On a rainy Wednesday morning, with a gunmetal gray sky overhead, four men in their late 20s share a street corner with a dead cat in the township of Thokoza, east of Johannesburg. Smoke rises above them, as they share homemade cigarettes filled with cheap tobacco.
“Smoking helps us forget our problems,” said David Ngobese, 32. “There are no jobs here; nothing to do.”
“No hope,” said his friend.
The shell of a community hall loomed nearby, burned almost to the ground during anti-government riots that erupted in several cities in South Africa in July 2021.
The men trudged across a park once filled with happy children; it’s home now to rats, rubble, plastic bags, and other waste.
Ngobese told The Epoch Times he’d been searching for a job since he graduated from technical college eight years ago.
“I am an electrician; I do piece [odd] jobs but it is not enough, even for food,” he said.
Ngobese is one of an estimated 11 million people below the age of 34 who should be formally employed in Africa’s most industrialized and technologically advanced economy but aren’t.
Sociologists and other experts often refer to this section of the population as a “ticking timebomb.”
It was largely jobless youth who drove the death and destruction that unfolded during post-apartheid South Africa’s worst-ever civil unrest 18 months ago.
As unemployment, poverty, and associated crime soar, anger directed at the African National Congress (ANC)—in power since Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president in 1994—is building.
Decades of apartheid created the most unequal society in the world, and decades of ANC governance haven’t changed that.
Most of the country’s wealth comes primarily from the mining of minerals—including gold and platinum—agriculture, and manufacturing, which remains in the hands of white capitalists, joined by a small group of ANC-linked black businesspeople enriched by the party’s policy of black economic empowerment.
Corruption and maladministration have paralyzed state-owned enterprises.
Railways, for example, no longer function. South African Airways, once the pride of the continent’s skies, is nearing bankruptcy. The state power utility, Eskom, is no longer able to keep the lights on, and electricity outages of up to 12 hours a day are now common, costing the economy billions in lost production, and lives.
In October 2022, that stood at $256 billion.
Across South Africa, areas governed by the ANC have become wastelands of violence and desperation, once-thriving towns visited by tourists disintegrating.
Funds meant for poverty alleviation, development, and service delivery have disappeared into the pockets of ANC mayors and councilors.
Refuse rots in the streets, uncollected, stark evidence of the decay the ANC has brought into the lives of the vast majority of citizens.
“When you visit these places, you can’t believe you’re in South Africa. It’s more like being in [war-ravaged] Somalia,” professor Alex van den Heever, of the department of governance at Wits University in Johannesburg, told The Epoch Times.
Even ANC veterans, such as Mavuso Msimang, who once carried an AK-47 to fight apartheid forces, acknowledge the party has been a “great disappointment.”
“People are fed-up with their selfishness and lies, and their unfulfilled promises to change,” he told The Epoch Times. “The ANC stopped being the ANC I knew a long time ago. It is literally killing itself.”
Van den Heever said the party is being “torn apart” by factions battling to control lucrative government contracts.
In some provinces, ANC officials competing for seats on town and city councils, and by extension access to tenders and contracts, are murdering one another.
“The ANC members, because they’ve not been able to grow the GDP of the country, they’re fighting over a shrinking cake, and the fights are becoming more bitter; murders are kicking in, political assassinations are kicking in,” Sandile Swana, an independent political analyst, told The Epoch Times.
“From here, it’s going to get worse, for as long as the ANC remains in power.”
When unionist-turned-mining-magnate Cyril Ramaphosa ousted Jacob Zuma as ANC leader and South Africa’s president in early 2018, he was praised for acknowledging the presence of “criminals” inside his party and government.
He promised “swift action” against them.
But only one, a close ally of Zuma, has so far been charged with financial crimes.
Ramaphosa himself is increasingly hamstrung by allegations of money laundering and tax evasion against him, related to the mysterious theft of at least $600,000 from his luxury game ranch in early 2020. The incident was exposed only late last year, by Zuma’s former police intelligence chief.
Yet Ramaphosa’s alleged crimes pale alongside those of his predecessor. A commission of inquiry has concluded that more than 500 billion rand ($34 billion) may have been stolen from state-owned entities during Zuma’s nine-year tenure, from 2009 to early 2018, mostly during the last four years of that period.
Some financial experts say the figure’s closer to $70 billion.
The commission linked several high-ranking ANC officials, including former and current Cabinet ministers, to the corruption that’s become known as “state capture” in South Africa.
