Particularly after last week’s elections, South Africa’s former “liberation movement” is no longer an untouchable holy cow. It played a role in ending Apartheid, but so did the international community, organised liberals, business groups, and a reconfiguration of Afrikaner politics after the death of Hendrik Verwoerd.
In a recent column, the civil servant Veli Mbele correctly notes that the Free Market Foundation (FMF) was established in 1975, at the height of Apartheid, as “an institution committed to advancing free market capitalism in South Africa”.
He explains that its founders were responding to what they regarded as the Apartheid state’s “creeping” control over economic activity, and that the organisation described itself in 1976 as the only body in the country with the single goal of advancing capitalism.
From this accurate starting point, however, Mbele leaves the realm of constructive discourse and recycles worn revolutionary rhetoric.
Tired rhetoric
Mbele contends that the FMF’s central concern was “state regulation of markets, rather than apartheid as a political and economic system founded on racial dispossession”. He adds that this objection “largely reduced apartheid’s injustice to barriers to individual economic participation” and “did not begin with a demand to restore land, wealth and power to the black majority”.
The FMF, in his account, sought to separate capitalism from Apartheid and to treat private property, free enterprise, and limited government as universal principles “detached from the racial history through which wealth and property had been accumulated”.
After 1994, the FMF applied the same standard to oppose race-based legislation, Black Economic Empowerment, expropriation without compensation, and restrictive labour policy, while supporting privatisation. The result, Mbele argues, has been to depict measures of redress as threats to freedom while normalising inherited concentrations of land and capital.
Consistently pro-liberty
There is no substantive distinction, outside the rhetorical framing Mbele prefers, between Apartheid as a system of racial dispossession, and Apartheid as extensive state regulation of the private sphere.
Apartheid was precisely that: a comprehensive apparatus of statutory control over where people could live, work, trade, own, and whom they could associate with, enforced on a racial basis. Capitalism is the precise opposite of this.
The FMF’s objection was never limited to interference in “markets” in isolation, but to the state’s intrusion into the private sphere of individuals and voluntary associations – the same sphere that Apartheid invaded and that post-Apartheid race laws continue to invade.
That the FMF continues, half a century later, to oppose state-enforced racial discrimination should be obvious, not presented as some kind of moral outrage. This consistency makes me proud to remain associated with the FMF, even as I recently shifted from my role as Head of Policy there to lead the AfriForum Institute for Federalism.
Policies are to be judged by their effects and their compatibility with the principles of human dignity, constitutionalism, and freedom, not by the bare intentions that their authors choose to highlight.
The premise that the old discrimination was malicious while the new is well-intended (because “trust us”) is one that the FMF and the consensus in the policy-studies community have never accepted. Intention is usually merely interesting, nothing else.
Freedom versus socialism
The suggestion that the FMF “ignored” racial and so-called “land injustice” is likewise unfounded.
The black population of South Africa never possessed collective political “power” that could simply be “restored”. It is the stuff of fantasy and historical ignorance.
What was required – and what is still required – is the restoration where applicable, and often the new establishment of secure property title that Apartheid and subsequent practice at municipal level have denied.
Through its Khaya Lam Project, the FMF has facilitated the transfer of more than twenty thousand municipal properties into the hands of their long-term occupants, converting insecure tenure into tradeable freehold at no cost to the recipients.
That is practical restoration of title, not the forcible redistribution of other people’s wealth according to a preferred socialist distribution matrix.
The FMF is anti-socialist precisely because it regards wealth as something to be generated freely, not merely reallocated coercively. The annual Economic Freedom of the World index, which the FMF co-publishes with the Fraser Institute, places beyond serious dispute the correlation between economic freedom (secure property, voluntary exchange, limited government) and broad-based prosperity.
Socialism has a consistent record of failure, whereas capitalism has a consistent record of producing the material dividends that make luxurious redistribution debates possible in the first place.
Mbele’s column nowhere acknowledges that the concepts of economic “inequality” and redistribution that he treats as self-evident are nineteenth-century European imports, just as is the free-market framework he criticises.
He knows that if he did acknowledge this reality, the implication he prefers – that we are dealing with a colonial import (capitalism) versus an authentic African phenomenon (socialism) – would fall away, and we would be left only with the question: between socialism and capitalism, which one actually produces good results?
The answer troubles Mbele.
Herman Mashaba and politics after LGE 2026
Mbele’s piece is framed as a critique of Herman Mashaba, whom he portrays as a hardcore capitalist opposed to redistribution and race-based policy.
If that portrait were accurate, South Africa’s municipalities would be in a much better position than they are in fact, after last week.
Mashaba chaired the FMF’s board from 2012 to 2014, and for a time identified with free market policies. He long ago left that position, much to my dismay.
His present political stance is neither capitalism nor socialism, but the advancement of Herman Mashaba. When it suits him to criticise race law or rent-seeking, he will do so. When it suits him to defend race law and rent-seeking, he does so with glee.
One fortunate consequence of the 2026 municipal elections – despite Mashaba’s very good showing – is that the brand of politics Mbele represents appears to be in retreat.
The National Democratic Revolution (NDR) bloc – together the ANC, EFF, MK, and company – fell sharply and, for the first time, commands only approximately half the electorate. Even if the SACP, the lone success story in the bloc and now the eighth-largest party in the country, were to be reincorporated into the ANC, its vote share would still have declined.
Parties opposed to or agnostic about the NDR programme recorded gains.
This means that South Africa’s political temperature has, mercifully, declined. That is a development for which there is reason to be positive, even if the municipal coalitions that follow prove messy.
The days of treating a particular political tradition as sacrosanct are numbered.
The principles the Free Market Foundation has defended since 1975 – individual liberty, secure property, limited government, the absence of racial criteria in law, and the generation of wealth through voluntary exchange – have a clearer path ahead than they have had for some time.
[Image: by ASphotostudio]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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