Over thirty years have passed since South Africa’s first non-racial elections. The vast majority of voters in 1994 had struggled all their lives under the stifling burdens of apartheid—in the workplace, on the land, in their neighbourhoods; the future could only be better. To some degree this has been the case. Though millions still live in informal squatter settlements, housing conditions have improved.footnote1 A considerable amount of land has been restored to those forcibly evicted by apartheid-resettlement programmes, despite the slow rate of progress. Pensions have been equalized upwards to the level previously enjoyed only by whites, providing a crucial safety net for many African households. The poor receive a free weekly allowance of electricity. Schools have been desegregated, at least formally, and Africans have moved up the educational ladder; over two-thirds now attain high-school education. Trade-union membership rates are high. Africans have been recruited to all levels of the civil service.
On the other hand, while South Africa had long vied with Brazil for the dubious distinction of having the most unequal income distribution in the world, this is no longer the case; South Africa now stands alone. The rich have done very well in the post-apartheid era, partly due to the eye-popping expansion of the financial sector; but the share of income held by the poorest 40 per cent is barely half the average for ‘emerging markets’.footnote2 The spatial segregation enforced during the apartheid era has scarcely shifted; instead, the informal settlements of the townships have expanded to incorporate immigrants from other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. The gdp per capita growth rate has stagnated since 2008, due only in part to strong population growth. Economic stagnation reinforces occupational stasis, with its residual racialization of the skills hierarchy—‘whites on top’, followed by Indians, Coloureds and Africans.footnote3 The rate of formal unemployment is staggeringly high: over 50 per cent among the young. Traffic reports regularly warn of road-block protests, where local communities and the unemployed, armed with rocks and burning tyres, are demanding jobs and services.
Exacerbating these macro-economic problems has been the measurable decline in the country’s public infrastructure—power, water, transport. Since 2007, growing demand for electricity has outstripped supply from Eskom, the state-owned electricity provider, leading to major power cuts or ‘load-shedding’. The blackouts have had serious effects on the economy, not least in interrupting water supplies which have to be pumped up to the high plateau where the industrial Vaal Triangle and the Rand mines are located. Broken freight trains mean that Transnet, the state-owned rail and logistics company, has struggled to ship iron ore and coal to the ports, representing lost exports estimated at nearly $5 billion a year. Hit by high energy costs and unreliable transport, the minerals-energy complex that has been the motor of South Africa’s development since the 1880s is starting to stall.
Compounding these difficulties has been the rise of violent crime. The homicide rate stood at 42 per 100,000 in 2021—second only to Jamaica, and far above the rates for neighbouring Namibia, Botswana or Zimbabwe.footnote4 Assault, burglary and car-jackings have become a staple of the daily news. The wealthy can take advantage of a panoply of private-security measures; poorer South Africans are far more exposed. Informal work, often illegal, is vulnerable to extortion under the threat of violence; systematically so for the zama zamas, own-account miners who dig in abandoned gold mines, at great physical risk. Worse still, in recent years, the vandalization of infrastructure has become a major problem. Anything metal is open to theft: road signs, manhole covers, the copper in cables. Looting soared during the pandemic, when—as passengers and security guards stayed home—the commuter-rail system in the Johannesburg area was reduced to total wreckage, with photos of tracks torn up and stations stripped bare. The effects are regressive; those without cars are left to the mercy of the gang-run taxi-cab companies, whose turf wars can end in shoot-outs, with passengers sometimes caught in the crossfire.
Falling turnout rates in recent elections are a measure of how far the post-apartheid optimism has evaporated. From 87 per cent in 1994, turnout dropped to 73 per cent in 2014, 66 per cent in 2019 and 59 per cent in 2024. The anc’s popular vote has dropped from 12 million in 1994 to 6.4 million in 2024, and its share of the total from a high of 70 per cent in 2004 to 40 per cent, forcing the party into a coalition government with the liberal Democratic Alliance, preferred vehicle for most white, Indian and Coloured voters, and two conservative groupings: the Inkatha Freedom Party, established by descendants of the Zulu royal family, with its stronghold in KwaZulu-Natal; and the Patriotic Alliance, a small right-wing party mobilizing poor Coloureds in the Western Cape. These motley forces comprise the parliamentary base for Cyril Ramaphosa’s second presidential term. The opposition now consists of ex-president Jacob Zuma’s mk, a populist Zulu party that took 15 per cent—over 2 million votes, mainly from the anc—in the 2024 election; and Julius Malema’s left-populist Economic Freedom Fighters, with 1.5 million votes, 10 per cent of the total. The pluralization of parliamentary forces may be positive, after twenty years of the anc’s unchallenged predominance; but the extent to which the new party landscape correlates with ethnic and tribal groupings bodes ill. There is now frequent talk of South Africa as a ‘failing state’ or, as the international ngo community prefers to put it these days, a ‘fragile’ one.footnote5 Blame the party?
