There are conversations that feel like an interview and then there are conversations that feel like a diagnosis. My recent engagement with political economist and analyst Moeletsi Mbeki on Power FM was the latter: a measured, unsentimental assessment of where South Africa finds itself at the end of 2025 — tired, anxious, polarised and yet still strangely hopeful. As we looked back on last year while facing the uncertainty of 2026, one message landed with particular force: our national crisis is not merely about failing departments or broken municipalities it is about the weakening of the political engines meant to drive democratic progress.
In our discussion, Mbeki offered a perspective many South Africans do not often foreground when speaking about institutional collapse. He argued that the most important institution in a democracy is not the public service, nor parliament, nor even the courts, but political parties. Parties, he insisted, are the “fundamental driver of success of democracy,” because they are entrusted by citizens to provide leadership, craft policy and carry the collective ambitions of society.
When parties lose their vision, coherence and legitimacy, the state itself begins to wobble. That framing matters, because it shifts the question from “why are our institutions failing?” to “why are the builders of our institutions failing?” In other words, it is not enough to demand better outcomes from government departments while ignoring the political ecosystem that appoints, directs and sometimes protects incompetence. It is a hard truth, but one worth facing: the decline of the state often begins with the decline of political imagination.
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Mbeki’s analysis placed South Africa’s present moment inside a longer historical arc, one that stretches back a century. He argued that for the past 100 years the country has in effect been shaped by two dominant nationalist political projects: Afrikaner nationalism, led by the National Party from 1924-94 and African nationalism, led by the ANC from 1994-24. The turning point, he said, is that South Africans have now rejected nationalism as a governing framework.
The 1994 election ended one nationalist era while the 2024 election signalled the exhaustion of the next. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, the proposition is significant: South Africa is not merely going through a political cycle, it may be going through an ideological transition. That transition comes with instability, because the collapse of an old order is always noisier than the construction of a new one.
It also comes with opportunity, because the end of a dominant narrative creates space for new voices, new coalitions and new forms of accountability. [Moeletsi Mbeki] believes 2026 will shift from anxiety to construction: a search for what replaces nationalism and a collective effort to build a new vision for the country. One of the sharpest critiques Mbeki levelled was directed at the ANC’s internal fragmentation and lack of renewal.
He pointed to successive breakaways over the years, from Gen Bantu Holomisa to Mosiuoa Lekota, Julius Malema and Jacob Zuma, describing a party splintering “in front of our eyes”. What is most damaging, in his view, is not only the factionalism but the absence of a credible forward-looking vision. A party that continues to recycle yesterday’s policies while the country bleeds today cannot be surprised when citizens withdraw their consent.
This is where leadership becomes more than a personality contest. It becomes a matter of national survival. The late Vaclav Havel once wrote that “the tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.” South Africa’s tragedy is that we know what is wrong — corruption, unemployment, poor governance, inequality — yet we sometimes behave as though it is normal, permanent and unchangeable.
But a nation cannot outsource its future to habit. The conversation also explored what Mbeki calls South Africa’s “crossroads”. While many countries experience political turbulence as catastrophe, he argued that South Africa’s strength is its capacity to reject what no longer works and search for alternatives without descending into widespread political violence.
He contrasted South Africa with other parts of the region where citizens have been killed for voting against governing parties. Here, he said, people can vote freely, argue loudly and contest power without being murdered for their choices. That democratic resilience, even when messy, is a national asset we must defend.
I found this point both sobering and encouraging. Sobering, because it reminds us that democracy is not guaranteed. Encouraging, because it confirms that despite our fatigue South Africa still possesses the institutional DNA for renewal.
As I reflected on the discussion afterwards, one thought stayed with me: “A country does not collapse in one dramatic moment, it collapses in small permissions we give to dysfunction.” And yet the opposite is also true: a country does not heal through one big speech; it heals through small decisions that restore trust. A key tension we examined was whether the rise of multiple political parties strengthens or weakens democracy. Some argue that fragmentation, particularly of the “black vote”, dilutes political power and delays transformation.
Mbeki’s response was that South Africa has moved into a new era where politics is shaped less by race and more by social class and economic interests. In his view, this shift is not a crisis but a sign of political maturation. The era of a unified liberation vote, he suggested, belonged to a particular historical moment, one anchored in opposition to apartheid. Now, citizens are beginning to organise politically around different material realities: working class, middle class, unemployed, business owners and more.
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