The ANC’s faction fighting has become the biggest threat to democracy in South Africa since Nelson Mandela’s election as president 27 years ago.
This is the view of Palesa Morudu, a South African writer who has published an article with the United States’ Wilson Centre on 27 years of democracy in SA.
Morudu says President Cyril Ramaphosa is “in a race against time to try and regain total control of the ANC ship.”
While the ANC’s factions fight it out, the weakened state can’t deal with the traumas ripping through the country. “Racialised inequality, violent crime and the violence of poverty (whose victims are poor Black people and Black women in particular), and fraying social cohesion).”
All this, she says, is “fertile ground for those who seek to carve up society based on racial and tribal identities, stepping away from Mandela’s nonracial legacy.”
Morudu divides up the past 27 years into four chapters:
- Reconciliation and reconstruction under Mandela
- Institution building and the creation of a “large post-apartheid nonracial middle class” under Thabo Mbeki
- State capture, under Jacob Zuma, where much of the ANC supported him in weakening state institutions to enrich themselves.
- Renewal under Ramaphosa
She says time will tell if Ramaphosa’s “renewal” means the reversal of state capture, or a continued unravelling of the state.