How should South Africa’s deteriorating social and economic conditions be explained? The two most commonly heard accounts both focus on the anc’s record, but offer opposing analyses of where it has gone wrong. For the left, the turning point was anc and sacp leaders’ collusion with capital in accepting a neoliberal framework during the 1990–94 transition. Rather than rallying the townships and international support behind a coherent redistributive programme, Mandela and his comrades agreed to demobilize. In this reading, the post-apartheid regime was midwifed by South African finance and mining capital, along with the World Bank and imf, while ‘sacp leaders eagerly offered the forceps’ and the mass movement of the townships ‘was kept locked outside the delivery room’.footnote6
Liberal critics also identify the anc as a crucial problem, but for them the issue is that the party has remained wedded to leftist statism and is not neoliberal enough. In What’s Gone Wrong?, Alex Boraine, architect of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, argues that the anc’s long years in exile, incessantly targeted by Pretoria’s secret police, inculcated it with an understandable fear of infiltration, making party loyalty and commitment to programmatic dogma the paramount virtue.footnote7 Frans Cronje, head of the country’s Institute of Race Relations, blames the apartheid rulers for hounding the originally quite moderate anc into Moscow’s embrace in the 1950s. For Cronje, the transition got off to a good start with Mandela’s 1992 speech at Davos and Mbeki’s deepening of the neoliberal turn with the 1996 Growth, Employment and Redistribution (gear) programme, which cut South Africa’s national debt from 50 to 25 per cent of gdp, while growth rates hit 5 per cent in 2004–07, albeit fuelled by a real-estate bubble on a scale to match those in the us and Europe. But, Cronje argues, Mbeki’s personal flaws—superstition about aids, paranoia towards his rivals, involvement in corrupt weapons deals—opened the way for the anc left, the sacp and cosatu to oust him as party president by exploiting Zuma’s populist appeal at the 2007 anc conference at Polokwane. After Zuma’s victory in the April 2009 presidential election, the left seized control of party policy, raising the minimum wage, imposing a union-friendly charter on the mining industry, expanding health insurance and accelerating Black Economic Empowerment measures. It was this departure from liberal-economic good sense, combined with Zuma’s industrial-scale corruption, that led to South Africa’s ‘fall’.footnote8
A third explanation for the anc’s failings is cultural. In Africa Works, a locus classicus of this approach, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz argued that post-colonial Africa has evolved its own form of modernity, combining advanced Western technologies with local cultural models and forms of rule. After independence, the rackety European-colonial state structures were further informalized in the interests of African elites, who needed resources for their client constituencies to shore up their status as ‘Big Men’. According to Chabal and Daloz, and contrary to the shibboleths of ‘good governance’, the imf structural-adjustment programmes of the 1980s deepened this process of ‘retraditionalization’ due to the rich pickings to be had from privatizing state assets. But in its own way, they argue, the system ‘works’, providing personalized solutions to societal problems, albeit at the cost of low economic growth.footnote9
Although Africa Works specifically excluded South Africa, the political scientist R. W. Johnson has developed a comparable cultural analysis of the anc regime, albeit less critical of its colonial predecessors. Johnson calls the failing-state label ‘hopelessly ahistorical’. Rather, South Africa has reverted to its pre-colonial mores. Cattle-raiding forays played an important role in Xhosa and Zulu societies; when anc leaders looted the state, they were simply reinstating an older pattern of authority, culturally transmitted down the generations, though also reinforced by apartheid-era ‘tribalization’ policies. This was a form of neo-patrimonialism, based on a Big Man accruing personal wealth and distributing it to clients. As Johnson points out, Zuma came from a relatively modest background but had no difficulty in adopting ‘all the attributes of a Zulu chief’—the great kraal at Nkandla, the many wives and multiple children, the host of clients and cronies. For Johnson, plunder itself is the main cause of South Africa’s low growth and rising unemployment, with corrupt and bankrupt state-owned enterprises a major drag on development. Unlike Chabal and Daloz, however, he is optimistic about neoliberal structural adjustment, arguing that with a debt crisis looming, the anc will have to change, either under imf pressure or its own.footnote10
Though a few grains of truth may be found in each of these explanations, there are criticisms to be made of them all. The left perspective fails to probe the real difficulties confronting socialist reconstruction in the era of financialized globalization. The liberal critique averts its eyes from the vertiginous inequality that deregulated capital has helped to cause. The culturalist approach fails to explain the scale of plunder and patronage under Dutch and British colonial rule. At the same time, all three concentrate almost exclusively on the choices of the anc leadership; important as that is, such a focus can leave important factors out of the picture, treating South Africa in isolation from larger geopolitical and world-economic forces. This essay attempts instead to provide a more structural explanation for South Africa’s situation. Without wanting to dismiss the toxic effects of neoliberalism, the harsh legacies of apartheid rule have been more significant in what has unfolded. Formative struggles
It was the 1886 discovery of a gold reef running from east to west through the interior of southern Africa, at the level of present-day Johannesburg, which would become known as the Rand, that catalysed the final struggle to forge a unified state out of the multiple polities between the Cape and the Limpopo River. For nearly a century, the English coastal colonies (the Cape and Natal) and the Dutch-speaking inland Boer republics (Transvaal and the Orange Free State) had been battling each other, even as they fought to suppress, at various times, the militant Zulu and Xhosa peoples of the Eastern Cape and Indian Ocean seaboard; the Khoi and San hunter-gatherers of the barren west; and the Pedi, Sotho and Tswana of the north. The British had seized the Cape from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars for its strategic location on the sea route to India; there was little support in London at that stage for an expensive military campaign to conquer the interior. Without the gold, the Transvaal Boer republic might have remained a frontier region, where white landowners made a living by exploiting their armies of labour tenants and squatters, or sharecroppers, as well as big-game hunting for ivory and skins to export. Beyond the reach of the British colonial authority’s laws and taxes, emanating from Cape Town, the Boer farmers were also geographically isolated from the circuits of global capital and the markets of the urban-industrial economy, to a far greater extent than Argentina’s estancias or us cattle ranches. The other crucial difference between southern Africa and the settler colonies in the New World or the Antipodes was the scale of the ‘native’ African populations, who outnumbered the whites by four to one. They proved more resistant to the white man’s diseases and more willing to work than the Indians of the North American plains: this would be of major significance for the mines.
The gold mines transformed the Transvaal from a rural backwater into a booming, semi-industrialized statelet under the leadership of its frontier-militia commander, Paul Kruger. British mining and railway companies poured in borrowed capital, while an influx of what the Dutch-speaking Afrikaners called uitlander labour—‘foreign’ whites, mainly British—provided the more skilled element in the mines and in the network of railways built from the port cities of Durban and Cape Town up into the Rand. Kruger kept a tight grip, exercising a monopoly over the supplies of dynamite and black labour, denying the uitlanders a vote while their taxes filled the gold state’s coffers, strengthening his hand against the British and helping to re-arm his kommando forces with German guns. The confluence of geopolitical tensions—the arrival of German imperialism in southern Africa—with intra-European ethnic ones—English complaints of maltreatment by the Afrikaners—was compounded by the destabilizing impact of industrial-capitalist extraction processes on the region. Moreover, in place of simple commodity exchange among the whites, and the Bantu practice of customary land tenure and subsistence farming, global capital required the production—and ongoing reproduction—of an exploitable labour force.
