As the ANC grapples with its legacy and the spectre of corruption, the journey from liberation to criminalisation paints a complex picture of contemporary South African politics. In 2026 the party stands at a crossroads, where the ideals of its founders clash with the stark reality of its current leadership, raising questions about its future and the integrity of its mission. In his majestic history of the ANC, The Founders, the historian André Odendaal writes of the party founders: “The early intellectuals and activists were political innovators, responding in courageous, often contradictory ways to the challenges of their times.
As one scholar has noted, ‘they journeyed back and forth across vast political, cultural and personal chasms’ to engineer new discourses and paths in politics… The actions and aspirations of the first generations, shaped by their time and place, were realistic, often insightful and forward-looking.” Odendaal chronicles the religious leaders, the newspaper editors, intellectuals and landowners who came together to form the South African Native National Congress in a church in Bloemfontein in 1912 – the forbear of the ANC. The culture of that generation persisted through the various phases of the Struggle against apartheid and into the first years of democracy, exemplified by its presidents: Nelson Mandela was an apparent heir of the founders, Thabo Mbeki more (and sometimes less so); Kgalema Motlanthe was cut from the same suit and so is Cyril Ramaphosa – you can see it in his bookish style of speech and his statesmanlike bearing. There are younger people in this mould, but on the whole the founders’ culture is no longer dominant in the ANC.
The story of 2026 will be about the local government elections, but also about whether the ANC will continue its decline, as liberation movements tend to do. Or whether it can reverse its trajectory as it said it would when the National General Council closed at the end of 2025. Laced through the party’s “base document” to inform its agenda at the National General Council is a lament on the quality of its leadership and membership, and the distance between the rich cadre-ship the ANC was able to nurture for most of its history, until things soon turned after 1994.
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In his book on the topic, Liberation and Corruption: Why Freedom Movements Fail,Peter Hainremembers Mandela’s words in 1997: “One of the negative features is the emergence of careerism in our ranks. Many among our members see… the ANC as a means to advance their personal ambitions to attain positions of power and access to resources for their own individual gratification.” Since 1994, it has been beset by at least 40 major corruption scandals that have sapped its history and now threaten its future. This is where political leaders at all levels use their positions to extract rent from the state and then earn favours or funds to sustain their lifestyles or support their political ambitions.
It’s so rife that trying to root it out is existential for the ANC. This has meant that while Ramaphosa’s promise of renewal has brought some reform to the state, in the ANC it has enjoyed limited success. In fact, the revelations by KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi in July catalysed the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry and the parliamentary ad hoc inquiry, both of which have revealed that patronage politics, or patrimonialism, has entrenched itself in the ANC in deeper and more dangerous ways.
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