Every election shaves off a little more of the ANC's dominance, and while it may lose elections, it still never truly lose power, argues the writer.
Image: Itumeleng English/Independent Newspapers
THE slow-burning crisis in South Africa is not merely electoral decline. It is structural capture.
The ANC is losing votes. That much is clear. Every election shaves off a little more of its dominance. The aura of inevitability has faded. Coalitions are now a fact of political life. The once-unassailable liberation movement must bargain, negotiate and compromise.
But here is the uncomfortable truth: the ANC may lose elections and still never truly lose power.
Because for three decades it has embedded itself not just in government, but in the state itself.
This is the difference too few are willing to confront. Governments change. States endure. And the ANC has spent years ensuring that the enduring part answers, reflexively and structurally, to it.
The mechanism is cadre deployment.
Dressed up in the language of “transformation” and “democratic mandate,” cadre deployment is, at its core, the deliberate placement of party loyalists in strategic nodes of state power, from director-generals and municipal managers to boards of state-owned enterprises and regulatory authorities. The result is not alignment. It is fusion.
A constitutional democracy depends on a clear firewall between party and state. Civil servants serve the Constitution. Regulators serve the law. Prosecutors serve justice. They do not serve Luthuli House.
But cadre deployment blurs that line until it disappears.
Over time, competence becomes secondary to loyalty. Independence becomes suspicious. Professional dissent becomes factional rebellion. The question is no longer “Are you capable?” but “Are you reliable?”
And reliable to whom?
The consequences are not abstract. They are measured in darkness when the lights go out.
Consider Eskom, hollowed out by years of political interference, its governance compromised by boards and executives selected within party circuits. Consider Transnet, its operational collapse throttling economic growth. These institutions did not decay by accident. They were weakened by a system that prized political alignment over technical excellence.
The rot was exposed in brutal detail by the Zondo Commission. What the Commission revealed was not merely corruption under Jacob Zuma. It revealed architecture. Networks. A governing ecosystem in which party deployment committees fed into state appointments, and state appointments fed into patronage pipelines.
State capture did not materialise in a vacuum. It thrived in a state already softened by partisan placement.
This is why electoral decline does not equal institutional displacement.
Even if the ANC falls below 50%. Even if it loses the presidency. Even if it enters an uneasy coalition. The senior bureaucrats remain. The middle managers remain. The boards remain. The administrative culture, shaped for decades by party-first logic, remains.
You cannot ballot away a bureaucracy overnight.
And that is the danger.
South Africa may soon experience what appears to be alternation of power. But if the machinery that implements policy is still wired through partisan networks, change will be cosmetic. A new minister at the top cannot easily command an entrenched administrative ecosystem trained to look sideways for cues.
Democracy becomes theatre: vigorous campaigns, dramatic vote counts and muted transformation.
The damage goes deeper.
First, the rule of law frays. When prosecutorial and investigative bodies are perceived as politically mediated, public trust collapses. Justice cannot merely be done; it must be seen to be done. Cadre deployment clouds that visibility.
Second, service delivery withers. Citizens do not experience ideological debates. They experience water that does not run, trains that do not arrive, municipalities that cannot balance books. When posts are filled to secure factional advantage rather than administrative competence, it is the poor who pay.
Third, cynicism metastasis. If voters conclude that elections cannot meaningfully reconfigure power because the state is already colonised, faith in democracy drains away. The ballot becomes symbolic rather than transformative.
This is the bitter irony. The ANC, the movement that dismantled an exclusionary apartheid state, now risks entrenching a partisan one.
To be clear: dominant parties are not inherently undemocratic. Many democracies have experienced prolonged single-party rule. The difference lies in restraint. A mature governing party builds strong, independent institutions capable of outlasting it. An insecure one binds those institutions to itself.
The ANC chose binding.
And now it confronts a paradox of its own making. As electoral support wanes, its instinct may be to tighten its grip, to ensure that even in defeat it remains structurally central. But that instinct, if indulged, will deepen the crisis.
South Africa does not need regime change alone. It needs state restoration.
That means transparent, merit-based appointments insulated from party committees. It means strengthening independent oversight bodies. It means professionalising the civil service and enforcing cooling-off periods between party office and senior state positions. It means reasserting a principle so basic it should be beyond controversy: the state belongs to the public, not to a party.
Above all, it requires a cultural reckoning within the ANC itself. Governing a constitutional democracy demands self-limitation. It demands accepting that political power is temporary stewardship, not permanent inheritance.
If that reckoning does not occur, South Africa may find itself in a perilous halfway house, formally democratic, substantively constrained. Elections will come and go. Governments will reshuffle. Coalitions will rise and fall.
But the deeper architecture of power will remain stubbornly familiar.
The ANC may well continue to bleed votes. It may one day lose outright control of the national executive. Yet unless the fusion of party and state is dismantled, it will never be fully out of power.
And that is not merely a political problem.
It is a democratic one.
Brown is an MPhil candidate at UCT