We come to the end of another year. This is the time, so conventional wisdom suggests, when people can revel in their joys or ponder their disappointments, and reflect on how to face them in the new year.
As it is for people, so it is for countries. It would be no exaggeration to say that 2025 has been an extraordinary time for South Africa. Last year, the great fact of the country’s politics since 1994 – the dominance of the ANC – was turned upside down. This year tested how South Africa would navigate this, and the durability of its coalition arrangement.
Well, it survived, with copious mutual mistrust and frequent recrimination among the members.
The Government of National Unity (a misnomer, but the sort of branding that has a resonance in South Africa) held together on purely comparative grounds. For the African National Congress and Democratic Alliance, their disdain for each other was exceeded only by their trepidation (for very different reasons) about a government incorporating the uMkhonto weSizwe Party or the Economic Freedom Fighters.
The ANC tried to continue with business as usual, with some success. President Ramaphosa used his presidential office to inflict a number of studied insults on the DA, notably by signing the Expropriation Act, and then announcing it over the head of the DA minister within whose portfolio it falls. The ANC deputy minister, by contrast, had apparently been kept up to speed.
The ANC had previously done the same thing with the signing into law of the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act (again, a matter of intense concern to the DA’s constituency, and over the head of the DA minister), and later in promulgating what amount to demographic quotas throughout the economy. (Those of us with memories long enough to remember the mid-1990s will recall that quotas were supposed to be off the table.) My assessment is that the ANC wanted to demonstrate to the DA who was really in charge, and to the DA’s supporters, that it was incapable of protecting them.
Showed the limits
Not always though. The battle of the budget was an important one, and showed the limits of the ANC’s freedom of action. The ANC-dominated executive can generally push ahead with a sectarian agenda – but it cannot defy the rules of arithmetic when it comes to assembling the requisite parliamentary majorities. As Tony Leon presciently observed, the post-election power the DA has found has been in the legislature rather than in the executive.
So, while the ANC attempts to plough ahead with its agenda, things just aren’t what they used to be. Yes, ruinous policy remains live, with plenty of doubling down on some of the worst and most counterproductive elements. But whether these can be forced through is now a matter of rather less certainty.
It was probably no coincidence that it was in the finance sphere – the site of the budget battle – that the ANC performed something of an implied climbdown, by declaring that removing tax credits on medical aids would be an assault on the middle class.
Public administration and state performance remain in crisis. The dire condition of the country’s municipalities and the inability of some of them to perform their most elementary functions received a great deal of attention.
In a moment of almost comical self-satire, President Ramaphosa declared that the condition of Johannesburg was “not pleasing”, an observation prompted less by empathy for its long-suffering residents than by concern for what G20 attendees would think. The city was given a hasty makeover – at least those parts that would be visible to its visitors – but no one seriously expected this to signal a turnaround.
For whatever it’s worth, last week many Joburgers (including residents of my own suburb) had to endure nil garbage collection. It was, the responsible city enterprise explained to residents, because they were introducing new service providers. Residents needed to understand that it would take time for them to become accustomed to the collection routes, so, sorry for the inconvenience. Well, at least the dignitaries have gone. (And as I write this, my suburb is suffering a power outage.)
The full sinister ignominy of state dysfunction was highlighted with claims by KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi of political meddling in police operations and the complicity of senior officers in organised crime. Two sets of hearings – one convened under Judge Mbuyiseli Madlanga, and the other by Parliament – proved a drip than a torrent of sordid allegations about the rot in the country’s law enforcement systems.
Resonates
In a sense it doesn’t matter if every allegation is correct. Each of them resonates. South Africa remains a chronically crime-wracked society, whose people have little faith in the state or the police to protect them. Afrobarometer’s 2022 polling (the full results for 2025 have not been released yet) found that three quarters of South Africans felt unsafe walking in their neighbourhoods, while close to two thirds felt that most or all of the country’s police officers were corrupt. Three quarters said they felt that police officers engaged in illegality “sometimes”.
As I was writing this, one of the witnesses who had testified before the Madlanga Commission in camera was murdered. It’s not an uncommon fate for whistleblowers in South Africa. The past year saw the fourth anniversary of the murder of Gauteng Health Department accounting officer Babita Deokaran, fresh light having been cast on the matter by the publication of Jeff Wicks’s book The Shadow State: Why Babita Deokaran Had to Die. Its very title encapsulates what has gone wrong in the country and what the consequences are.
