On 29 May, South Africans will join voters from more than 60 countries at the polls this year. This is a pivotal moment in South African history, with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party facing defeat for the first time, 30 years since the first democratic election in April 1994 that saw Nelson Mandela elevated from the world’s most famous political prisoner to iconic president.
South Africans who queued to vote on that historic day were full of hope, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission promised peace and equality for all in the post-apartheid “rainbow nation”.
There have been several rainbow moments to celebrate since the 1990s, many sports-related – four times Rugby World Cup champions, 2010 hosts of the football World Cup – but also six Nobel Prize winners, starting with the 1993 Peace Prize awarded jointly to Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk “for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa”. South Africa is rarely out of world headlines, most recently making waves for bringing a case of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice in December 2023.
Read South Africa decides 2024 part 2: the state of the parties
But South Africa is a complex country, riddled with contradictions. Economically and socially, South Africa’s fundamental challenges are poverty, inequality and unemployment (PIU). The ANC inherited this highly racialised legacy of more than 300 years of slavery, colonialism and apartheid in 1994, when most of the poor and unemployed were – and still are – black. Thirty years later, what is the government’s record on redressing these three challenges?
Poverty, inequality and unemployment
In his State of the Nation Address (SONA) in February 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa stated that poverty in South Africa fell from 71 percent in 1993 to 55 percent in 2020. The World Bank disagrees. Its figures show that poverty has flatlined at around 62-63 percent since 2008. In 2023, 18.2 million out of 60 million people in South Africa – an upper-middle-income country with GDP per capita of US$ 6,766 – were living in extreme poverty (<US$ 1.90/day).
Inequality has worsened since 1994: the rich have got richer while the poor have stayed poor. The Gini coefficient rose from 59 in 1993 to 63 in 2015 (the most recent estimate). South Africa remains “the most unequal country in the world”. Unemployment has risen from 20 to 33 percent since 1994, “the highest unemployment rate in the world”.
Right to food
One inevitable consequence of poverty, inequality and unemployment is hunger. South Africans have a constitutional right to food. Yet child stunting, an indicator of long-term undernutrition, has not fallen below 25 percent since the ANC came to power – there has been no improvement in child hunger for over 30 years. The government admits that South Africa is “lagging” on achieving SDG 2 (“zero hunger”) by 2030.
The Food Equity Centre is holding our annual meeting in Cape Town on 20-21 May. One topic of discussion will be the “normalisation” of (black) hunger in South Africa.
Failures of the ANC
The most consequential failure of the ANC lies in service delivery. The education system is failing South Africa’s children: 80% of 10-year-olds cannot read for meaning. The state-owned electricity utility Eskom was looted to the point where power-cuts have become normalised: in 2023, South African residents and businesses endured a record 332 days of “load-shedding”. These two facts contribute to economic stagnation: GDP growth has averaged a moribund 0.8 percent since 2012.
While the economy stutters towards a grinding halt, the South African Revenue Services (SARS) collected R2 trillion in 2023/24 (close to £100 billion) to finance government spending. Lack of money is not the problem. Rather, it is the ANC’s muddled ideology, a curious blend of neoliberal capitalism – which is pro-business and not pro-poor – and heavy-handed interventionism by incompetent politicians and political appointees, which results in the state (mis)managing enterprises which would benefit from private sector investment and management.
A major obstacle to pro-poor economic and social transformation in South Africa is corruption, sometimes called the “fourth horseman” of South Africa’s post-apartheid malaise, after PIU. Under Jacob Zuma’s presidency (2009-2018), corruption was elevated to “state capture”, which went much further than politicians and civil servants skimming 10 percent kickbacks off contracts awarded to comrades. Government agencies and state-owned enterprises were “captured” through ANC cadre deployment, and looted using the tender system for government contracts, until their performance was undermined, sometimes fatally. In addition to the loadshedding already mentioned, railways and freight services collapsed, and South African Airways – voted Africa’s best airline for 14 consecutive years until 2016 – was pushed into bankruptcy in 2019.
In 2022, the State Capture Commission, led by Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, delivered its damning final report that found numerous government officials, including Cabinet Ministers, had a case to answer on allegations of corruption. Two years later, only one senior ANC official has been charged with receiving bribes and money laundering. No-one has been sent to prison.
Social protection
Although public enterprises, education and public health services are performing abysmally, one shining policy success is social protection, which has expanded dramatically since the Child Support Grant was launched in 1998. The CSG now reaches 13 out of 18 million children with a cash transfer every month. Almost four million people over 60 years of age receive the Older Persons Grant, and a million individuals receive the Disability Grant, every month. Overall, 54 percent of the population receive social grants. In addition, the National School Nutrition Programme provides free meals to nine million learners every school day.
Although I am a cheerleader for social protection, I have argued that its expansion in South Africa is “a social policy solution to an economic policy failure” – compensating citizens for the failure of the government and economy to generate growth and livelihoods. My research into the failure of the Child Support Grant to reduce child stunting concluded that the cash is inadequate, because it is diluted among other household members, effectively underwriting unemployment.
The latest addition to the social protection system is the COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, which was introduced to provide income support to working adults during lockdowns in 2020, but has never been removed and now reaches 8.5 million people. In 2021, I was a member of a government expert panel that recommended retaining the SRD grant as a form of “basic income support” for low-income adults. In his 2024 SONA, President Ramaphosa agreed: “We have seen the benefits of this grant and will extend it and improve it as the next step towards income support for the unemployed.”
Of course, social protection addresses symptoms, not drivers, of deeper structural problems. One of the fiercest political debates since 1994 has been around land expropriation, “to redress the results of past racial discrimination”. But the government has consistently failed to grasp this nettle, fearing a backlash from commercial farmers and preferring its market-led “willing seller, willing buyer” approach, which aligns with its shift from its socialist origins to neoliberal practice that respects private property rights, irrespective of how they were acquired.
Gender equality, religious tolerance and freedom of expression
Despite its dismal performance in the economic and governance realms, South Africa is proudly progressive on many social issues. Unlike many other countries, gender equality, abortion and LGBTQI+ rights are fully protected by the Bill of Rights. Religious tolerance is high. Freedom of expression (with appropriate exceptions such as hate speech) is also protected by South Africa’s constitution. Sign language was adopted as South Africa’s twelfth official language in 2023.
South Africa remains a free country with a vibrant democracy. Elections are free and vigorously contested, with no suspicion of vote-rigging. The judiciary remains strong and independent, the press is free to criticise and lampoon political leaders (and does so daily), and the police and army do not oppress but serve the people. Oversight institutions such as the Public Protector, the Human Rights Commission and the Auditor-General, as well as an activist civil society, make heroic efforts to hold the government to account. Only 15 percent of 257 municipalities received clean audits from the Auditor-General in 2022, for example, and the NGO Women on Farms Project recently led a successful campaign to ban harmful pesticides imported from, but banned in, the European Union.
Looking ahead
In arguably another sign of healthy democracy, South Africa has been labelled “the protest capital of the world”, with thousands of service delivery protests every year. Will this discontent with the government that liberated people from apartheid cause them to finally vote the ANC out of power? The latest opinion polls suggest yes. In a follow-up opinion piece, I will examine the state of the parties that are joining forces to unseat the ANC on 29 May.
Stephen Devereux is a Professorial Fellow at IDS, where he is co-director of the Centre for Social Protection and a founding member of the Food Equity Centre. He also holds a Research Chair in Social Protection for Food Security at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa.
