I have never been particularly good at picking a political tribe, in the same way that some people are just bad at parallel parking. I can talk myself into agreeing with someone on a Monday and be trading insults with them by Friday, and for years I assumed that made me an unreliable ally. I have since decided it just makes me a functioning adult.
With elections looming, the ideology behind each party is impossible to escape. It is stapled to every lamppost, dodging traffic with the rest of the pamphlets. Voting season is less a festival of ideas than a hopeful sigh directed at a ballot paper — a small act of surrender to whichever party seems least likely to embarrass the country this particular week.
There are things I believe quite firmly, mind you, unlike my taste in political parties. I believe in individual freedom. I believe government exists to serve citizens, not to audition them for loyalty. I believe markets are extraordinarily useful — genuinely, spectacularly useful — right up until someone tries to use them as a substitute for a conscience. I believe inequality matters, not because unequal societies are aesthetically unpleasant, though they are, but because extreme inequality eventually corrodes freedom itself, one gated community at a time.
I believe in the rule of law, independent institutions, a free press and the right to disagree — including, awkwardly, with people whose politics I find deeply irritating.
And I believe South Africa’s greatest achievement, the constitution, deserves better than the half-hearted defence we tend to give it, the way you’d defend a distant relative at a braai, technically, but without much enthusiasm. Perhaps that makes me a liberal. Possibly it just makes me insufferable at dinner parties.
The Political Compass test (a quiz that has ended more friendships than it should) drops me in its left-libertarian quadrant. I recognise myself there, with one asterisk. I am more conservative about institutions than the label suggests — not socially conservative; I have no interest in governments moonlighting as etiquette coaches, telling people whom to love or which identity they are allowed to wear to work. I mean conservative in the boring, structural sense: institutions are hard to build and disturbingly easy to torch, and I would rather we stopped handing out matches. Which is why I have become a little obsessed with the state of the South African state.
This isn’t an argument for a smaller state. We have tried starving beasts before, and they just get hangry. It is an argument for a better one; a state that can do the things only a state can do — provide public goods, regulate without institutionalised bribery, build infrastructure, protect citizens, redistribute where necessary and get out of the way of anyone actually trying to run a business. Competence is not a right-wing idea. For the poor, it is often the most left-wing idea there is.
A wealthy South African can shrug off a collapsing transport system and buy a car. A poor South African cannot, shrug, full stop. A wealthy family can buy private health care and a decent school; millions cannot buy either. So when the state fails, it is not merely inefficient; it is a wealth transfer in reverse, redistributing misery downward with impressive efficiency.
Economic dynamism with social justice
I do not have much patience for the idea that worrying about fiscal discipline, institutional competence or economic growth is somehow a betrayal of social justice. Usually it is the opposite. You cannot redistribute wealth that nobody bothered to create, build houses without a municipality capable of collecting the rubbish, or run hospitals on good intentions. Grants do not sustain themselves on vibes; you need an actual economy underneath them, and you are not going to attract investment while publicly treating business like a Bond villain.
But I am equally unconvinced the market should be left to run the whole show unsupervised, like a teenager handed the house keys. Markets are magnificent at some things and catastrophic at others. They’re superb at allocating capital, hopeless at deciding what a decent society owes its members.
Some things should not depend on the thickness of your wallet. Water, education, basic health care, public safety, dignity. The real political question is not state versus market; it is what each is actually for, and how you stop either one turning into a protection racket.
Which is also why the old fight between “the Left” and “the Right” bores me rigid. The Left is right that inequality is real, that apartheid’s economics did not politely disappear in 1994 because someone signed a document, and that opportunity remains wildly, insultingly unequal. But the Left can be spectacularly wrong when it mistakes a bigger state for a freer one, or when loyalty to the party starts doing the work competence should be doing.
The Right is right that markets matter, that enterprise matters, and that a government can torch value as efficiently as it can share it. But it can be just as wrong when it treats inequality as an unfortunate rounding error of growth, or imagines that saying the word “nonracial” loudly enough makes 350 years of history politely excuse itself from the room.
