in the streets. A national fight would likely incur similar resistance at scale and tremendous cost.
Meanwhile, the Black Economic Empowerment program provides a second basis for ANC power in the business world. The “Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment” points system implemented race and gender quotas across the private sector. It is among the most ambitious racial programs in a country full of race laws, with over one-third of all racial legislation ever passed in South Africa having come into being after Apartheid ended.
Focused on a mix of ownership, management, and spending protocols, the program uses a points system to impose race-based regulations on businesses. Those hoping to gain government procurement contracts, or any kind of license in industries such as mining, must have an appropriate point score. By design, a business can increase its score by contracting with other companies with a high score, creating a ripple effect of compliance pressure.
BEE deals are valued at several billion dollars per year. Men like South Africa’s current president have become incredibly wealthy as the beneficiaries of those deals. The system is also a useful way to enrich ANC members and allies who can deliver fraudulent certifications. Kleptocrats have pocketed vast sums of government funds via BEE front companies.
The ANC’s ability to manage these patronage networks inevitably creates losers on the recipient side. This discontent has seen several splinters in the direction of African racial nationalism and more radical economic redistribution. The MK Party, a splinter fostered by Jacob Zuma, has cut into ANC support in the Zulu heartland and combines support for land expropriation with opposition to immigration.
More extreme are the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a Marxist and black nationalist party. Its leader, Julius Malema, has repeatedly made headlines for genocidal rhetoric. When pressed by a reporter, he stated it was possible that he might one day call for the slaughter of white people and refused to make any commitment against it. His party has voiced strong support for the expropriation of land without compensation, the nationalization of mines, and for the late Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.
Malema was formerly head of the ANC’s youth league. This implies that such views are likely more common among the party’s younger cadres. As long as redistributive patronage networks are the main form of political power, there is no reason for anyone politically ambitious to choose productivity or competence instead. In the ANC’s political economy, you beat political gatekeepers by out-radicalizing them to take over the patronage structure.
The liberal opposition centered in regions like the Western Cape has traditionally represented those sections of society opposed to such policies. In the 2024 election, the loss of ANC support to both liberal and radical opponents forced it to enter a coalition to keep governing. It chose to partner with the liberal Democratic Alliance and several smaller parties. Despite this, it is unclear how extremist splinters can be moderated in the long run so long as patronage remains the main road to power in South Africa. The MK Party and the EFF are the two largest opposition parties to the coalition government, a position that gives them little incentive to restrain their politics.
South Africa may not be the last country to meet this fate. It is easy to assume that the greater wealth and dynamism of Western nations will prevent a similar spiral. But in South Africa, the racketeers ascended to power before the material decline set in.
Following the years of Apartheid-era sanctions, South Africa even saw explosive real GDP growth up until about 2012. This growth softened the effects of cadre deployment and BEE, giving these programs years to cement themselves in state and economic power. An entire generation of politicians, officials, and patronage ventures has now grown up under this regime.
Since then, economic growth and poverty reduction have stagnated. Moreover, the statistics don’t capture on-the-ground realities. South Africa is a country where advanced service sectors operate side by side with high crime and rolling blackouts.
This order of events mirrors some of the most dramatic instances of de-development in other Western nations. Germany shut down its entire nuclear infrastructure on green ideological grounds. The U.S. permitted the offshoring of its mid-century assembly lines based on free market globalization. The effects have not been quite as dramatic as in South Africa, but the lesson stands: productive activity only occurs when the political culture of those with power leads them to sanction and endorse it.
Historically, this occurred because many of these elites had personal stakes in the productive economy, whether on its capital or labor side. But when ruptures occur between these forces, whether from European and American managerial elites or South African cadres, the political economy degrades the material one. Ideologies of extraction or full-on degrowth can do irreversible damage to an advanced society and place it on a permanent downward spiral.
This increases the value of political patronage for those who control the functioning remnants of the productive economy. This is the key cause of South Africanization: battles over patronage networks radicalize the ideology, the incentive to corruption becomes impossible to resist, and the decay spiral takes on systemic and irreversible proportions.
There is no historical model of what happens when a large, modern country de-develops. As long as similar structures continue to operate across the Western world, the question is whether South Africa will be the only once-developed country to meet this fate. Other nations may learn the lesson that a political cabal built on racketeering, corruption, and racial patronage can only be defeated by its total removal from power, the dismantling of its institutions, and the repudiation and replacement of its ruling ideology.