The ANC is broke. Not cash-strapped, not merely struggling, but structurally bankrupt. Salaries go unpaid and unpaid debts pile up. Yet the party now faces the gargantuan cost of mounting a nationwide campaign for the 2026/27 local government elections. It cannot afford this, not even close.
For an organisation that has defined itself as the natural governing force of South Africa, this is nothing short of an existential crisis.
In this crisis, the ANC is for sale. Not through any public contract or open declaration, but in the darker, cynical sense that desperation opens the door to negotiable principles and price. When the survival of the party becomes the only shared priority among its factions, the barriers to outside influence weaken dramatically. And if the ANC is up for sale, then the question is not whether someone will buy influence over it, but who.
Many assume the buyers are already obvious. China, Russia, and Iran have spent years perfecting their transactional approaches across Africa: loans, covert patronage. And tremors across the political landscape already point to an Iranian deal. Yet, in the ANC’s hour of desperation, there may be another surprise contender.
The United States, under a Trump administration that instinctively views politics as a marketplace, could well see the ANC as an asset worth acquiring. Intensely risky, but with enormous national, regional, and continental consequences. And possibly vintage Trump.
The idea of a backroom deal between a Trumpian America and an NDR ANC might sound absurd to those who know the ANC’s reflexive hostility to Washington, its anti-West rhetoric, its Cold War baggage. But the party today is less a movement with momentum and ideas to tip the balance of forces, than a federation of paralysing panic.
And the resources of its more orthodox backroom benefactors are already being brutally drained by two current wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and a brewing one off the Chinese coast.
In this concoction of distress and desperation, the pressures on the ANC, even with its warring factions, might prove seductive.
Reason to tolerate it
Each ANC faction could read a covert American lifeline through its own lens, and each might find a reason to tolerate it. ANC National Democratic Revolution (NDR) ideologues might justify a tactical retreat, recalling how they grumbled yet went along with compromises between 1994 and 2007 to preserve the NDR.
ANC institutionalists might embrace it as a way to rescue the party they regard as South Africa’s ultimate source of legitimacy and esteem. ANC kleptocrats might see it as a way to keep procurement and BEE patronage networks humming. ANC paternalists, who still believe the ANC holds the historic right to govern South Africa as a quasi-religious conviction, might welcome the chance to reassert the strength of that claim through the ballot box. And the dwindling circle of ANC pragmatists might recognise it as the only viable means of keeping the organisation afloat.
Together, these impulses may just be strong enough to override the ANC’s entrenched anti-American instincts. When a party is staring down oblivion, ideological dogma might just become negotiable enough.
And in a contest for the ANC’s loyalty, the Americans have a unique advantage. They can outspend Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran, not by attempting to bankroll the South African state, but by providing just enough to stabilise the ANC’s finances, keep its campaign machinery alive, and ensure its negotiated gratitude flows westward at a crucial moment testing the unipolar post-Berlin Wall, and the post-War-on-Terror geopolitical hierarchy. Historic precedent exists for US funnelling of funds across all boundaries, legal, ideological, and geopolitical.
Warring factions
It is a sinister prospect. It might just be a credible one. The ANC is cornered, desperate, and facing the fight of its life in the 2026/27 elections. The only thing its warring factions have in common is that the party must survive.
That survival, in the cynical economy of global influence, is now a commodity. And in the transactional world of Trump’s Washington, there may be buyers ready to make the offer and outbid, in the Trumpian style of shaking up the global settlement in America’s favour through the weaponisation of trade and economics, the ANC’s historic blessers.
[Image: Combines material from M. H. from Pixabay and https://www.anc1912.org.za/]
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