For almost three decades, South Africa was offered as the polite exception to the African liberation movement problem.
The ANC, we were told, proved that a liberation movement could become a democratic governing party without swallowing the state, corrupting the republic, or treating voters as permanent debtors to history.
The irony now is that South Africans are being forced to liberate themselves politically from the very movement that once claimed liberation as its moral inheritance. This is not a post-ANC argument, because South Africa is not yet in a post-ANC moment. It is an argument about the unfinished work of loosening the liberator’s grip on the republic.
Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola and Eritrea each offered versions of the same warning. The details differed, but the disease was the same: liberation movements that helped defeat colonial or minority rule hardened into custodians of the state, turned historical legitimacy into entitlement, blurred the line between party and government, and treated opposition as an insult to the struggle rather than a normal democratic alternative. South Africa, apparently, was supposed to be different.
The ANC had fought apartheid, entered constitutional politics, accepted elections, sat in Parliament, governed through formal institutions, allowed opposition parties to exist, and operated under a Constitution that restrained some of the worst instincts of one-party dominance. To many observers, that was enough. The party’s repeated electoral victories were not treated as warning signs. They were treated as confirmation that the ANC had successfully completed the journey from liberation movement to democratic party.
It was always too generous a reading. What South Africa has had is not proof that liberation movements become healthy democratic parties. It has had proof that a complex system, filled with courts, commissions, opposition parties, journalists, civil society organisations, factions, donors, lawyers, activists, opportunists and competing elites, can delay the full cost of liberation movement rule. Sometimes that delay comes through principle. Sometimes it comes through institutional survival. Sometimes it comes through self-interest. Sometimes it comes because one part of the elite has an interest in checking another part of the elite. None of it should be romanticised.
The ANC has not escaped the habits of liberation politics. It has carried them into government, dressed them in constitutional language, and spent the past three decades proving, slowly and painfully, that the liberation movement problem was not solved in South Africa. It was merely better disguised for a time.
The 2024 election has made the evasion harder to sustain. The ANC has lost the outright majority it held since 1994 and now governs in an arrangement it would once have regarded as almost unthinkable. The party has not been removed from power completely, but it has been stripped of the old assumption that it is the natural centre of South African political life. Voters have not merely punished a party. They have punctured a mythology whose consequences are still playing out.
It would be a mistake, however, to treat this as if the ANC has already been removed from power. It has not. The party remains the largest force in national politics, still leads the national executive, still shapes the language of government, still governs outright in much of the country, and still sits inside coalition arrangements where its habits do not simply disappear because other parties are now in the room. The so-called Government of National Unity has changed the arithmetic of power, but it has not yet changed the deeper grammar of the state. Anyone who reads government communication in this period can still hear the old voice: transformation, dignity, developmental mandates, national plans, social cohesion, inclusive growth, state-led correction, and the familiar assumption that government must manage, announce, approve, coordinate, intervene and moralise across almost every sphere of life.
That mythology has lasted far longer than it deserved, protected by the narrow argument that South Africa remains democratic because the formal processes of democracy remain intact. Elections are held. Parties campaign. Courts rule. Newspapers criticise. Parliament sits. The Constitution endures. All of that matters in the narrow sense, but it also allows many people to avoid the more uncomfortable question of what is happening to the substance of the state while the procedures of democracy remain in place.
The answer is visible everywhere. Municipalities collapse while the language of transformation remains loud. State-owned enterprises are hollowed out while the party speaks of developmental mandates. Cadres are deployed into public institutions as if the state exists to absorb the movement’s loyalists. Corruption is treated as a recurring embarrassment rather than a political culture. State capture is discussed as if it descended from somewhere outside the governing party, when in truth it has fed on habits the ANC normalised long before the Guptas became a national shorthand for rot.
This is not an accident sitting awkwardly beside ANC rule, but part of the logic of liberation movement rule. The ANC has never become an ordinary political party. It enters elections, yes. It occupies Parliament, yes. It forms governments, passes budgets, appoints ministers and speaks the language of constitutionalism. But in its own imagination it remains something larger than a party and, in many ways, more dangerous than one. It is the movement. It is the custodian of the struggle. It is the author of freedom. It is the moral owner of the democratic order.
