MK, the army of the then banned ANC, electrified millions of oppressed people to rise against the apartheid regime. Today, its veterans are being used in factional battles within the ruling party.
The battle between South Africa’s finance minister Pravin Gordhan and the country’s elite police unit is once more grabbing headlines. What are the points of law around the matter?
In this new world where its lost thousands of votes does South Africa’s ruling ANC know who it is, how to be in opposition, or how it might fight its way back to winning ways?
Business people who become politicians can bring fresh energy into the public service. They come from an ecosystem that is driven by urgency to produce measurable results.
The main criticism leveled at the body that oversees the work of South Africa’s elite police unit, the Hawks, is that it lacks the power to initiate investigations, making it ineffective.
South Africa’s watershed local elections have resulted in upsets for the ANC in key metropoles. But will the new, minority coalition regimes live up to their mandate of providing basic services?
There were high hopes that the SABC would become a true public broadcaster after the end of apartheid when it was used ruthlessly as a propaganda machine. But those hopes have since been dashed.
The ghost of ‘Khwezi’ – the woman who accused Jacob Zuma of rape in 2006 – continues to haunt him, just as the spectre of rape continues to haunt South Africa.
South Africa’s past tells us that, under certain conditions, women mobilise in ways that produce significant political results. But the country’s present shows how easily these gains can evaporate.
Various commentators have wrongly over the last 22 years said that black people voted blindly for ANC governments. There’s no better example why the academy needs a dramatic post-colonial overhaul.
Patronage and clientelism is slipping away from the ANC and accruing to those who pledge their political futures to the Democratic Alliance. It will have to guard against incumbency arrogance.
The ruling ANC has been seriously challenged by the Democratic Alliance, but South African politics is still about white privilege and black exclusion.
South Africa’s struggling economy may have played a big role in determining the outcome of the 2016 local government elections, but the future direction of economic policy remains uncertain.
For more than 20 years the ANC’s electoral support has appeared unyielding to the obvious weaknesses of its performance in government. To fall below 60% is psychologically significant for the party.
The ANC’s waning urban vote and growing support rural is not a political trend unique to South Africa. Many of Africa’s liberation-movements-cum-governing-parties now depend on rural support for political longevity.
Chief Research Specialist in Democracy and Citizenship at the Human Science Research Council and a Research Fellow Centre for African Studies, University of the Free State