The Randlords, as the English-speaking mine owners were known, put immense pressure on the Transvaal government to supply cheap black labour for the mines. The geological conditions of the Rand, where the bulk of the ore was low-grade and buried very deep, imposed a labour-intensive extraction process and high capital costs. At the same time, the fixed price of gold—the Bank of England’s shift to the Gold Standard by the 1870s underwrote the credit flows in this first era of globalization—as well as the Afrikaner state’s high taxes, meant that profits could only be increased through downward pressure on labour. But the Afrikaner landowners of the Transvaal, Kruger’s base, with their massive farms, also relied on the products of African sharecroppers and the help of labour tenants in tending their herds and harvesting the crops. The Randlords had the backing of the Cape Colony, where diamond-mining companies like Cecil Rhodes’s De Beers were already finding ways to corral new sources of labour, not least by raising the hut tax, forcing Africans to work for cash, and pioneering new forms of labour control, notably the compound, that would be transferred to the gold mines. Rhodes, the son of an English vicar, had been sent as a teenager to relatives in Natal to cure his sickly constitution. By the age of 23 he had made a fortune in diamonds and was plotting the expansion of British South Africa up the eastern spine of the continent, across the Zambezi. A press campaign in London for this ‘Cape to Cairo’ project helped win the Cabinet’s backing for military intervention in 1899, launching the Boer War, in which British forces, frustrated by their inability to stamp out the kommando guerrillas, resorted to torching farms and rounding up Afrikaners to starve in concentration camps, while the Boers slaughtered Africans suspected of colluding with the imperial power.
The Boer War concluded with a compromise, sealed in the Union of South Africa’s 1910 Constitution. The country would be a British dominion, on the ‘self-governing’ model of Canada and Australia, ruled by a ‘moderate’ Afrikaner government, elected on a whites-only suffrage. The polity was buttressed by white ownership of mines, corporations, banks and agricultural land, the latter codified in the 1913 Land Act which specified that Africans were not allowed to own or lease land outside the scheduled ‘native reserves’, proto-homelands that covered barely a tenth of the country. One result was to reduce African tenant farmers to servants or labourers, or drive them to the land-poor reserves. It also served to increase the pool of migrant labour available to the Randlords: younger sons would be sent for a stint in the mines, living in hostels, leaving their families behind; their wages didn’t need to cover the cost of household reproduction. (The Land Act also tried to do away with labour tenancy and sharecropping on white farms, with limited success; there would still be millions of African farmers on the platteland in the 1960s, particularly in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.)
South Africa’s insertion into the international division of labour as a major minerals producer—gold, but also diamonds, copper, coal and, later, platinum—would be dependent on these circuits of temporary migrants from across the region; workers who were only semi-proletarianized, in that they worked for wages but also had access to the means of subsistence at home, either through customary tenure in a native reserve, or through their labour-tenant or sharecropping families on white-owned farms. Above-ground, clerical and engineering jobs were reserved for whites by the 1911 Mines and Works Act, while the 1923 Native Urban Areas Act demarcated the cities as white spaces and required all urban Africans to carry a pass; lighter but still comparable restrictions would apply to the Coloured and Indian populations. Premised above all on securing cheap labour for the mines, these racialized class structures would sediment within the culture and society of the newly formed country, leaving it riven by discontent.
The agricultural depression of the inter-war period deepened the material insecurity in the African reserves and saw increasing numbers slipping away to find work in the cities; perhaps also to escape patriarchal rule and the burden of finding the traditional lobola, or bride price. This worsened the labour shortage in the white countryside. Meanwhile, rural Afrikaners seethed at the country’s submission to the British Empire after the atrocities of the Boer War; sentiments that would be channelled by a ‘purified’ National Party against the Anglophile governments led by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. The Second World War sharpened the intra-white polarization. The National Party under Daniel Malan took a pro-German line against the Smuts government’s Empire loyalism, in hope that if Hitler defeated Britain, an Afrikaner republic would be restored. In the 1948 election, Malan rallied the rural vote of white farmers, worried about the shrinking supply of black labour, and the urban vote of white workers who feared competition from blacks’ lower wages, to squeak a victory on a platform of curtailing African urbanization through a policy of ‘apartness’.
Apartheid was a deepening of racialized labour regulation, not a rupture from it. Nevertheless, it represented a decisive strategic choice, a rejection of Smuts’ gesture towards integration that was intended to neutralize the appeal of a new generation of black leaders in the anc Youth League—Sisulu, Tambo, Mandela—who were attracted to the small but intellectually potent South African Communist Party, the country’s first non-racial political organization. Instead, the National Party government aimed at the ‘uplift’ of Afrikaners, the poorest section of the whites, through the intensified exploitation of the African majority. ‘Influx control’ would set tight limits on the black population in the cities through harsh enforcement of identity documents—the ‘pass’ system. Only a thin layer of ‘Section Tenners’, named after a clause in the 1945 Bantu (Urban Areas) Act, would have rights of permanent urban residence; the aim was that they would answer to South African industry’s demands for an intermediary layer of skilled black workers; hence the provision of schools, something absent for Africans elsewhere. Otherwise, Africans were only allowed to move to the townships as temporary migrant workers, living in hostels, and on the pattern of the mining industry; family members from the reserves or the white-run rural areas were banned from joining them.
In parallel with ‘influx control’, the National Party set about turning the native reserves into self-governing tribal homelands. In part, this was a tactical response to growing black resistance, aiming to divide the African majority by ‘tribalization’; but the claim that these Bantustans would become real nations was also calculated to meet the rising tide of anti-colonialism across the continent and, in the process, to create a truly white, if rump, South Africa. In the 1960s a major push to modernize and mechanize white farming drastically reduced the need for African labour, leading to the ‘whitening of the platteland’ through the forced expulsion of sharecroppers and labour tenants and their relocation to desolate resettlement camps in the tribal homelands, under the rule of their traditional chief or—as with the Bafokeng in Bophuthatswana—the king. Some 3.5 million Africans were evicted from their lands in this tide of misery. On its own terms, this racialized social-engineering project was a success; by the early 1980s, 54 per cent of Africans were living in the homelands. Now fully proletarianized—deprived of the means of subsistence—they were funnelled into new industrial zones, built within the jurisdiction of ‘white South Africa’ but adjacent to the proto-national Bantustans, making use of their pools of cheap labour. Resettlement would also give rise to the ‘career’ miner, workers now completing one contract after another, rather than returning to the countryside; and not just miners but factory hands, dockers and construction workers, too. They would provide the basis for the explosive rise of the African trade-union movement.
