“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.

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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).

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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.

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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 dollar bills — at least $580,000 worth — were shoved into a sofa for safekeeping at the lodge by staff, according to a subsequent report, and were still there two months later. That’s when an enterprising housekeeper in cahoots with a Namibian money-laundering gangster allegedly stole a chunk of the loot on 9 February 2020. President Ramaphosa, by his own evidence, had known about the transaction two months before the cash was stolen.

No public statement was ever made about the theft. No arrests have been made nor convictions secured. Had it not been for a whistleblower — one of Ramaphosa’s arch political foes — nothing would have been known publicly about the incident. It’s no wonder that the President is known by his fellow-countrymen as Cyril the Silent.

Ever since the “Farmgate” scandal was exposed, Ramaphosa has struggled to silence his critics. The row has revealed yet again the turpitude of the ruling African National Congress, and the tragic absence of any viable alternative political leadership from within the ranks of Africa’s oldest political party. It is not the incident of possible criminality that is alarming: South Africans are immured to skulduggery in both the public and private sectors, from the highest to the lowest levels. It is rather the emergence of a terrifying national question: what if President Cyril Ramaphosa goes?

Hailed as the saviour of South Africa upon election four years ago, Ramaphosa this week temporarily dodged a preliminary Parliamentary impeachment inquiry into the bizarre set of circumstances that played out on his game farm. To do so, he used a well-known legal wheeze known as “the Stalingrad Tactic”: seeking a Constitutional Court Review of the report of an independent panel of judges into the events.

It appears Ramaphosa is learning from the master: the comprehensively corrupt Jacob Zuma. The former president deployed similar diversionary and often vexatious legal tactics to keep out of both court and jail for years, in some cases decades, in a string of corruption and racketeering charges. But Ramaphosa’s party leadership does not appear fazed by the likeness — and many in the public still support him.

Such dramas are not foreign to the ANC as ruling party. President Thabo Mbeki was “recalled” (ANC weasel word for sacked) at the party conference in December 2007, allegedly because he had conspired to have his successor, Jacob Zuma, falsely charged with criminal enterprises.

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Zuma was himself effectively “recalled” from any position of power in 2017, when Ramaphosa narrowly beat Zuma’s anointed successor, his former wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Ever since, Zuma and his legions of corrupt cronies have insisted that Ramaphosa has been up to Mbeki’s old games, using the prosecutorial services and Commissions of Inquiry to stitch them up.

The culprits remain within the party, and chaos, instability and even insurrection have ensued as a painfully inadequate prosecutorial service battles to bring the crooks to court. Cyril, meanwhile, has remained silent, putting party unity before minor considerations such as booting out the bad guys. The roll recently proposed for the 80 members of the ANC’s top policy-making body — to be decided in two weeks — is rotten with ex-cons, accused criminals and assorted no-gooders. Honesty is obviously not at a high premium in the ruling party, and clearly little has changed during Ramaphosa’s tenure.

The President’s first response to the impeachment panel’s recommendation was to offer to resign before being “recalled” — an unprecedented and almost certainly mischievous move. The South African currency tanked, bonds tailspun, and thousands of ordinary citizens begged him not to go. How does one explain this response given that he is widely regarded to have failed in all his key mandates, has presided over a deterioration of the country’s fortunes by every index possible, and now even his Mr Clean image is under a cloud? The answer: there is nobody else.

The Deputy President David Mabuza, who would take over if Ramaphosa stepped down, is a nonentity chosen to balance tribal and regional forces within the ANC. He has been at the centre of multiple investigations through the years into alleged scams in the State’s land restitution programme in his home province of Mpumalanga, all dogged by mysteriously disappearing files.

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The nearest rival to Ramaphosa as leader of the party, and thus next President, is Dr Zweli Mkhize, a Zumerite on the smash-and-grab wing of the movement, himself facing charges of procurement corruption during the Covid panic when he was Minister of Health.

Not surprisingly, John Steenhuisen, leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, has called for a snap general election. The current options before the country, he said, were unacceptable: a crook for an incumbent President, a crook for a Deputy President and a crook for an aspirant President.

So what happens now? Ramaphosa, having tested the waters, has opted not to step down, thus buying valuable time and saving the country the horror of what might follow. The Elective Conference of the ANC is in two weeks. Ramaphosa is likely to succeed as party president; the ANC’s parliamentary majority will surely quash any moves to impeach him. The plot by his internal foes will fail as did their botched civil insurrection in July last year — although they will remain in the party, plotting.

The results of the investigations into the game lodge heist by South Africa’s Reserve Bank, tax authorities, police, financial control centre and immigration authorities still loom over the ANC. Worrying reports have already emerged about the stash of dollars in the sofa being part of a flood of foreign currency that came through a military air base. Many more questions remain unanswered. Is it conceivable that one of South Africa’s richest men would need to resort to money-laundering? Was the money instead intended to bail out a bankrupt party administration no longer able to rely on disenchanted corporate donors? Was it all a set-up by shadowy ex and present members of the State Security Council, once ex-president Zuma’s private fiefdom and headed by the very man who blew the stuffing out of Cyril the Silent’s sofa? If so, why did the President not say so immediately?

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Meanwhile, Ramaphosa faces a bigger challenge in the form of a 2024 general election. On present showing, it seems the ANC will remain the largest party but with a minority. The latest polling gives it 42% of the vote compared to its all-time high of 72%. It will either have to seek a partner or lose out to a coalition of new forces. Such coalitions at local level have proved turbulent, short-lived and unproductive. There is little reason to believe it will be different on a national scale.

Here lies Ramaphosa’s only salvation for a second term. The support for him by the party leadership and broad sections of the public in the Farmgate scandal, desperate as it may be, gives him a mandate to cleanse his party of corruption and build modernist alliances outside the narrow base of his bankrupt organisation. Will he seize the opportunity? It’s doubtful. Is he a crook? Right now, no one dare care other than his bitterest and infinitely worse foes.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.