The past year saw an uncharacteristic focus on South Africa’s standing in the world. Ascribe this to Donald Trump’s ability to dominate attention – and the fact that he paid South Africa more attention than any US president since 1994. Not the good kind, either. I’ve said before that there is a class of South African thought leaders revelling in this; it’s intoxicating to “fight Trump”.
For the South African government, this happened to land during its G20 presidency. Such events are a “happy place” for South African officialdom, allowing temporary respite from the grubby realities of actually managing the country it is responsible for.
Inevitable
The problem is that Trump’s animus builds on something that has been decades in the making; South Africa’s international positioning and the open loathing for the US by the ANC made this inevitable.
When President Ramaphosa said that “we offer the people of the United States nothing but goodwill and friendship”, I was reminded of a long-standing perspective in the ANC which splits “the people” of the US (those who formed the anti-apartheid movement, protested the Iraq war, and took part in the Black Lives Matter movement, not all US citizens) from its government, which is ‘the fount of all imperialist evil’. (When the President added that his administration valued the US government as a partner and shared values and interests with it, that is frankly belied by its words and actions.)
What concerns me is that there is very little evidence that South Africa’s authorities grasp this fact. There is no self-reflection, let alone any sense of responsibility for the state of a relationship that is now in tatters. This has come with a cost, too, in the 30% tariffs.
And I’m not just talking about holding positions that the US finds objectionable. (Our “principled foreign policy” is principled, after its own fashion, though not in the sense in which many of us might understand the idea of principle.) But I am talking about the corrosion of diplomatic capacity. If South Africa was going to take the positions it did with the attendant risk of alienating the governments of the countries from which most of its investment and a great deal of its trade came from (in the case of the US, on often concessionary terms), it needed to ensure that it had some other compelling offerings and avenues of influence. The “we’re special” school of diplomacy reached its sell-by date a long time ago.
In the event, not only could South Africa not offer enticing business opportunities and enticing returns on investment (nor, after the debacle with our deployment in the Democratic Republic of Congo, any help as a security partner), but its diplomatic corps suffers the same incapacity as the rest of its state system. It had long been remarked that South Africa’s embassy in Washington was missing in action, and the past year has taken this to new heights, with no ambassador to argue its case over a period in which relations plummeted. (And this was after the incumbent ambassador fired off a public denunciation of Trump. Valid or not, that’s an elementary mistake for any diplomat.)
Tanking global stature
The malaise in South Africa’s cities, the country’s inability to get to grips with crime, and its tanking global stature – all on show in 2025 – demonstrate a systems failure. As I wrote in a piece carried on BusinessLIVE, there is a potholed road that connects Johannesburg to Washington.
Anyway, as we close out the year, there have been some welcome green shoots, of which much has been made in recent weeks. Economic growth and investment numbers are showing a small lift. We haven’t had load-shedding for a while (although poorly-maintained infrastructure can compensate for that). There is some movement on getting private participation into infrastructure. And, perhaps most importantly, South Africa is off the Financial Action Task Force’s Grey List.
I have been heartened by the public debate over the last year on Black Economic Empowerment policy, one of the great policy holy cows. It’s hard to imagine that a mere five years ago, such scepticism would have been so prominently aired.
Perhaps we can build on this in the coming year. I fear, though, that our public life has become poisoned by an obsession with holding office as an end in itself. And many of us are now so jaded about the country’s repeated failures that we allow our political class to get away without consequences. And our failures are so deeply ingrained that they will defy any effort to excise them. Certainly, listening to the testimony about the state of policing, I shudder.
Official thinking
I shudder too at the sense of unreality that pervades so much official thinking. Chief here is the faith invested in the National Dialogue. It’s a ridiculous notion that we have some sort of preternatural ability to solve our problems through deliberation. It wasn’t true in the past, and as the fractious relationship between the GNU’s partners goes, it isn’t true now. But maybe for a national leadership of declining credibility and even fewer ideas, it’s all there is.
I also fear that a consequence of that dearth of ideas is a destructive doubling-down on policies that will only aggravate our situation. Brace for new Employment Equity demands in the new year: quotas in all but name, enforced by an army of petty officials for whom the demographic spreadsheet is the ultimate reality, and backed by fines that could put actual businesses out of business.
There are the new business-licensing proposals. I said of a similar idea in 2013 that this was a matter of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly – and they hadn’t quite identified the fly that needed killing. There is boundless hubris in this.
And, so, we close off the year. A year of opportunities lost, and some taken, though to my mind too many of the former and too few of the latter. We remain a country in trouble. But we ‘ve been there before, and a small consolation is that with different choices in 2026, who knows where we might be a year from now…
[Image: BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash]
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