This would prove the turning point. The growing African, Coloured and Indian labour movement signalled its presence in the 1973 Durban dock strikes. The new unions, federated as cosatu, would be a key component of the anti-apartheid movement. A second element was the politicization of township youth led by the high-school students who initiated the 1976 Soweto uprising. By the mid-1970s, the black southern African states—Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, Botswana, Zimbabwe—were winning independence and offered a refuge to the outlawed anc. The National Party’s response to the rising urban unrest was to devolve responsibility for local government and public housing to black municipalities. But their corruption and high-handedness galvanized a new middle-class civic movement to organize further protests and rent strikes. The 1983–85 township uprisings led the government to declare a state of emergency, which in turn produced a foreign-debt crisis and stock-market crash; the highly statist apartheid economic system came under attack on neoliberal grounds. It was becoming apparent that breaking working-class resistance would require a transition to a universal franchise and thus African majority rule. The South African intelligence service had put out feelers to the anc in the early 1980s; in 1991, public negotiations finally began with the reformist wing of the National Party over the dismantling of apartheid. Transition
How was the anc to deal with the sedimented social legacy of South Africa’s first century and the racialized class pyramid that the English and Afrikaners had forged? At its summit, a handful of mining and manufacturing conglomerates were owned and run by a small group of white families, linked into international business and banking circles. A growing black professional middle class was coming to outnumber its better-off and better-trained white, Indian and Coloured peers. They were outnumbered in turn by the young black proletariat, increasingly jobless, who headed for the cities once ‘influx control’ was ended in 1986. Their ‘late’ proletarianization in the 1970s and 80s came at a crucial moment for the world economy, when global growth rates and labour uptake were starting to decline. The millions of Africans thrown off their land, herded into tribalized resettlement camps, then flung into the industrial economy, would be ejected from it from the 1990s, to swell the ranks of the urban unemployed.
The global conditions for the post-apartheid transition were not propitious. South Africa’s self-liberation from settler-colonial rule came late in the century—too late for it to attempt the classic model of economic uplift through export-led, state-backed industrial development. By the early 1990s, the rise of China was already well underway and the chance of any other state following that development path was foreclosed; on the contrary, latecomers like Brazil and South Korea were already starting to deindustrialize. In any case, South Africa would have been ill-equipped for such a course. Mineral exports kept the currency relatively strong; newly unionized labour fiercely defended its rights; the major banks and corporations would certainly have resisted the sort of public intervention and allocation of capital required for a developmental state. Geographical location also counted against it. South Africa is a long way from global consumer markets, in contrast to middle-income export economies like Mexico or Slovakia, with richer countries just across the border. The obvious outlet would be the markets of sub-Saharan Africa, but, due to the prevalence of customary tenure, capitalist development is a challenge and they take only a fifth of South Africa’s exports.footnote11
Transforming a mineral-dependent economy into one more focused on industrial growth for overseas markets was always going to be daunting. The whole social and physical infrastructure, the knowledge base, skill structure, industrial production and domestic markets are geared towards mineral production, or dependent on it. It is what the South African business and banking sectors know best.footnote12 Import-substitution policies had a brief moment after the First World War and were given further impetus by the Second. But from the start of National Party rule in 1948, the government’s attempt to control African urbanization would get in the way, imposing temporary migrant-labour status on the majority, on the assumption that workers’ families would remain behind in the native reserves and ‘live off the land’. This limited the possibilities for training and upgrading African workers’ skills; short-term contracts were not the answer.footnote13
The anc’s approach to these strategic problems was informed by the sacp’s famous definition of South Africa as ‘colonialism of a special type’. It was not formally a colony, since it had been an independent country since 1910; on the other hand, those who put the means of production and labour power into motion and monopolized the state were the descendants of those who had arrived as colonizers from imperial countries while it was under the rule of first the Dutch and then the British. The exploited class were the indigenous populations, along with those imported by the early white settlers as slaves or indentured workers to facilitate the accumulation process. For sacp theorists, this called for two successive revolutions: first a national one, in which colonial rule in all its aspects, economic, political and cultural, would be dismantled; after which the national working class would overthrow the national capitalist class and prepare to build socialism.
In hindsight, what is curious is the emphasis on the ‘national’ as the framework within which the social process would unfold. The transition negotiations made clear that South African capital would always be able to draw on global capital’s political guardians. The balance of forces was also determined by the resources upon which the apartheid rulers could call; unlike the French-Algerian settlers, reliant on a French state that had its own agenda, they had their own military capability and the industrial base to support it. Against this, there was the historic weakness of the anc. It was not until the 1970s that generalized demands for the abolition of apartheid and introduction of a non-racial franchise began to animate the black population as a whole.footnote14 This also reflected the history of working-class politics in the country and the delayed proletarianization of the rural majority, thanks to the mine-owners’ need for semi-subsistence labour. The anc’s moral hand was much stronger than its political one. Moreover, it was damagingly weakened at the start of the negotiations by the carnage inflicted by supporters of the Zulu independence party, Inkatha, instigated by factions in the intelligence service.
To recall these difficult conditions is not to prettify the subsequent evolution of the anc. On his release from prison in 1990, Mandela had famously reiterated the 1955 Freedom Charter’s call for the nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries, adding that ‘modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable’.footnote15 The story of that modification has been told many times and the main reasons for it are not in dispute. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the anc disarmed, with no international support for any form of post-capitalist transition. Indeed, the anc’s objective had always been national liberation—the elimination of apartheid and establishment of black majority rule—rather than radical economic transformation. Second, there was the stake of Western capital. The imf and the World Bank, in particular, were determined to make South Africa’s transition a capitalist success story. An army of experts descended on the country to train anc leaders in ‘economics’ and the importance of private-property rights.footnote16
The upshot was to bind post-apartheid South Africa into dependence on foreign investment, and therefore to maintaining an attractive ‘business climate’. As a token of good will to international investors, the anc agreed to take on the debt incurred by the apartheid regime; the only way to pay this down was by selling off state-owned industries, notably iron and steel and oil-from-coal (sasol). Ending capital and currency controls—one of the conditions for the imf’s $850 million loan—resulted in disinvestment and capital flight. A private-property clause inserted into the new Constitution proved a serious obstacle to land reform, eliminating the possibility of expropriation without compensation. Joining gatt and the wto, represented as South Africa’s coming in from the cold, meant lowering tariffs and ending subsidies to the textile and auto industries that had provided employment for the new black proletariat. In 1996, gear would be a further pro-market shift. The anc’s evolution was dramatically symbolized at Marikana in 2012, when police fired on striking miners at a Lonmin platinum mine, killing 34. Sitting on the board of Lonmin was one Cyril Ramaphosa, General Secretary of cosatu during the late apartheid years, who had denounced the Marikana strikers as ‘criminal’ and called for government action. By the time he became president in 2019, Ramaphosa’s personal wealth was $450 million. Corruptions of state....Ctd....The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
Re: Kevin Cox: South Africa In History’s Shadow II
Ctd.... Yet egregious as ANC elite behaviour has been, three structural factors provide a sounder explanation for South Africa’s course. First, continuity in property relations ensures that, though race discrimination has been abolished, the class structures in which it was embedded have undergone no fundamental change. By virtue of the Anglo-Afrikaner bourgeoisie’s continued dominance of the highest levels of the country’s private economy, its board rooms and the upper echelons of its corporate structures, the major avenue to wealth for aspirant Africans has been the state. This is what lends corruption in South Africa its systemic character. The anc understood the importance of the state administration and duly implemented a policy of ‘cadre deployment’, putting trusted party members into key positions to guide public resources towards the poor black majority.footnote17
Overall, civil-service employment, along with greatly expanded representation in the judicial system and the universities, played a highly positive role in enlarging and reproducing the black professional middle class.footnote18 But the loss of skills was particularly damaging when priority was given to party loyalty, rather than technical knowledge or expertise, in appointing people to run the major state-owned enterprises—electricity, transport, water, the national airline. The anc view was that the apartheid-era state administration was not to be trusted to manage the transformation to majority rule. But the relevant know-how could not simply be hired in from abroad; international advisers knew little about the specific problems of using South African-grade coal in standard Western-model power stations, for example. Skills loss has undoubtedly been a factor in the problems at Eskom.
