Factions: The future of the ANC depends on whether its leaders like Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and President Cyril Ramaphosa can rise above petty
factionalism and embrace governance rooted in the rule of law. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy
South Africa’s 2024 general election did not merely dent the African National Congress (ANC); it shattered the myth of its invincibility.
Once the towering liberation giant that embodied the triumph over apartheid, the ANC limped into coalition politics with just 40.18% of the vote, its lowest tally in three decades.
This implosion is not merely a South African reckoning but a continental siren, warning of a broader unravelling.
Across Africa, the liberation aristocracies that once monopolised power — Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe, the MPLA in Angola, Frelimo in Mozambique and CCM in Tanzania — now peer into the same abyss of inevitable decline.
Their historic aura of sovereignty is eroding and in its place, looms the darker path of authoritarian relapse, where liberation credentials are weaponised to mask corruption, repression and the hollowing out of democratic promise.
The ANC’s fall is not an isolated stumble but the loudest alarm bell yet. The golden age of liberation monopolies is ending and the sense of eternal legitimacy, built on the sacrifices of anti-colonial struggle, is evaporating under the weight of corruption, generational disillusionment and urban discontent.
What is collapsing in South Africa is not just a party but a political model — and the idea that liberation credentials alone can indefinitely substitute for democratic renewal.
This moment demands to be read as a continental turning point. The ANC’s unravelling is a mirror held up to Africa’s liberation movements, exposing their fragility and foreshadowing a new era in which youth agency, urban frustration and demands for accountability will no longer be pacified by the nostalgia of struggle.
The liberation script, in its original form, is exhausted and the curtain is rising on a new and uncertain play.
South Africa’s 2024 general election marked the most dramatic rupture in the post-apartheid order. The ANC plunged from 57.5% and 230 seats in 2019 to 40.18% and 159 seats, stripped of its ability to govern alone for the first time since 1994.
This collapse exposed the fragility of its dominance, long corroded by corruption, scandals, state capture and patronage networks that enriched elites while citizens endured blackouts, water shortages and failing infrastructure.
Once synonymous with liberation, the ANC has become shorthand for mismanagement, its historic credentials drowned in graft.
Economic stagnation and staggering youth unemployment further eroded its credibility, leaving millions disillusioned.
Into this vacuum surged splinter forces: Cope after Polokwane, the EFF after Julius Malema’s expulsion and most recently, Jacob Zuma’s MK Party, which stunned the landscape with 14.58% and 58 seats, cannibalising the ANC’s base.
Polokwane in 2007 remains the watershed that dethroned Thabo Mbeki, elevated Zuma and entrenched factionalism as the ANC’s defining feature.
Changing of the guard: Leaders of former liberation movements – who fought colonialism, must be prepared to make way now for a new coterie of Gen Z leaders. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy
What was hailed as grassroots renewal became the seed of decline, hollowing out state institutions and birthing splinter parties that exposed the ANC’s vulnerability.
Malema’s expulsion in 2012 accelerated this trajectory, catalysing the EFF and reshaping youth politics.
Zuma’s MK Party has now delivered the most consequential rupture since Polokwane, fracturing ANC dominance and forcing coalition politics.
Taken together, these breaks chart the ANC’s descent from liberation movement to fractured organisation, trapped in perpetual legitimacy crises.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Alliance’s consolidation at 21.81% in 2024 underscored the ANC’s urban decline, reframing the contest as one between liberation nostalgia and governance credibility.
More than a numerical challenge, the DA represents a structural threat, stripping the ANC of unilateral authority and accelerating the transition to contested pluralism.
The ANC’s failure to fill Moruleng Stadium in January crystallised this unravelling: empty seats where throngs once gathered now stand as a warning that, unless corruption, factionalism and mismanagement are confronted, the liberation party risks collapsing further into irrelevance and being remembered more for its decline than its triumph.
Since South Africa entered a Government of National Unity, the ANC’s diminished authority has been laid bare, as its once unchallenged grip has been weakened by coalition compromises and the loss of outright majorities in key provinces.
Into this vacuum have surged far-right currents, testing the boundaries of power and legitimacy. Most visibly in the Western Cape, secessionist movements such as the Cape
Independence Advocacy Group and the Referendum Party have seized on anti-ANC sentiment to advance a brand of ethno-regional populism steeped in the discredited logic of apartheid.
The so-called “white genocide” agenda is propelled by opportunists, far-right movements and lobby organisations such as AfriForum and Solidarity and amplified by segments of the US and European far right.
These actors exploit farm murders to fabricate a narrative of racial extermination. They thrive on grievance rather than vision, portraying ANC rule as irredeemably corrupt while peddling the illusion of “freedom from Pretoria”.
Their rhetoric corrodes democratic cohesion, entrenches exclusionary economics and pits provinces against one another. By lobbying foreign powers and weaponising false grievances, they imperil not only South Africa’s fragile unity but the broader continental project of cohesion, equality and democratic renewal
Coalition governance has become South Africa’s lived reality, shattering three decades of single-party dominance and thrusting the ANC into a paradox of weakness and renewal.
Across Africa, coalition experiments offer sobering lessons: Kenya’s fragile bargains often collapse into ethnic rupture; Zimbabwe’s unity government briefly eased economic pain before authoritarian relapse; and Lesotho’s coalitions repeatedly spiral into paralysis. Mauritius, by contrast, shows that stability is possible when compromise is anchored in institutions.
For the ANC, coalition politics is both a curse and a blessing. It exposes the party’s loss of legitimacy while forcing long-absent checks and balances. The future will depend less on seat arithmetic than on whether leaders can transcend factional ego and embrace governance rooted in the rule of law, public accountability and the common good.
This crisis is not uniquely South African but part of a continental unravelling of liberation movements once hailed as custodians of sovereignty.
Zanu-PF clings to power through repression; the MPLA scrapes by amid corruption and Unita’s rise; and Swapo’s vote share has collapsed as younger generations question its relevance.
Liberation parties, though deserving praise for dismantling colonialism, are eroding under corruption, stagnation and generational discontent. Survival demands moral renewal, credible succession planning and genuine engagement with Gen Z under millennial stewardship.
Liberation movements must confront the reality that power is not an eternal entitlement but a fragile trust that must be earned through service.
The moral authority forged in the crucible of liberation has been squandered through corruption, mismanagement and the capture of the state by tenderpreneur elites and rent-seeking networks.
The ANC, like Zanu-PF before it, has fallen from grace, losing the ethos of sacrifice and solidarity that once defined it.
If this decline continues unchecked, the ANC risks degenerating into a rural rump party, hollowed out by Jacob Zuma’s populist implosion and estranged from the urban constituencies that sustained its rise.
South Africa’s strong constitutional framework may avert the lawless pseudo-democracy that has taken root in Zimbabwe but the warning signs are unmistakable.
Across Africa, allegations of election rigging — from Nigeria to Uganda, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Cameroon — have eroded trust in democracy and fuelled instability.
South Africa must serve as a continental alarm bell. The liberation era is over. The youth era must begin. Gen Z, guided by millennial leadership, must seize this moment to build movements rooted in accountability, service delivery and generational agency — and to complete Africa’s unfinished revolution.
Wellington Muzengeza is an independent journalist, political risk analyst and urban strategist offering incisive insight on urban planning, infrastructure, leadership succession and governance reform across Africa’s evolving post-liberation and urban landscapes.