I’m writing this before the results of the local government election are known, but one thing is already obvious — President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC are going to get a snotklap. Why has the leader who was arguably South Africa’s most promising president failed?
As so often, Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli has the answer. The passage that comes to mind from The Prince is this: “For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order.” It is difficult to think of a more economical account of Ramaphosa’s predicament. Those threatened by reform know exactly what they stand to lose. Those who might gain from it generally have to wait until somebody has built the railway.
I actually feel for Ramaphosa. His speech at the ANC’s Siyanqoba rally in Buffalo City on Sunday had some genuinely fine passages, delivered by a man who, whatever else one thinks of him, has become rather more thoughtful about the limits of his party’s historic claim on the electorate.
Addressing young people, he acknowledged the perception that the ANC was forever presenting the liberation struggle as an unpaid invoice. “It might sometimes sound like we are holding this over you, as if your vote is a debt you owe us.” Then he said something rather magnificent: “Freedom was won so that you could use it on your own terms.”
To the young graduates endlessly checking their phones for a job notification that never comes, he offered a wonderfully precise image of South Africa’s peculiar ability to educate people into unemployment. He dispensed with the vocabulary of national transformation in favour of whether the tap works, the street light comes on or the refuse gets collected. One feels that, after all these years, someone in the ANC has finally discovered that rubbish removal is not primarily a philosophical question.
The power of positive thinking?
The speech was also revealing in its restraint. Ramaphosa conceded that the ANC could no longer simply invoke 1994 and expect a standing ovation. “We do not win by proclaiming victory. We only win by working,” he told the rally, whose name, siyanqoba — “we are conquering” — seemed somewhat optimistic.
And yet, if the opinion polls are anywhere near correct, the ANC is about to receive a monumental thumping. Ipsos puts national ANC support at 30%; a Social Research Foundation survey has it at 32%. These are measurements of voter sentiment, not forecasts, and local elections have a nasty habit of confounding national calculations. But the comparison is brutal enough: the ANC won 45.6% in the 2021 municipal election, having taken about 62% in 2011. It could have lost almost half its support in 15 years, and its president’s good manners are unlikely to reverse the arithmetic.
Why? Start with the economy, where the figures make even his most indulgent admirers reach for an antacid. Using broad calendar-year averages, South Africa grew about 2.7% a year under Nelson Mandela, 4.2% under Thabo Mbeki and 1.6% under Jacob Zuma. Under Ramaphosa, between 2018 and 2025, the average has been about 0.6%.
These figures are a useful provocation, though a lousy verdict on their own. Mbeki enjoyed a global commodity boom, Zuma was walloped by the financial crisis and Ramaphosa presided during the pandemic, which briefly turned national output into a rather dramatic ski slope. Presidents cannot choose the world economy, however much their communications departments wish they could.
But look at the two most recent years, when the electricity crisis was easing, the GNU had been formed and some of the long-promised reforms were finally getting traction. Growth was 0.5% in 2024 and 1.1% in 2025, an average of just 0.8%. The economy then contracted 0.2% in the second quarter of 2026. This is a recovery only in the sense that a patient who has stopped bleeding but cannot get out of bed is recovering. It may be medically accurate, but there is still a problem.
Great optics, hollow reality
The question becomes more troubling when you examine investment. In an illuminating presentation, political analyst Frans Cronje tracks South Africa’s fixed-investment ratio climbing above 20% of GDP towards the end of the Mbeki era before sinking back to the neighbourhood of 14%. The Reserve Bank puts it at 13.9% in 2025. That is an extraordinarily underwhelming result after years of presidential investment conferences, each accompanied by pledges of enormous sums of money, substantial applause and the usual photographs of business and political luminaries who have come to an agreement about investing. He analysed the problem correctly, did his best to remedy it and … nothing happened.
There are substantive achievements too. National load-shedding has largely disappeared, Eskom’s operational performance has improved, private generation has expanded and the door is at last opening to greater private participation in rail and ports. Operation Vulindlela has shown that regulatory obstacles can be removed, given sufficient attention from the presidency and the National Treasury. South Africa received a sovereign credit rating upgrade in 2025. These are not imaginary accomplishments manufactured by a presidential media office. They are changes with economic consequences, some of which may take years to become visible.
And substantial difficulty lingers. Fixing the electricity supply does not create customers for a factory that has no orders. Eskom’s sales volumes fell 6.2% in the year to March 2026, partly because of private generation and efficiency, but also because industrial demand is weak. The electricity crisis may have disappeared only to reveal a more depressing problem: large parts of the economy no longer need as much electricity as they once did. One can fix the power station without automatically reopening the smelter.
Cronje has a harsher account. He argues that Ramaphosa’s temperament was poorly suited to the task. “He kept looking for consensus, and he looked for consensus as an excuse not to take those decisions,” he said in his recent presentation. The country needed a reformer prepared to confront vested interests; it got a negotiator whose instinct was to assemble another negotiating committee.
Hard to argue with that.
