By Mzoxolo Mpolase
Life in South Africa is about to become much harder, and this becomes clear when reading Ivor Chipkin’s analysis of how the ANC has moved its idea of revolution into the international arena because it can no longer realise it at home.
Ivor Chipkin’s recent article, From revolution to anti-imperialism: Does South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel help resolve the organic crisis within the ANC?, offers one of the clearest explanations for the ANC’s changing political behaviour. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Israel is, for Chipkin, not simply a legal matter but a political expression of this shift.
His argument is that the ANC, and by extension the state it leads, whether governing alone or in coalition, has effectively shifted its idea of revolution out of the domestic sphere and into the international one because it no longer knows how to perform that role at home. The institutions that once gave the party coherence have weakened. The state is fragmented. The internal unity that sustained its “National Democratic Revolution” has faded. According to Chipkin, the ANC now expresses revolutionary purpose through anti-imperialist politics abroad precisely because it can no longer enact anything resembling transformation within South Africa.
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That is Chipkin’s argument, and it is persuasive.
But I believe the implications go further than even he sets out.
When Governments Fail, They Look Outward
If a governing party relocates its sense of purpose to the international arena because the domestic space has collapsed, then South Africa is entering a stage that many countries have known before us. This is why life in South Africa is about to become much harder. Anti-imperialist activism may feel dramatic and morally charged, but it is also the hallmark of governments that have reached the limits of their ability to govern at home. Political science has long shown that when ruling parties lose domestic capacity, they turn outward to find meaning. It is diversionary foreign policy. It is the externalisation of identity. It is late-stage behaviour.
Zimbabwe is the clearest example in our region. When Robert Mugabe’s government could no longer fix the economy or maintain state capacity, it discovered renewed purpose in external confrontation. Anti-imperialism became a daily script. Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe. It was repeated with great conviction, even as the country slid into collapse. The slogans created the sense of a righteous national struggle, but they did not rescue the state. They did not prevent sanctions, stop the hyperinflation or slow the exodus of millions. They created the illusion of control while the real decline deepened.
Venezuela followed the same logic. Nicolás Maduro inherited an economy in crisis and turned to permanent anti-imperialist rhetoric to hold his political coalition together. For a time it worked. Supporters felt they were defending their country against outside interference. But the strategy contributed nothing to rebuilding institutions or repairing the economy. The country was eventually overwhelmed by hyperinflation, sanctions, mass migration and a near-total collapse of state capacity.
These examples matter because South Africa is now displaying the same political symptoms. Chipkin’s reading helps explain why. His point is that the ANC’s turn to anti-imperialism is not a position of strength but a response to its internal crisis. The movement no longer derives meaning from domestic governance, because it cannot govern effectively. It no longer sees itself as the agent of transformation at home, so it has begun to express its revolutionary identity abroad. The ICJ case is part of that shift.
South Africa’s Drift Into Late-Stage Behaviour
Where I go further is in saying that this turn is not only a sign of an identity crisis. It is a late-stage political behaviour, typical of governments that have exhausted their governing capacity. When a ruling party cannot stabilise its institutions, cannot deliver basic services, cannot grow the economy and cannot resolve its internal conflicts, it often turns to grand ideological battles beyond its borders. These fights offer emotional certainty at a time when the domestic environment feels uncontrollable. They give leaders a sense of purpose that the real conditions of the country no longer supply.
You can already see the early signs of this playing out. The recent G20 episode is an example. South Africa held the presidency, yet managed to turn what should have been a straightforward diplomatic moment into an unnecessary confrontation. The United States declined to attend and then criticised the country publicly, citing long-standing concerns amplified by Trump’s claims about human-rights abuses and a so-called white genocide in South Africa. South Africa responded with indignation. It is not the incident itself that matters. It is what it reveals: a governing party stumbling into needless international quarrels because it has lost its grounding at home. These fights do not add a cent to the lives of ordinary South Africans. They are symptoms of a government performing ideology because it can no longer deliver governance.
This is not to say that Trump’s white genocide narrative is right or true. It is not. But a pragmatic government would have handled it differently. Even the most outlandish claim from a global power should be managed with strategic calm. You take the person into confidence. You lower the temperature. You stabilise the relationship, not because you agree, but because the consequences of mishandling it are severe. South Africa is not in a position to perform defiance for its own sake. And part of the reason these talking points find oxygen is because the ANC has failed to lift the previously racially oppressed black majority, relying on policy choices such as Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BEE or BBBEE) that fixate on racial allocation rather than broad-based economic expansion. Real upliftment would have come from growth: factories, manufacturing, exports, jobs in every town and township, an economy that pulls people out of indignity through participation, not patronage. Instead, the ANC pursued policies that create neither growth nor inclusion, yet still carry a racial framing that right-leaning actors abroad can distort. They blend these policies with South Africa’s lawlessness and selectively focus on white victims of crime to manufacture the fiction of a so-called white genocide. Competent governance removes that fodder. The current government supplies it.
The Domestic Cost of Externalised Politics
This is why life in South Africa is about to become much harder. The ANC’s externalised revolutionary politics do not address the failures that ordinary people experience daily. They do not repair Transnet. They do not stabilise Eskom. They do not revive the economy, strengthen policing or restore institutional integrity. They simply give the governing party a sense of historic purpose while it avoids its own responsibilities.
Chipkin identifies the cause.
The consequences fall on the rest of us.
A government that relocates its meaning to global ideological struggles is a government that has already conceded defeat in the domestic arena. South Africa is now living through that shift. The rhetoric will grow louder, the moral appeals more dramatic and the international battles more intense. But the problems at home will remain, and without real governance they will worsen.
The Final Verdict
This is what lies ahead. A harder country. A weaker state. A government speaking loudly abroad because it can no longer act meaningfully at home. The years ahead will not be shaped by the ICJ matter itself, but by what it reveals. We are being governed by a party that has replaced domestic repair with international performance. And in every country where this pattern has emerged, the outcome has been the same.
Hardship, decline and a slow drift into isolation, long after the slogans lose their power.