We ‘Started Off so Well’
ANC veteran Pallo Jordan, one of Mandela’s first Cabinet ministers, told The Epoch Times his organization made a “good start” in government in 1994, after replacing the white National Party, which had been in power since 1948.“We gave human rights to all. We built millions of houses and gave water and electricity to millions of poor people. Our job creation policies were working, we were bringing crime down.
“We made mistakes, but the progress continued under President [Thabo] Mbeki.”
Mbeki succeeded Mandela in 1999, but was ousted by Zuma in 2008.
“That’s when the rot started to set in,” Jordan said.
But another ANC veteran, and formerly the government’s top statistician, Pali Lehohla, told The Epoch Times the party’s “good start” lasted only two years.
“By 1996, there was dramatic change, and things changed for the better. The question is, did they change for the better sustainably? All those things have fallen apart! We don’t even have electricity anymore. Ukraine has more electricity than us!
“Yes, the ANC built houses, but many housing projects have been ruined by corruption and substandard building. The education and health systems, which started off so well, have been mismanaged to the point of ruin.
“People die every day because the state can’t provide them with medicines and proper care. Services have collapsed in almost every ANC municipality.”
Lehohla said he was “sick” of the ANC blaming Zuma and his allies for “everything that’s wrong” in with South Africa today.
“It hurts to say but even under Madiba [Mandela’s clan name], there were signs that the ANC was abandoning its mission to improve the lives of the poor. People forget there was corruption under Madiba and Mbeki as well,” he said.
The first major corruption scandal involving the ANC happened a few months after Mandela took office. His delegate to the United Nations, Rev. Allan Boesak, was accused of “misusing” funds donated to a “peace and justice” group with ties to the ANC.
An internal party investigation, led by Mbeki, cleared Boesak of wrongdoing, a finding that the Scandinavian donors described as “ludicrous.”
Soon after, local media reports implicated Mandela’s health minister, Dr. Nkosazana Zuma, in fraud. She allegedly “misappropriated” millions of rand meant to fund a play called “Sarafina,” that warned youngsters against unsafe sex.
Mandela accused the media of “creating an uproar,” saying Zuma should be “left alone to do her job.”
And that’s exactly what the ANC and its law enforcement agencies did, establishing a modus operandi that continues to this day.
In October 1996, more than a year after the minister’s alleged corruption had been exposed, professor Steven Friedman, then of the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg, told The New York Times: “The ANC has established a very clear pattern and the pattern is simple: You can be whatever you like as long as you are loyal.
“The minister of health may be responsible for ‘Sarafina’ but she is loyal, so she will be defended. The problem is you can’t deal with corruption this way.'’
Themba Sono, frequently jailed by the apartheid government for activism that stretched over three decades, grew up supporting the ANC. It would later expel him for “indiscipline.”
Sono, now an 81-year-old retired economist, told The Epoch Times, “I saw the signs early on and they got rid of me and my big mouth.
“I warned that we were replacing a corrupt white government with a corrupt black government.
“But no one wanted to hear the truth; they just wanted to hear about the ‘miracle’ of the ‘new’ South Africa.
“Mandela and I were friends, but he was often blind to the failings of the people around him.”
Ever since it came to power, the ANC has “protected, nurtured and promoted” the corrupt in its ranks, to the extent that the party “now resembles an organized crime syndicate,” Swana said.
Nkosazana Zuma has been in various positions in the Cabinet ever since the “Sarafina” episode and has been implicated in numerous cases of corruption. She recently ran an unsuccessful campaign to replace Ramaphosa as ANC leader.
Her ex-husband, Jacob Zuma, became president in 2009, despite strong evidence he’d siphoned off millions of rands from a multibillion-dollar deal signed in 1999 to “modernize” South Africa’s armed forces with new aircraft, warships, and weapons.
The ANC protected Zuma, and other leading party figures, including Mbeki, from allegations of fraud, corruption, bribery, racketeering, and money laundering connected to the arms deal.
Charges were reinstated against Zuma after he lost the presidency; he’s currently fighting to have them dismissed.
“The ANC has always had a policy of cadre deployment,“ Van den Heever said. ”In terms of that, instead of giving top jobs to people based on skill and merit, it rewards loyal members with those jobs. Its argument has always been, ‘If we put loyal ANC members in those posts, they will implement our policies and everything will be okay.’
“But, of course, policies are useless when you don’t have the skill and experience to implement them.
No Courage to Make ‘Tough Calls’
But it isn’t the ANC’s “obvious” corruption that will ultimately “destroy” it, Swana said.“A government can steal as much as it wants, as long as it leaves enough behind for its people,” he said. “If citizens have jobs, food, shelter, basic services, safety and security, education for their kids ... Well, a government can get away with pretty much anything.”