The anc’s other solution to Anglo-Afrikaner control of the private economy was the Black Economic Empowerment programme, bee, whose goal was the creation of an African capitalist class. bee was gladly embraced by South Africa’s white-owned conglomerates, no doubt relieved to have got off so lightly from the original threat of nationalization. Companies got a bee scorecard for good conduct on a range of black-empowerment measures. One of these measures could be met by selling a block of shares to an anc cadre, paid for by a bank loan that would be perpetually rolled over, earning the cadre a non-executive seat on the board. This allowed the company to raise its bee score for black ownership, entitling it to preferential treatment in government contracts and ensuring that other companies would favour it in order to enhance their own bee scorecards. The upshot was to create a new layer of black rentiers, while the high concentration of South African capital continued to crowd out African entrepreneurialism from below.footnote19
The structural requirement for access to the state as a condition for black advance operates at all levels, from the local through the provincial to the national. But to gain access requires getting elected, or being close to someone who is. Since the anc has predominated in every election since 1994, the path to the state has been through the party, which has become a vehicle for personal enrichment. Corruption can assume a dazzling variety of forms, though the biggest takings typically come as kickbacks from multinationals tendering for state contracts. An elected official in charge of a government department can favour particular businesses in contracts for public services, decisions over licenses and access to land, especially for mining companies. At the local level, officials can decide which companies to employ for service contracts: the allocation of government housing, repairs to highways, the installation of flush toilets in a township. Jobs are also in play since, by law, local development projects must hire local contractors and workers. Reserve armies
To win elected office, the aspirant needs a personalized support base, which then has to be offered something in return. This makes for a factionalized and highly mobilized politics. Those in office, the ‘gate keepers’, are under constant threat from rivals seeking to usurp their role, often by whipping up their own disgruntled voters against them.footnote20 Here a second legacy comes into play: the vast lumpenproletariat, in Marx’s sense of the term, created by apartheid’s resettlement programme at the start of an epoch of labour-shedding, driven to the cities in a seemingly fruitless search for employment. The sheer magnitude of this layer needs emphasis; there is nothing quite like it elsewhere in the world today. The formal unemployment rate—for much the larger part, African—soared from 20 per cent before the 2008 financial crisis to over 30 per cent today, with higher levels among the youth. It means there are large numbers available for mobilization and street protests. The frustrations of the unemployed in the informal settlements can easily be exploited. As one settlement is favoured by its political patron, so its neighbours are left behind, spawning demands and protests—blockades of roads, destruction of property—often instigated by those who can use the anger for their own electoral purposes. The conflicts are zero-sum and the stakes can be huge; likewise, the costs of failure for the urban proletariat. Despite the relatively high wages for those in unionized employment, pay rates elsewhere are meagre. Many households subsist on a mix of a grandmother’s pension, remittances from some higher-earning family member and irregular informal earnings.footnote21 In this context, young men in particular are often available to riot in protest at the lack of jobs, housing and services, perhaps venting in the process some of their own frustrations at being unable to afford the lobola needed to head a household of their own.footnote22
Protests can lead to violent clashes—often instigated by the police—and the destruction of public property. Political violence has, of course, a long history in Southern Africa. Dutch and British colonial systems were maintained by force of arms, muskets and cannon against the iron-tipped spears of Zulu or Xhosa resistance. Coercion underlay the profits of the mines and enforced the expropriation of land and the segregation of labour and urban space under apartheid. The region was marked, too, by the violent responses of the dominated, including intra-black conflicts, gang warfare and vigilantism.footnote23 The frenzy of violence unleashed against anc supporters by the deep state and the Inkatha Freedom Party during the 1990–94 negotiations paralysed the mass democratic movement. Under the post-apartheid regime, violence has been deployed by the state security forces called upon to police the exclusionary social-economic system, as in the shooting of striking platinum miners at Marikana, but also by those who want to challenge or re-configure it. But anc factional struggles can take murderous form, including the assassination of political rivals, public prosecutors or whistle blowers at provincial or even municipal-council level. Competition for urban land on which to erect a shack can also turn violent, sometimes through conflicts with neighbours who stand to be relocated on the occupied land from adjacent shacks, or better-off residents worried about property values. Land occupations, too, often become politicized, with local anc or eff cadres fighting for leadership of the occupation as a way to secure the squatters’ votes. The violence is rational, then, but still a blight on the country, with serious implications for its ongoing development.footnote24
At the apex of the system, the capacious budgets of the state-owned companies provided almost unlimited opportunities. South Africa is not the only country in which elective office operates as a gateway to wealth enhancement; witness the personal fortunes amassed by the Clintons, Blairs or Obamas. But there are few others in which the democratic state alone bears responsibility for reparative redistribution on such a historic scale, operating against the entrenched dynamics of the economic system. Again, corruption has a long history in South African politics, dating back to Kruger’s mining ‘concessions’ and their patronage networks.footnote25 But the scale of government corruption under the anc is of a different order. The late 1990s Arms Scandal involved a gigantic state outlay on high-tech weaponry, including submarines and fighter jets, financed by international loans, and allegedly greased by enormous kickbacks to leading anc figures, including Mbeki and Zuma.footnote26
These adaptations of the state as a vehicle for molecular enrichment would render it vulnerable to criminal capture from outside. From 2009, during Zuma’s presidency, the Gupta brothers—tycoons from Uttar Pradesh who had become his cronies—succeeded in appointing collaborators to top ministerial and administrative posts in order to tap the procurement budgets of the major state-owned companies—Eskom, Transnet, South African Airways, the state pension fund. Key positions on their boards were taken by Gupta loyalists. With Zuma’s help, the Minister of Public Enterprises concealed what was going on with militant speeches about speeding up the social transformation, attacking critics as proxies for white monopoly capital. The Guptas went too far when they trained their sights on the Finance Ministry itself, after the incumbent minister refused to pay out for an over-priced nuclear-power plant in which the brothers had an interest. The Public Protector, a state-oversight body headed by jurist Thuli Madonsela, produced a damning report that led to an official inquiry by the Zondo Commission. Under severe pressure from anc grandees, Zuma resigned in 2018, still denying any wrong-doing, before the Commission could deliver its multi-volume report—a detailed account of systemic corruption.footnote27 Nationhood
