President Cyril Ramaphosa painted a picture in his state of the nation address (Sona) of a South Africa that has “turned the corner” — where load‑shedding has ended, growth has returned, logistics are improving, crime is being confronted and social protection is deepening.
He spoke with pride about Operation Vulindlela, infrastructure commitments, the social relief of distress (SRD) grant and the government of national unity (GNU).
In parts of that story, we do converge. But we are looking at the same landscape through very different lenses. The president described a narrow turnaround in systems that should never have been broken, and certainly not for this long. I see crisis management in a state that continues to fray at its core, most starkly in water.
Ramaphosa says he will deploy ministers, task teams and even prosecutors to fix the water crisis. But this is not a sudden disaster. It has been announced in audit reports and community protests for years. The Human Rights Commission has documented towns where households have had dry taps for years on end. Johannesburg has reservoirs in urgent need of repair, loses almost half the water it buys through leaks and illegal connections, and replaces only a handful of kilometres of ageing pipe each year.
Pattern of decay
The national government has long known that local infrastructure is collapsing under the weight of underinvestment, mismanagement and diverted budgets. Yet only now, in the middle of rolling outages and road blockades, do we see an “emergency” response. This is the pattern: decay is allowed to proceed in full view, warnings are filed and shelved, and real political energy is mobilised only once the crisis has broken the surface — while attention and resources are still absorbed by yesterday’s emergency in another sector.
Ramaphosa says his government has ended load‑shedding. I see a power system stabilised, for now, through late and costly measures after nearly two decades of preventable failure. The question is not just why the lights are on this month, but why it took nine Sonas under his leadership to reach this point — and whether we have built a resilient, depoliticised system, or simply shifted risk to private providers while Eskom’s deeper financial and governance problems remain.
Ramaphosa says ports and railways are improving. I see a logistics network partially rescued by forced partnerships and concessions after years of politicised appointments, under‑maintenance and plummeting freight volumes. Efficiency gains are real and welcome, but measured against the scale of the collapse, they mark the beginning of repair, not proof of a new, durable settlement between politics and the economy.
Ramaphosa celebrates primary surpluses, improved ratings and a stronger rand as proof that the fiscus is back on track. I see the late tightening of a developmental welfare state experiment that has largely failed on its own terms: spending, grants and debt surged while growth stagnated, unemployment remained among the world’s highest and public investment declined.
A primary surplus is not a victory lap; it is an admission that the room for error has vanished.
A primary surplus is not a victory lap; it is an admission that the room for error has vanished. We are now paying heavily, in foregone growth and squeezed services, for a decade-and-a-half in which each rand of borrowing bought less and less development.
The president did not ask the essential question in this Sona: what kind of state are we really sustaining, and at what opportunity cost to the future? He rightly highlighted social grants and the SRD as bulwarks against hunger and destitution. They prevented a social catastrophe. But grants have become the shock absorber for an economy that does not generate enough productive work; they are not a bridge to a different equilibrium.
When more and more South Africans rely on transfers funded by a shrinking tax base in a stagnant economy, we are not building a developmental state; we are stabilising a fragile welfare state on an ever narrower platform. Ramaphosa’s speech treated this primarily as a triumph of compassion. It is also the clearest sign that we have not yet found a way to mobilise our people’s capabilities in productive, income‑creating activity.
Political capital
Ramaphosa presented the GNU as proof that our democracy is maturing and that South Africans can come together. There is truth in that. The GNU has created political space for Operation Vulindlela and helped avert a more chaotic outcome. But the political economy he left out is crucial.
We are not building a developmental state; we are stabilising a fragile welfare state.
The GNU rests on a fragile truce within the ANC, tactical bargains among rivals and the implicit backing of a business and civil society desperate for stability. Below that layer, the party system is fragmenting, by-elections are volatile and a growing share of citizens simply opts out.
Political capital is being consumed faster than economic capital is being rebuilt. The danger is that we mistake a temporary elite pact for a developmental coalition. The former can hold just long enough to declare success; the latter demands confronting the interests, incentives and rent‑seeking that the president’s Sona reduces to “corruption” and “state capture”, without re‑engineering how power and resources actually flow.
Ramaphosa acknowledged the crisis in local government and water and was right to do so. But the fraying of the state is most visible precisely where his remedies are weakest. Local government has become the junction where fragmentation, patronage and violence meet collapsing infrastructure. Audit outcomes show billions in water and electricity losses, staggering arrears to Eskom and water boards, chronic noncompliance in procurement and project management, and almost no consequence for failure.
Political capital is being consumed faster than economic capital is being rebuilt.
Councillors are assassinated. Coalitions are treated as weapons, not instruments of governance. In that context, promises of new laws, task teams and even criminal charges look less like structural reform and more like the familiar pattern of reacting late and hard to a crisis long foretold.
Without confronting that political economy — how local power is acquired, rewarded and protected — the government cannot legislate its way out of the water crisis or municipal collapse. It can only defer the breaking point.
Ramaphosa is right to insist that South Africa is not a failed state. But the choice is not between “failed” and “fixed”. There is a long space in between where capacity erodes unevenly, pockets of competence co-exist with zones of abandonment, and each emergency is managed just well enough to avoid rupture, but not well enough to restore trust.
Ramaphosa’s Sona described a country that has turned a corner. My reading is harsher, but I believe more honest: we have slowed the skid, patched key systems and agreed, for now, on who holds the steering wheel. We have not changed the road, the destination or the way decisions are made along the way.
If this is to become more than managed decline, the conversation must move beyond quarterly growth rates, grant numbers and investment pledges. It must confront the settlement that keeps producing crisis: who carries risk, who captures rents, whose work is valued, and how power is won and used, from the cabinet to the smallest municipality.
Until then, the president’s annual address will continue to describe successes that are real but narrow, and a turnaround that is partial at best. South Africans deserve the full picture — not to despair, but to understand what it will take to build something genuinely new, instead of continuously rushing from one avoidable emergency to the next.
• De Baissac is founder and CEO of resilience advisory firm Eunomix.
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