Three decades on from apartheid, South Africa is creaking under the weight of a settlement that prioritised peace over performance. The country’s democratic transition is often described as a miracle. In one sense it was.
A country on the brink of civil war stepped back from the very edge of the abyss, chose peace and avoided the bloodshed many feared inevitable. However, the harder truth is that the transition was never properly concluded. It was simply negotiated.
The settlement reached by Nelson Mandela and Cyril Ramaphosa on one side, and FW de Klerk and Roelf Meyer on the other, achieved legitimacy at extraordinary speed. What it did not build was alignment between state capacity, economic transformation and social cohesion. That gap now defines the country’s trajectory, not in dramatic rupture but in a slow, steady erosion.
Peace without performance
In the early 1990s speed was paramount. More than 14,000 people were killed in political conflict between 1990 and 1994. The economy strained under sanctions and capital flight. Compromises such as Joe Slovo’s “sunset clause” bought peace by preventing institutional collapse. They were stabilisers, not design flaws.
The political transition worked, yet it solved for peace rather than performance. Power transferred quickly; capability did not. Instead of building a deliberate bridge between experience and legitimacy, South Africa drifted into a false binary: continuity versus change, expertise versus representation.
Those with means can opt out of the shared public realm; those without cannot. In effect, parallel systems have been built that no longer meaningfully intersect. This is not simply inequality; it is divergence
That choice hollowed out institutions over decades. Cadre deployment blurred the line between party and state. Some institutions, such as the Reserve Bank, held firm. Others, such as Eskom and many municipalities, became systems of extraction rather than instruments of delivery, as later exposed in the findings of the Zondo commission.
The systems built in the 1990s were designed to stabilise a fragile settlement. They were never fully redesigned for a mature, unequal and fiscally constrained democracy. Government debt now exceeds 75% of GDP. Debt-service costs consume more than 20c of every rand collected. The state that secured peace was not the state that would sustain performance, and the work was never finished.
Transformation without inclusion
At the centre of the post-apartheid economic settlement was BEE: necessary in design but distorted in execution. Too often it became a vehicle for elite deal-making rather than broad-based capability. Ownership shifted at the top but opportunity did not expand below.
South Africa remains the most unequal country in the world, with the top 10% of households controlling more than 80% of wealth. Transformation became a scorecard exercise rather than a reimagining of the role of business in a shared society.
Firms ticked compliance boxes while resisting deeper structural change. As trust eroded, policy hardened. The state leaned more heavily on blunt instruments to force change. Those instruments fuelled defensiveness and fragmentation among those who felt targeted.
A self-reinforcing cycle emerged: weak growth drives frustration; frustration drives rigid policy; rigid policy undermines the cooperation needed for growth. The result is not simply policy failure. It is a breakdown of the compact itself: a social settlement never fully honoured by government, by capital or by citizens who accepted the language of reconciliation while exempting themselves from its obligations.
Cohesion without proximity
If we are being honest, we know what South Africa looks like when it works. We see it every weekend when the architecture of separation is momentarily dissolved. Look at the Cape Town Sevens, K Day, the Cape Town Carnival, Rocking the Daisies, any major festival or public celebration where the barriers of class and financial status are lowered.
In those spaces South Africans of every conceivable background mix freely, easily and peacefully. There are no fights born of simmering racial tension. Just a shared jol, shared sun, the lekker music and a universal equality of experience. In those moments when we are grooving together, even if only for an afternoon, we discover we all can get along just fine, even in close proximity.
Yet South Africa is increasingly a country of parallel systems. There are now more than 550,000 registered private security officers, outnumbering members of the South African Police Service by more than three to one.
Access to quality education, health care and infrastructure is determined by income. Those with means can opt out of the shared public realm; those without cannot. In effect, parallel systems have been built that no longer meaningfully intersect. This is not simply inequality; it is divergence.
The transition did not fail. It succeeded on its own terms. The miracle of 1994 was avoiding collapse. But those terms were insufficient and left us with a specific South African feeling of being “suspended”, not quite falling but certainly not flying
There remains, at a human level, a remarkable degree of social grace: daily interactions that defy the country’s history. The petrol attendant who turns a transaction into a moment of genuine warmth; the nurse in an understaffed clinic who fusses over a stranger’s child. In those moments we are reminded the capacity for a shared South Africa is not only a fantasy.
These moments are real, yet alongside them another reality has taken hold: a quiet, rational retreat into separation. A society cannot sustain a shared future if its members no longer share the same spaces, institutions or experiences. The everyday contact that builds trust and makes a common identity possible has become optional for some and unavoidable for others. Without shared proximity, the idea of a common national project begins to thin.
Paradoxically, it is often those most exposed to the country’s difficulties who continue to carry its social cohesion: the patience, the humour and the willingness to engage across lines that history drew in violence. That imbalance is not sustainable. No society can rely indefinitely on the goodwill of those who remain structurally excluded from its full benefits.
Moreover, most South Africans alive today have no memory of 1994. The miracle is not theirs. What they know is the inheritance: the debt, the degrees that do not guarantee work and the state that cannot keep the lights on. They did not negotiate the settlement; they are simply living with its incompleteness. Whether they choose to finish the work or abandon it entirely will determine what comes next.
The unfinished job
South Africa’s crisis is not the product of a single failure. It is the cumulative effect of an unfinished transition across all three domains. Weak institutions cannot drive inclusive growth. Exclusive growth cannot sustain social cohesion. Fractured cohesion makes institutional reform harder still. Each reinforces the other and none of this unfolds in isolation: the green transition pressures a coal-dependent economy, global capital moves where governance is predictable and the world will not wait for South Africa to finish its work.
The transition did not fail. It succeeded on its own terms. The miracle of 1994 was avoiding collapse. But those terms were insufficient and left us with a specific South African feeling of being “suspended”, not quite falling but certainly not flying.
The government of national unity (GNU) at present looks to be a second stabiliser. The difference between a stabiliser and a reformer is simple: one buys time, the other uses it. The GNU’s current arithmetic, built on managing coalition tensions rather than confronting structural ones, suggests the former is more likely than the latter.
That is not going to be enough; we need to finish the job. That means building a state that works, an economy that includes and a society shared in practice. Until those three merge, South Africa will remain what it has increasingly become: a country that is not falling apart but is surely, steadily, coming undone.
• Cassim is a writer based in Cape Town.
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