That is why the distinction between party and state remains so fragile. The state is not approached as a public trust temporarily administered on behalf of citizens. It is treated as the terrain over which the movement has earned authority. The public service becomes a site of deployment. Public entities become extensions of political influence. Public money becomes surrounded by networks of comrades, loyalists, fixers, donors, factions and tender-seekers. The party does not have to formally abolish democracy to degrade the republic. It only has to behave as though the state and the movement were born from the same historical entitlement.
This is how the movement that opened the gate began to claim the house. It did not need to declare the state its property. It only had to treat public institutions, public money, public appointments and public memory as though they flowed naturally from the movement’s historical claim.
The Constitution has not prevented this. It has often given the country a vocabulary through which failure can be managed, litigated, explained, delayed and moralised. It helps preserve the formal processes of democracy, but it does not prevent the slow corrosion of the state by a liberation movement that treats public power as inheritance. It has not saved South Africa from liberation politics. It has helped process the damage for longer than many are willing to admit.
This is where the old liberation vocabulary remains so useful. “Our people.” “The struggle.” “The revolution.” “Transformation.” “The National Democratic Revolution.” “The movement.” “Historical mission.” “Counter-revolutionary forces.” “The Morogoro Declaration.” “Through the Eye of a Needle.” “The Freedom Charter.” “The disciplined member.” “Exile.” “The masses.” The stale internal language that still preoccupies ANC minds. At some point, the words stop being memory and become cover. They allow an exhausted movement to keep presenting itself as morally alive. They allow failures of governance to be wrapped in the language of unfinished liberation. They allow ordinary criticism to be treated as hostility to transformation. They allow the ANC to speak as if South Africans are not citizens judging a government, but beneficiaries expected to remember who delivered them.
The vote, in that political imagination, is never merely a mandate. It is tribute. The citizen is not simply asked to choose. He or she is expected to be grateful. That is the poison in liberation politics. It turns history into a claim. It turns sacrifice into entitlement. It turns the party into a custodian rather than a contestant. It treats opposition not as a normal democratic alternative, but as an insult to the movement’s moral standing. It allows those who govern badly to speak as though their past virtue should soften judgement on their present failure.
South Africans are told, again and again, to separate the ANC’s historical role from its governing record. But that separation is absurd. A party does not govern in memory. It governs in the present. It governs through police stations, hospitals, schools, water systems, roads, municipalities, electricity supply, public procurement, border management, economic policy and the daily experience of citizens trying to live in the country it runs.
By that measure, the ANC’s liberation credentials become less relevant with every year in power. The struggle does not keep the lights on. Exile does not make municipalities functional. Prison does not prevent cadre deployment. Armed struggle does not produce ethical procurement. Slogans do not stop corruption. Revolutionary songs do not make communities safe. The memory of sacrifice does not build a capable state.
Instead, South Africa has the familiar liberation movement package, only softened and complicated by a constitutional order that can slow the damage, process the damage, litigate the damage, and discuss the damage, but not prevent the damage. Entitlement. Cronyism. Internal factionalism spilling into the state. Public institutions treated as instruments of party power. A governing elite that can talk endlessly about the poor while presiding over the systems that keep them trapped. A political class fluent in grievance and clumsy in delivery. A movement that claims to speak for “our people” while making ordinary life harder for the very people in whose name it speaks.
South Africa has been spared some of the more obvious outcomes seen elsewhere, but not because liberation politics is healthier here. It has been spared because the ANC has never been able to close the system completely. Courts sometimes resist. The press sometimes exposes. Civil society sometimes litigates. Opposition parties sometimes force the issue. Internal factions, external interests and institutional survival instincts sometimes block one another. Some of this is principled. Some of it is accidental. Some of it is self-interested. Some of it is merely one part of the elite checking another part of the elite.
