“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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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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.