It’s interesting why South Africa remains caught between an ANC that squandered its inheritance and a DA that refuses to examine its own blind spots.
To be fair to readers, I was once blindsided by both at different times, and for different reasons. The collapse and clunker have now become increasingly plain.
The tragedy of South Africa is not simply that the ANC has failed to deliver on the promise of liberation, but that the party that inherited the moral authority of the struggle has too often treated that inheritance as a substitute for competent government.
The ANC came to power with an unparalleled mandate: to heal the wounds of apartheid, dismantle structural inequality and build a capable state. Instead, it allowed cadre deployment, patronage and corruption to hollow out the very institutions meant to advance social justice. The result is a country with world-class constitutional ideals but failing municipalities, collapsing infrastructure, chronic unemployment and one of the highest levels of inequality on Earth.
This failure is especially bitter because South Africa’s inequality remains overwhelmingly racial. We may no longer live under formal apartheid, but race still maps onto wealth, education, land ownership and economic opportunity with brutal consistency. South Africa’s Gini coefficient is among the world’s highest — consistently near the top of global rankings — and most of those trapped in poverty are black. To insist, in this context, that race no longer matters is not colour blindness; it is a refusal to confront the enduring architecture of exclusion.
That is where the DA’s limitation becomes not merely a policy disagreement but a philosophical failure. The DA is right to stress the rule of law, institutional integrity and clean administration. In places such as Cape Town and the Western Cape, it has often governed more effectively than the ANC. But competent management is not, by itself, a political vision.
The ANC came to power with an unparalleled mandate: to heal the wounds of apartheid, dismantle structural inequality and build a capable state. Instead, it allowed cadre deployment, patronage and corruption to hollow out the very institutions meant to advance social justice.
It is a floor, not a ceiling. And when that floor is dressed up as a complete political programme, when administrative tidiness is offered as an answer to generational dispossession, it becomes something more troubling: politics that mistakes process for justice.
At the heart of the DA’s worldview lies a form of liberalism that has curdled, over time, into something closer to neoliberal orthodoxy with a constitutional veneer. It speaks the language of individual rights, meritocracy and colour-blind opportunity while systematically avoiding the question of what meritocracy means when the starting blocks are set centuries apart.
Free markets, property rights, fiscal discipline and the removal of race-based policy: these are the load-bearing pillars of the DA’s programme. Each of them is defensible in the abstract. Together, in South Africa’s specific historical context, they function as a mechanism for preserving existing distributions of wealth and power while appearing neutral.
This is not liberalism in its richer, classical sense — a tradition that has always grappled with the conditions necessary for genuine freedom, not merely its formal declaration. It is liberalism reduced to a checklist — balance the budget, protect contracts, let the market sort the rest. Applied in Scandinavia or Switzerland, this framework produces mixed results. Applied in a country where the racial distribution of land, capital and human development was engineered by the state over three centuries, it is wilfully blind.
The market did not create South Africa’s inequality by accident; the state created it by design. The idea that a hands-off state can now undo what an interventionist state deliberately built is not an economic argument. It is a faith position, and a convenient one for those who already hold what was taken.
The DA’s discomfort with race-conscious policy, whether in the form of BEE, employment equity or land reform, is often framed as a principled commitment to nonracialism. But nonracialism as an ideal and nonracialism as a governing strategy are different things. The former is a moral aspiration for a future society in which race has been made irrelevant. The latter, applied prematurely, treats that future as if it already exists and asks the victims of a racial system to compete as though the system no longer mattered. The DA routinely conflates the two, offering the aspiration as cover for a strategy that benefits from the status quo.
Her point was simple and structural; numbers reveal power. Representation is not about symbolism alone; it is about who has access to the institutions that shape society: universities, courts, professions and capital markets. When exclusion persists at scale, and when that exclusion follows racial lines that were drawn by deliberate policy, neutrality is not an option. Silence about the pattern is not neutrality; it is a choice to allow the pattern to continue. Simone understood, as she understood most things, that culture and politics are not separate domains. The absence of black students from American universities in 1969 was not an oversight. It was a structure. And structures do not dissolve because you stop talking about them.
South Africa demands a politics capable of holding two truths at once, where racial inequality remains the central organising fact of our society and where redress requires an honest, effective and incorruptible state. The ANC has spoken the language of transformation while too often betraying it in practice. Through cadre deployment, state capture and the systematic looting of public institutions (Eskom, SAA, National Prosecuting Authority, the South African Police Service, local government countrywide) it has not merely failed to dismantle structural inequality. It has deepened it while enriching a connected elite that now has as much interest in the status quo as the old order it claimed to replace.
The DA, for its part, offers a genuine corrective to this: cleaner administration, stronger institutions and some accountability. But it remains intellectually and morally uneasy about the structural realities of race and historical injustice. Its instinct is to reach for economic frameworks that have the advantage of appearing universal while functioning, in this particular context, as a defence of existing distributions.
When the DA opposes race-based redress, it is rarely explicit about what it proposes in its place. What mechanism, in a profoundly unequal society with a racially structured economy, will actually shift wealth and opportunity towards those from whom it was taken? The answer, in the party’s public positioning, is largely silence, filled by the assumption that growth, good governance and time will do the work.
They will not. Growth in an unequal economy tends to flow along existing channels. Good governance is necessary but not redistributive. And time, as 30 years of postapartheid South Africa demonstrate, has proved stubbornly insufficient. The children of the townships are not waiting for the market to discover them. They are living, now, with the consequences of the compounded disadvantage that the market continues to reproduce.
What South Africa needs is a political project that takes institutional integrity as seriously as the DA does and takes the structural reality of racial inequality as seriously as the ANC once claimed to. A project that is neither captured by patronage networks nor blind to history. One that can hold, simultaneously, that BEE as presently implemented has too often enriched a small elite rather than the broad black working class, and that abandoning race-conscious policy entirely, at this moment in South Africa’s history, is an act of historical illiteracy dressed as principle.
One cannot govern a country as unequal as South Africa by pretending race no longer matters. Nor can one remedy that inequality through slogans while the state is looted from within. Both failures are real. Both are current. And until a political formation emerges that is honest about both — that can name the ANC’s corruption without using it as an alibi for abandoning transformation, and that can name the need for structural redress without using it as cover for patronage — millions of South Africans will remain caught between a liberation movement that squandered its legitimacy and an opposition that has mistaken its own convenience for a universal principle.
• Cachalia, a businessperson and management consultant, is a former DA MP and public enterprises spokesperson, and chaired De Beers Namibia.
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