I want neither tribe, thanks. I want economic dynamism with social justice attached, a government that enforces rules without micromanaging your entire life, and a country where race matters less and less while we are honest that it currently matters an enormous amount. Those two things are not in tension; pretending they are is how bad policy ends up dressed as principle.
I believe in nonracialism. I do not believe we have earned the right to call ourselves post-racial, the way you do not get to declare a diet finished because you thought about the gym once.
There is a temptation, especially among liberals, to think that treating everyone equally today squares the account. It does not. If people start from wildly unequal positions, “equal treatment” just launders the inequality and hands it a receipt.
The opposite temptation that turns race into the permanent, unkillable organising principle of political life, carries its own risk. The destination has to be a common citizenship. The route runs through honesty, not amnesia. The same logic applies, word for word, to immigration.
South Africa absolutely has the right to control its borders, decide who works here and who does not, and enforce that with a straight face. What it does not get to do is turn foreigners into the designated villain for problems South Africans’ own governments created. Housing scarce? That is a housing policy failure. Jobs scarce? Ask why the economy cannot make enough of them. Crime rising? Fix policing, not headlines. Municipalities collapsing? Fix municipalities — radical, I know.
The foreigner is, and always has been, the most convenient scapegoat a failing government can hire, and cheaper than actually governing.
Rising authoritarianism
Which brings me to something that worries me well beyond our borders — the democratic world’s growing taste for authoritarian politics. It never introduces itself honestly. It arrives as grievance, resentment, a promise to restore something supposedly stolen from you, and the quiet insistence that there is an enemy — take your pick: immigrants, minorities, elites, foreigners, liberals, judges, journalists, “the establishment” — who must be dealt with before the country can be whole again.
Then it moves on to the institutions in its way. The press becomes the enemy, the courts become “activist”, civil servants become traitors, and opposition becomes disloyalty, right up until the line between the government and the country itself quietly disappears.
That is how democracies die. Slowly enough that each surrender feels survivable, then suddenly enough that you look up and the whole structure is gone. The centre-left should understand this better than anyone, and it should also understand why people fall for it. Telling an angry citizen their anger is illegitimate has never once won an election. Neither has responding to economic insecurity with a lecture on tolerance while doing precisely nothing about the insecurity. Liberal democracy has to actually deliver, not just narrate its own good intentions. It has to offer people dignity and agency, not a pamphlet.
That means growth, jobs, housing and public services that function without a miracle. It also means something less tangible — the working assumption that the person next door, whatever their race, religion, nationality, sexuality or politics, is entitled to exactly the same basic dignity you would like for yourself. That has to be universal, or it is not a principle, it is a preference with good PR.
It cannot apply to Ukrainians and not Palestinians, or Palestinians and not Israelis. It cannot apply to minorities you happen to like and vanish the moment one becomes politically inconvenient. Human rights are either universal, or they are just merchandise.
So, if I had to sum up the politics I actually believe in, I would put it plainly — freedom without indifference, equality without authoritarianism, markets without market fundamentalism, a state strong enough to deliver justice but leashed enough not to become anyone’s master.
Nonracialism that has not forgotten its own history. Patriotism that knows exactly where nationalism starts and refuses to cross the line. An immigration policy that never curdles into xenophobia. And, above all, a democracy that has finally outgrown its tribalism.
I do not expect any political party to embody all of this at once. Frankly, I doubt one exists, and I am not holding my breath for a by-election miracle.
Maybe that is the actual point. Democratic politics was never supposed to be about finding the tribe that is permanently right. It is about building a country where no single tribe is powerful enough to be right forever, unchecked and unembarrassed.
A decent republic needs a heart. It also needs a spine. And every so often, it needs someone rude enough to point out that the people promising to save it might be the ones about to drop it.
Cachalia is a businessman, commentator and former DA MP