The final legacy weighing on South Africa’s present is apartheid’s racialization of national identity. The only available sense of nationhood under apartheid was that of a white South Africa. The logical outcome of this was the ‘grand apartheid’ project: not just segregation within one country, but separation into different countries, South Africa itself and the Bantustans, which had been built up under the tribal kings and chiefs as sumps of corruption. The anc’s Freedom Charter referred to ‘the people’, implicitly regardless of race; it became the hope and dream of Africans and many Coloureds and Indians because it promised a country where they could exert their will through a non-racial franchise. The civic organizations of the 1980s embraced not just Africans, but Coloureds and Indians as well; this would be the basis of the United Democratic Front as a vehicle for bringing about the end of apartheid. Township struggles, going back to the Soweto riots of 1976, were in the most immediate sense about living-place issues and not those of the workplace: township schools, township housing, which had its limits in terms of a more radicalizing agenda. The initial 1994 Government of National Unity, comprising anc, Inkatha and National Party ministers, the much publicized idea of the ‘rainbow nation’ and the Truth and Reconciliation Committee prefigured in different ways a more inclusive sense of nationhood. 2 maps of South Africa, the first showing it after 1996 and the second showing homelands of apartheid South Africa
Yet the anc’s sidelining of class struggle in favour of a cross-class unity of the formerly dispossessed—retaining the traditional ruling elites within the various ethnic groupings, just as the top bourgeoisie was kept in place among the whites—had ethnicizing implications for the country’s national identity. As many have pointed out, the anc’s assertion of African ethnic identities gathered pace with gear’s abandonment of redistribution and the need to bluster away charges of corruption. Mbeki’s presidency re-linked nationhood and ethnic identity, if in a far less aggressive form. His ‘African Renaissance’ promoted the idea of South Africa as quintessentially ‘African’. Here the claim of Afrikaners to be a white tribe of Africa met its limits; they might agree that South Africa was no longer a white country, but the idea that it was a Western one lingered on. Zuma was more explicitly a Zulu leader, happiest when cracking jokes in his native tongue. The Africanization of city names, as well as streets and airports—Durban, named after a British governor of Natal, is now eThekwini, Port Elizabeth is Gqeberha, Fort Beaumont is KwaMaqoma—involved something of an exclusionary tit for tat, at least for the fifth of the population made up of Coloureds, Indians and whites. It’s hard to avoid the impression that the anc sees Africans as a more authentic presence in the country than other people of colour; Indians have persistently complained about being sidelined in bee in favour of Africans.
Undoubtedly it has been hard to find a convincing non-racial way to narrate a national story, with shared heroes and aspirations, that could structure the self-understanding of such a divided country. It has proven difficult enough to find symbols for stamps and bank notes; anodyne images of wildlife have had to suffice. But if the anc at least has struggled to shake off the legacy of an ethnicized national identity, other more reactionary forces have fought to perpetuate it. The apartheid regime’s fostering of ethno-tribal identities through its construction of proto-national Bantustans has proved one of its most debilitating bequests. The superimposition of Western forms of political representation, complete with legislatures and executive authorities, on the customary patrimonial authority of the tribal chief, with his control of land allocation, was part of the grand-apartheid process of readying the homelands for ‘self-government’. But this layering institutionalized a particularly retrograde version of Big Man politics as apartheid subsidies and cash from multinationals elevated tribal leaders and their families to oligarchic status.
At the start of the negotiations the anc wanted to abolish these newly buttressed tribal homelands within the democratized Union of South Africa. But the carnage of the civil war initiated by Inkatha supporters against anc cadres, fomented by the claim that the anc was bent on banning customary tenure, gave it pause. The homelands would be absorbed into the nine new provinces, but the old tribal power structures and chiefly control over land would remain, now legitimated through the creation of a new government chamber, the National House of Traditional Leaders. With their incorporation into the new provincial governments after 1996, the tribal leaders continued to exert considerable local weight, above all in the Eastern Cape and the northeastern provinces of Limpopo and Mpumalanga.footnote28 When the post-apartheid Department of Rural Development and Land Reform purchased land from white owners to restore to the community, the old tribal leaderships tended to arrogate control over the Community Property Associations which were supposed to ensure collective self-management. The result has been nepotism, embezzlement and bribe-taking from mining companies seeking to encroach on communal land and water resources; and elite appropriation of the profits given over to the cpa by the firms, typically white, called in to manage land for agriculture.footnote29 Prospects
It is against the backdrop of these legacies—racialized class structure, jobless lumpenproletariat, naturalization of political violence, ethno-tribalization, the state as sole avenue for advancement—that the condition of South Africa should be judged. The country’s history lends context to the high levels of inequality and black joblessness, the stasis of race-based occupational sectors and residential geography, the deterioration of public infrastructure and the rise of vandalism and violent crime. There seems little hope for any major macro-economic improvement. For the foreseeable future, South Africa’s trajectory in the international division of labour will be ‘re-primarization’: an increased emphasis on the export of raw materials—in South Africa’s case, minerals—over manufactured goods. Since the 1990s, this has been a general trend for the countries of the Southern Hemisphere, both in the Cone of Latin America—Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil—and the Antipodes, with New Zealand a partial exception. One can point to the soy boom in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay; iron ore exports from Brazil and increased exports of copper from Chile (Table 1). Demand from the China-led commodities boom of 2000–12 has played a part in this, across the board; so, too, has deindustrialization, an uneven response to the global glut in manufacturing capacity, worsened by the coming onstream of China’s huge industrial export sector, on top of the prodigious productivity of the Asian Tigers, Germany and Japan. Table 1: Percentage Share of Raw Materials in Exports. Showing each decade since 1990 for Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, New Zealand, South Africa and Uruguay. South Africa's percentage share is shown as growing from 18 to 29 over this period.