That should not be romanticised, because these actors do not prove that the system is healthy. In some ways, they become part of the poisoned chalice. Their presence makes the decay look manageable. Their interventions create the impression that South Africa is self-correcting while ordinary people continue to live with collapsing municipalities, broken policing, failing services, corruption, unemployment and fear. They help keep the roof from collapsing all at once, but they also allow too many people to confuse delayed collapse with democratic strength.
The correction now underway is incomplete, but it is coming from voters, not from panels, commissions, institutional sermons, civil society statements, court papers and polite concern. It is coming from citizens who are withdrawing the tribute and beginning the harder work of liberating the republic from the liberator.
That is the part the political class should sit with. The voter, so often patronised, so often spoken for, so often treated as a passive recipient of liberation history, is doing what many of the country’s supposedly sophisticated institutions have failed to do decisively. The voter has looked at the ANC’s record and reduced its power. The voter does not need a seminar to explain state failure. The voter lives it. The voter does not need a panel to explain corruption. The voter sees its consequences. The voter does not need a constitutional lecture on accountability. The voter is using the one instrument still available and cutting the movement down to size.
The ANC has had time, legitimacy, institutional inheritance, international goodwill, moral capital and repeated electoral mandates. It has had room to build a capable state. It has had room to deepen democratic citizenship. It has had room to show that liberation history can mature into disciplined, ethical governance. Instead, it continues to show that liberation movements do what liberation movements so often do. They preserve the memory of struggle while losing the discipline of public service. They turn yesterday’s sacrifice into today’s claim. They speak of the people while building systems that serve the connected. They treat the state as something to be occupied, not something to be stewarded.
When the public withdraws its faith, they behave as though the voters have forgotten history rather than remembered the present. That is why the lesson should be clear by now: liberation movements should retire at the gate of statecraft.
They may deserve honour for helping to destroy an unjust order. They may deserve monuments, memorials, chapters in textbooks, days of remembrance and the gratitude owed to those who fought when fighting was necessary. But historical honour is not a governing qualification. It is not a permanent electoral deposit. It is not a licence to administer the state indefinitely. It is not proof of competence, ethics or seriousness.
There is a difference between liberating a country and governing one. The first may require courage, sacrifice, mobilisation, underground networks, discipline and defiance. The second requires humility, competence, institutional respect, financial discipline, administrative capacity and a willingness to be judged by results rather than memory. The habits that sustain a movement in struggle can become dangerous once that movement takes power. Secrecy becomes opacity. Loyalty becomes cadre protection. Discipline becomes factional enforcement. Moral certainty becomes arrogance. Revolutionary language becomes a substitute for thought.
The freedom fighter does not automatically become a public servant. Too often, he becomes a custodian of entitlement, still speaking of sacrifice while fighting for tenders, positions, influence and proximity to the state. The enemy is no longer apartheid, colonialism or oppression. The enemy becomes accountability.
The ANC is not the exception. It is the warning in slower motion. Its decay is more constitutional, more contested and more restrained than in some other places, but it is decay all the same. It proves that liberation politics does not need to abolish elections to damage democracy. It only needs to hollow out the state while asking citizens to keep applauding the past.
The 2024 election has not solved this problem, and it would be foolish to pretend that it has. It has done something more modest but still important. It has ended the idea that the ANC is untouchable, but it has not ended ANC power. It has reminded the party that voters are not a historical possession, but it has not yet freed the state from the habits, language and assumptions that the ANC embedded into it over three decades. It has opened the possibility that South Africa may finally begin to move beyond the liberation movement as the organising centre of political life, even if that possibility remains contested, unstable and far from guaranteed.
The myth is broken, but the work is not finished. The ANC is not proof that liberation movements can naturally become normal democratic parties. It is proof that a country can spend decades managing the damage caused by a movement that never fully accepts that the state is not its inheritance.
Liberation politics may be useful in ending an unjust order. After that, it becomes a burden. Once freedom has been achieved, the movement must step aside and allow the republic to breathe. If it refuses, democracy must eventually do what sentiment, lawfare, commissions, panels and polite institutional concern cannot: liberate the country from the liberator’s claim over it.
A liberation movement may open the gate to freedom. It should not then move into the house and call it its own.
