THE ANC PROBLEM: WHY SOUTH AFRICA’S CRISIS IS A VOTER PROBLEM, NOT JUST A PARTY PROBLEM
South Africa’s decline under three decades of ANC governance is well documented, but the party’s survival at the ballot box depends on ANC voters, not just ANC leadership. New polling from the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation shows 54 percent of South Africans now want black economic empowerment phased out, while a government commissioned review by Professor William Gumede found that R1 trillion in empowerment related money has moved between fewer than 100 politically connected individuals since 1994. Meanwhile, more than 8,000 South Africans have left for the United States as refugees since May 2025, and the EFF and MK Party have shown they treat transformation policy with the same rigidity as the ANC itself.
South Africa is falling apart, and the evidence is not really in dispute anymore. Power cuts that never fully end. Municipalities that cannot collect their own rubbish. A rail network that used to move goods safely across the country and now barely functions at all. What is less often discussed is that none of this happens without the ANC winning election after election, and it keeps winning because millions of South Africans keep voting for it.
ANC loyalty in this country behaves a lot like an addiction. Instead of admitting the party has failed them, many supporters hide it, excuse it, or explain it away. Part of that loyalty comes from a fear that has been repeated and exaggerated for 30 years: that if the ANC loses power, apartheid returns. There is no political movement in South Africa with the power or stated intention to bring that back, but the fear still works at the ballot box.
It is worth being precise about what the record actually shows, rather than relying on the race arguments that usually dominate this debate. South Africa once ranked among the most prosperous nations on the continent, with a functioning education system, a police service and defence force considered among the best in the world, and state owned enterprises that worked. Eskom did not just power the country, it exported electricity to its neighbours. None of that describes South Africa today.
HOW DISSENT GETS FRAMED
In May 2025, a group of 59 Afrikaners left for the United States on a chartered flight, claiming persecution. President Cyril Ramaphosa, speaking at the Africa CEO Forum in Abidjan, rejected the claim outright, saying they were not being persecuted or treated badly, and calling them “a fringe grouping” that was “anti transformation and anti change.”
That group has not stayed small. Another 335 South Africans arrived in the United States before the 2025 fiscal year was out. According to official United States State Department arrival data, a further 7,730 arrived between October 2025 and the end of June 2026 alone, all but a handful of them South African. That is more than 8,000 people in just over a year. In May 2026, the Trump administration raised the annual cap on the resettlement programme from 7,500 to 17,500, citing what it called an unforeseen emergency, to make room for thousands more.
That single episode says something about a wider pattern. Raise a concern about government policy as a white South African, and there is a real chance the response is not engagement with the substance of what was said, but a framing that casts the person as nostalgic for apartheid.
WHAT SOUTH AFRICANS ACTUALLY THINK ABOUT TRANSFORMATION
The ANC has treated black economic empowerment as close to untouchable for three decades. But according to the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation’s South African Reconciliation Barometer, 54 percent of South Africans now want B-BBEE phased out, and two thirds say the use of racial categories does more harm than good. That is not a fringe position. It is the majority.
Crucially, the same study found that South Africans are not rejecting the underlying goal. More than three quarters of white South Africans, and more than 80 percent of black, Indian and coloured South Africans, agree that a racially representative workforce should remain a national priority. The objection is to the mechanism, not the aim.
The clearest evidence of why comes from inside government itself. The state commissioned Professor William Gumede of the Wits School of Governance to assess the policy, and his findings were stark. “Conservatively, R1 trillion has been moved between under 100 people since 1994,” Gumede found, describing a system in which the same politically connected individuals have been “empowered and re-empowered over and over.” Gumede is not arguing against empowerment. He wants millions of black South Africans with meaningful capital each, rather than a small group of billionaires, which makes his critique of the current model harder to dismiss as ideological.
The underlying numbers explain the frustration. Black unemployment sits at 35.8 percent against 8.1 percent for white South Africans, and white households still earn close to five times what black households earn on average, according to Stats SA figures cited by the Presidency itself. Three decades in, transformation policy has produced some narrowing of relative income by race, but the core gap it was designed to close remains enormous, and youth unemployment has continued to rise in the meantime.
NOT JUST THE ANC
It would be a mistake to treat this as an ANC only story. The EFF and MK Party are liberation movements in the same mould, and in some respects more rigid on transformation than the ANC itself. When Communications Minister Solly Malatsi proposed easing B-BBEE ownership requirements to allow investment in the ICT sector, it was not the ANC that mounted the strongest resistance. MK demanded a minimum 30 percent black ownership threshold, and the EFF called the proposal a betrayal that would see “transformation” eroded “in the interests of white capital and Western imperialism.” Ramaphosa had initially supported the reform. His own coalition partners on the left pulled him back from it.
All three parties treat transformation the same way: not as a policy that can be debated, adjusted or concluded once it achieves its goals, but as an article of faith. Question it, and the response is rarely a policy argument. It is an accusation of betrayal, or nostalgia for apartheid.
That is the deeper problem, and it goes beyond any single party. It is a governing culture, inherited from liberation struggle politics, that has never fully made the transition to treating policy disagreement as legitimate rather than as a threat to the movement itself.
Until South African voters, across all three of these parties, accept that this culture is the actual obstacle to progress, the country cannot change direction. The ANC broke South Africa, and on the evidence available, it is not going to be the one that fixes it. Neither will the parties competing to offer a more committed version of the same approach.