But while consignment to primary exports does not necessarily mean an inability to raise living standards, in South Africa, it does. Compared to similar Southern Hemisphere countries, the record is dismal (Figure 1). This is largely because re-primarization, in South Africa’s case, reflects an exceptional rate of deindustrialization. State-driven industrialization from 1960–80 faltered thereafter, but manufacturing growth stabilized from 1995–2008 when the economy overall grew at an annual average of 3.4 per cent. Yet the South African economy—and manufacturing, in particular—struggled to recover from the shock of 2008; average annual growth for the next decade was only 1.4 per cent. Some 300,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, especially low-skill ones, with small and medium businesses and energy-intensive metal-processing industries impacted by Eskom’s problems, hardest hit, especially in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape; the result was to cut total employment growth by 20 per cent.footnote30 The knock-on effects of manufacturing contraction saw a steep fall in domestic demand for investment goods, as well as financial and services inputs. Investment was targeted away from production to acquisitions and mergers, putting a further squeeze on small businesses. Scatterplot graph with mean export per capita growth as x axis and mean income growth as y axis, with South Africa compared to New Zealand, Argentina, Australia, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil, showing that South Africa has near zero growth on both measures for the 1970-2020 period, while the other countries have done better
Company surveys show that the electricity crisis—frequent power cuts combined with a surge in prices—has been the biggest constraint on firms across the economy. The proportion resorting to costly private generators has risen from 20 per cent in 2007 to 60 per cent in 2020—a creeping, molecular process of privatization that is both socially regressive and economically inefficient.footnote31 By 2019, Eskom was producing less electricity than in 2007, though its prices had tripled and its payroll had grown by 50 per cent. Plans for expanding supply rested heavily on the construction of two new power stations, Medupi and Kusile, but they were plagued with technical problems and cost overruns, compounded by allegations of massive kickbacks. Exacerbating the corruption and skills loss resulting from anc cadre deployment—and the Gupta brothers’ predation—at Eskom, the municipalities constitute a weak link in the electricity-supply system. As direct retailers of electricity to users in their localities, their budgets are dependent on electricity revenues, which often get diverted elsewhere in the municipal accounts rather than paying Eskom’s bills. This is not to mention informal settlements’ illegal hookups to the grid, or customers’ resistance to paying the sky-high bills charged by the municipality for an unreliable supply. There is a clear risk of multiplier effects cascading from the structural problems inherited by the anc, worsened by some of its solutions.
Discontent is taking varied political forms. The Marikana platinum miners’ strike in 2012 was also a struggle against the official National Union of Mineworkers, affiliated with cosatu, the anc coalition partner, in favour of the more militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (amcu). A wave of amcu-led strikes in 2014 won improvements in wages and conditions. numsa, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, itself in a fraught relation with cosatu, has also led strikes at the new thermal power stations at Medupi and Kusile. At the level of party politics, these polarizations are mirrored within the Tripartite Alliance, the long-standing electoral pact between the anc, sacp and cosatu. The anc’s coalition agreement with the Democratic Alliance, Inkatha and the Patriotic Alliance after the 2024 election brought tensions with the sacp to a head. The sacp, which boasts 200,000 members, has now announced its withdrawal from the Tripartite Alliance, saying it will contest the 2026 local elections under its own name. Some of the unions currently affiliated with cosatu are expected to withdraw their support.footnote32 There is popular disillusion. But it is unlikely that these developments presage a serious realignment of class forces. The eff, the principal contender for the breakaway unions’ vote, stands for the nationalization of industry and land redistribution without compensation but seems more serious about promoting hostility to the numerous refugees from north of the Limpopo.
Yet if the outlook is bleak, it is not unremittingly so. Many would point to the Public Protector’s role in reporting on state capture, the bloodless ouster of Zuma and the unstinting accumulation of evidence by the Zondo Commission as examples of South Africa’s better side; even if corruption has continued under Ramaphosa, it is not on quite the same scale. Others might highlight the part played by South Africa and its juridical system in bringing Israel to task before the icj for the destruction of Gaza as a more civilized approach than that of the us, uk, France or Germany. Meanwhile Eskom’s performance has shown signs of improvement under new management since the start of 2025, with a significant reduction in power cuts; the railways are slowly—very slowly—being turned around. But apartheid’s effects have been long-lasting. South Africans are still paying its heavy price. 1 Housing: in 1996, 49 per cent of black South Africans lived in formal, brick-built accommodation; by 2015, that had risen to 65 per cent, mainly through a programme of one-off grants. For further background, see my Geohistory, Capitalist Development and South Africa: From Racial Domination to Zim-Lite, Leiden 2025. 2 The poorest 40 per cent in South Africa hold 7 per cent of total income, compared to an average of 16 per cent for emerging markets: imf, ‘Six Charts Explain South Africa’s Inequality’, 31 January 2020. 3 This was the four-part ethno-racial categorization employed by South Africa’s founding fathers and still in everyday use today, albeit euphemized by the national census as ‘Population Groups’. The long-standing Coloured population of the Cape originated as the descendants of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers and local African women, as well as Malay slaves imported from the Dutch East Indies. The British imported indentured labourers from India as a solution to the nineteenth-century labour shortage in the sugar plantations of Natal. 4 The South African homicide rate climbed to 61 per 100,000 in 1995, then dropped to 30 per 100,000 in 2011, before ticking up again. Jamaica is at 52 per 100,000, compared to Namibia (12), Botswana (11) and Zimbabwe (6). The us rate is 7 per 100,000. 5 ‘Failing state’ is the term of choice for the Daily Maverick, a foundation-funded news website that runs many exposés of anc corruption. For ‘fragile’, see the annual Fragile States Index report put out by the Washington dc-based Fund for Peace, which in 2024 ranked South Africa as 80th out of 179 states. 