What’s eventually going to result in the ANC losing power, Swana said, is its failure for the past 30 years to implement a credible economic strategy, that would spark consistent growth to pull significant numbers of citizens out of poverty.
“Business has been presenting plans to government for years about how the economy should be rebuilt, but the ANC doesn’t hear sense,” he said. “It says it wants to involve all sectors in developing the country. But really it wants to control every aspect of society that involves money.”
Oscar van Heerden, a political economist at the University of Fort Hare, told The Epoch Times that the ANC had failed because of its “inherent corruption and immorality,” but also because it had always lacked the courage to take “tough decisions.”
Primarily, he said, the government should have privatized state-owned industries.
“Private companies are motivated by profit. This incentivizes them to be more productive and more efficient and to deliver better services. They could raise more money for government.”
But privatization is anathema to the ANC’s communist partners and, perhaps more significantly, to the labor unions that traditionally campaign for the ANC ahead of elections.
Van Heerden said privatization would also “crush” the criminal syndicates “bleeding” public corporations.
But, Van den Heever said, this wouldn’t be in line with the ANC’s “selfish interests” and “dedication to state control.”
“I’m not saying there’s no corruption in the private sector. The Jacob Zuma administration collaborated closely with local and international private firms to plunder the public purse,” he said. “But privatization of state assets, such as Eskom, would undoubtedly stem the flow of illicit money that’s currently keeping the ANC on life support.”
Van Heerden said the ANC was also “too scared” to end food subsidies, which had distorted markets and “stunted” diversification of the economy, and to deregulate markets to encourage competition.
“The ANC doesn’t want competition; it wants control of a limited number of players,” Van den Heever said.
“Only a few countries in the world can afford such a luxurious policy and we aren’t one of them. Yet we have it because the ANC wants young votes.”
He said the ANC had failed South Africa largely because it continued to “bow and bend to the most ridiculous demands” from public-sector unions.
“The government knows that tens of thousands of workers are surplus to requirements across the state sector. It knows that some of its ministers are useless and that some are worse; they’re criminals. But it does nothing to free South Africa of these burdens.
A Better South Africa Without ANC?
The ANC overperformed at the polls in 2019, according to political analysts, garnering more than 57 percent of the vote.“People voted ANC four years ago because they saw Ramaphosa as a messiah; they believed his message of change and renewal following the utter devastation of the Zuma years,” Lehohla said. “That optimism faded very fast.”
Swana said the local government elections of 2021 represented a more accurate reflection of the ANC’s decline. It got less than 48 percent of the national vote, the first time in its history as the governing party that it failed to secure more than 50 percent.
The ANC lost control of several major cities and towns.
To hold on to significant power, the ANC would have to enter a governing coalition.
The chief opposition party, the broadly centrist Democratic Alliance, with almost 21 percent of the vote in 2019, has rejected the possibility of cooperating “in any way” with the ANC.
Its most likely bedfellow, Van den Heever said, would be the country’s third-largest party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which won almost 11 percent of the vote four years ago.
The EFF, led by its firebrand, ultra-leftist, corruption-accused “commander-in-chief,” Julius Malema, has said for it to consider any “alliance” with the ANC, the ruling party would have to agree to its “non-negotiable” demands.
These include the nationalization of “all forms of wealth,” including mines and financial institutions; expropriation of land and property owned by whites, without compensating them; and the “destruction of white monopoly capital.”
Malema told The Epoch Times: “When these things happen, wealth will pass into the hands of the rightful owners of South Africa, the black majority. The whites who want to stay in the country are welcome, but opportunities will be much more limited for them.
“Up to now, the ANC has partnered with white capitalists simply to build a small black elite, while most black people get poorer. We will make sure this changes when we are in government. Pro-poor policies are the answer, not pro-business.”
There is, of course, the possibility that the ANC corrupts the Independent Electoral Commission ahead of the 2024 polls, to rig the election to ensure it gets the majority it needs to maintain absolute power.
It’s a scenario that even its fiercest critics agree is unlikely.
“The ANC, as corrupt and incompetent as it is, prizes the fact that South Africa’s seen as one of the few strong democracies in Africa. It cannot be denied that every election since 1994 has been free and fair.
“The ANC also prizes its membership in the G-20. It’s not going to jeopardize this by rigging an election when there are still other options open to it to continue having a strong hand on the levers of power,” Van den Heever said.
In 2004, Jacob Zuma declared that the ANC “would rule South Africa until Jesus comes back.”
In 2023, his prediction faces its greatest test.
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