Opinion | Decline management not nation-building

The ANC is no longer a liberation movement building a future. It is a retirement home managing its own decline, and with it, the decline of South Africa. It does not govern to solve problems, it governs to slow the rate at which its failures become undeniable. Look at the basic contract of a state.

Electricity, water, roads, safety. After 30years in power often with absolute majorities, the ANC cannot reliably deliver any of them. Loadshedding was paused not because Eskom was fixed, but because it was an election liability. The debt remains, the maintenance backlog remains, the cadre deployment that put loyalists ahead of engineers remains.

Water is the next Eskom. In Bronkhorstspruit, in Makhanda, in Johannesburg, in Hammanskraal, in Giyani, in Nelson Mandela Bay, residents drink water that is unsafe or they have no water at all. The ANC’s response is not a plan to fix it, but a press conference to manage the headlines. This is decline management, not nation-building. The second pillar is the economy.

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South Africa has not grown meaningfully in 15years. Youth unemployment sits at above 60%. Instead of creating an environment for investment, small business and skills, the ANC manages decline through patronage.

The public sector wage bill and social grants have become the tool to keep a constituency dependent while the private economy that must fund them shrinks. BEE, in its current form, has not created broad black industrialists, it has created a small politically-connected elite who get deals without building factories.

The state-owned enterprises tell the same story: SAA, Transnet, Prasa and Denel. All looted, all collapsed, all then recapitalised with public money while ministers insist they are being “turned around”. That is not reform. It is life support. The third pillar is accountability.

The ANC has learned to absorb scandals instead of being changed by them. State capture was exposed in thousands of pages at the Zondo Commission. How many senior ANC leaders are in jail for it today? Almost none. Instead, the party speaks of “renewal” and “unity”, words that mean nothing. The step-aside rule is applied selectively, factionally.

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Corruption is not punished, it is rotated. A mayor implicated in one metro is redeployed to another province. This teaches every young cadre that the system rewards loyalty over competence. When loyalty is the currency, decline is inevitable. At local government, the collapse is most visible and most honest. In townships, rubbish is not collected. Bylaws are not enforced.

Illegal connections are everywhere because the municipality cannot provide legal, affordable services. Spaza shops operate without enforcement for some and with harassment for others. The ANC council cannot enforce rules because it no longer has the institutional capacity or the moral authority to do so. So it manages the chaos.

It allows informality to fill the vacuum left by the state, then blames residents for the dysfunction. Even its politics is about managing decline. The ANC’s 40% of the vote in 2024 was a historic rejection. Its response was not a deep ideological renewal or a purge of corruption.

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It was a government of national unity designed to keep power while outsourcing economic credibility to other parties. South Africans feel this intuitively. They no longer expect the state to work.

They expect to work around the state: Buy a water tank because Rand Water fails, buy an inverter because Eskom fails, hire private security because SAPS fails, send their child to a private school or hire a tutor because public education fails. The tragedy is that South Africa does not lack talent, money or ideas.

It lacks a governing party willing to put the country’s future ahead of its own survival. Until the ANC accepts that it is part of the problem — cadre deployment, centralized control, tolerance of corruption — it will continue to manage its own slow fade, and ask the whole country to fade with it.

Nhlanhla Mbatha is a current affairs analyst.