6 Patrick Bond, ‘In Power in Pretoria? Reply to R. W. Johnson’, nlr 58, July–Aug 2009, p. 78; see also Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg 2000. For similar analyses, see, inter alia, John Saul, A Flawed Freedom: Rethinking Southern African Liberation, London 2014; Sam Ashman, Ben Fine and Susan Newman, ‘The Crisis in South Africa: Neoliberalism, Financialization and Uneven and Combined Development’, Socialist Register, vol. 47, 2011; Danelle Fourie, ‘The Neoliberal Influence on South Africa’s Early Democracy and Its Shortfalls in Addressing Economic Inequality’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 50, no. 5, June 2024. 7 Alex Boraine, What’s Gone Wrong? South Africa on the Brink of Failed Statehood, New York 2014. 8 Frans Cronje, The Rise or Fall of South Africa, Cape Town 2022. 9 Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument, Oxford 1999, pp. 144–6, 12–16, xix–xx. 10 R. W. Johnson, ‘Thinking about State Failure’, Politicsweb, 1 March 2021. 11 Kevin Cox and Rohit Negi, ‘The State and the Question of Development in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, vol. 37, no. 123, March 2010. 12 Ben Fine and Zavareh Rustomjee, The Political Economy of South Africa, Boulder co 1996. 13 Furthermore, South African gold mining went into decline from the 1970s, with production falling from a peak of 1,000 tonnes in 1970 to just 110 tonnes in 2022; its mainly unskilled workforce had shrunk to 130,000 by 2004. To some degree it has been replaced by coal and platinum, while tourism now accounts for a tenth of foreign-exchange earnings. But these cannot provide the type of economic activity that develops working-class self-confidence and skills. 14 Adam Ashforth, ‘Lineaments of the Political Geography of State Formation in Twentieth-Century South Africa’, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 10, no. 2, June 1997, p. 104. 15 ‘anc Leader Affirms Support for State Control of Industry’, The Times (London), 26 January 1990. 16 In addition to the works by Patrick Bond and John Saul cited above, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Toronto 2007, Chapter 10, for a memorable critique. 17 There were precedents for this. After 1948, the National Party promoted Afrikaners to replace English-speaking administrators in state-owned firms, part of a project of economic uplift. However, there was already a significant layer of Afrikaans-speaking professionals in law, journalism and business. The gap in education and experience between the English- and Afrikaans-speaking administrators was much smaller than it would be in the 1990s, when the replacement of a highly trained white civil service by one with strong anc credentials but no prior experience of government involved a much greater loss of skills. 18 Public-sector salaries are 33 per cent higher than in the private sector—a 2016 report estimated the real monthly wage of an average public-sector worker at R11,668 ($1,209), compared to R7,822 ($811) for the private-sector equivalent—thanks to a much higher rate of unionization: some 70 per cent, compared to 36 per cent in the private sector. See Haroon Bhorat et al., ‘South Africa’s Civil Servants Are the Country’s New Labour Elite’, The Conversation, 19 February 2016. 19 For an example of corporate capital’s embrace of bee, see Musa Nxele, ‘Crony Capitalist Deals and Investment in South Africa’s Platinum Belt: A Case Study of Anglo-American Platinum’s Scramble for Mining Rights, 1995–2019’, Review of African Political Economy, vol. 49, no. 173, September 2022. 20 Alexander Beresford, ‘Power, Patronage and Gatekeeper Politics in South Africa’, African Affairs, vol. 114, no. 455, April 2015. 21 Brendan Pearce and Bobby Berkowitz, ‘Rethinking South Africa’s Informal Economy Debate’, FinMark Trust, 1 September 2025; Imraan Valodia, ‘South Africa Can’t Crack the Inequality Curse’, The Conversation, 14 September 2023. 22 Ivor Chipkin and Jelena Vidojevic with Laurence Rau and Daniel Saksenberg, Dangerous Elites: Protest, Conflict and the Future of South Africa, Institute for Security Studies, Southern Africa Report 49, 16 March 2022; Hannah Dawson, ‘Patronage from Below: Political Unrest in an Informal Settlement in South Africa’, African Affairs, vol. 113, no. 453, October 2014. 23 Karl von Holdt, ‘South Africa: The Transition to Violent Democracy’, Review of African Political Economy, vol. 40, no. 138, December 2013; see also Karl von Holdt, ‘On Violent Democracy’, Sociological Review, vol. 65, no. S2, December 2014. 24 Karl von Holdt, Malose Langa, Sepetla Molapo, Nomfundo Mogapi, Kindiza Ngubeni, Jacob Dlamini and Adèle Kirsten, The Smoke That Calls, Johannesburg 2011. 25 After 1948, the National Party government allowed the Afrikaner Broederbond to operate as a secret society at the heart of the state. Corruption spread as the apartheid regime lost direction from the mid-1970s and the ‘scramble for personal enrichment began’, turning into a free-for-all of ‘grabbing the spoils’ through spectacular golden handshakes in its last few years: see the historical account in Jonathan Hyslop, ‘Political Corruption: Before and after Apartheid’, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 31, no. 4, December 2005. 26 Andrew Feinstein, After the Party: Corruption, the anc and South Africa’s Uncertain Future, London and New York 2009. The German arms dealer Thyssen is said to have set aside $25 million for ‘useful expenditures’ related to the deal, while bae dispenses $115 million to ‘advisers’ with offshore bank accounts and luxury cars were delivered to thirty government officials. 27 Atul and Rajesh Gupta fled to the uae in 2016, when Madonsela produced her report. The cost of their ‘state capture’ has been estimated at R500 billion, or $30 billion. See Ciaran Ryan, ‘State Capture Scorecard: R500bn Looted, Zero Assets Recovered’, Moneyweb, 5 July 2022. 28 One study found ‘a clear correlation’ between the level of systematic corruption and the degree of continuity with the old homeland administration, above all in the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and the Northern Limpopo provinces: Hyslop, ‘Political Corruption: Before and after Apartheid’, p. 785. 29 For example: Tabelo Timse, ‘Conflict Erupts Over Limpopo cpa Control’, Mail and Guardian, 10 August 2015; Tania Broughton, ‘Millions of Rands in Suspicious Transactions Found in Accounts of Limpopo Land Claimants’, GroundUp, 18 August 2021; T. Ngomane and M. P. Sebola, ‘Agrarian Reform and Communal Property Associations: An Analysis of the Functionality of cpas in Mpumalanga’, Proceedings of the International Conference on Public Administration and Development Alternatives, October 2020. Chiefly power was further protected in the Traditional Leadership Acts of 2003 and 2019: see Phillan Zamchiya, ‘Mining, Capital and Dispossession in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, vol. 49, no. 173, September 2022. 30 Andrés Fortunato, ‘Getting Back on the Curve: South Africa’s Manufacturing Challenge’, Working Paper no. 139, Center for International Development, Harvard 2022. 31 Fortunato, ‘Getting Back on the Curve’. 32 Sabina Price, ‘What Future for South Africa’s Tripartite Alliance?’, mr Online, 17 July 2025. The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
on December 29, 2025, 8:26 pm