South Africa is a country facing huge and interrelated problems of massive corruption, intermittent electricity supply, low economic growth, massive unemployment, widespread infrastructural and institutional decay, and a breakdown in law and order. These are the accumulated result, in one way or the other, of the policies pursued by the African National Congress over the past four decades, first in opposition and then in government. 

As a liberation movement the ANC did not just dominate the new democracy electorally, but morally and ideologically. Its hegemony stretched from the state machinery into the universities, the media, and the judiciary as well. Though there is widespread popular dissatisfaction with the state of the country today, something reflected in the 2024 election results, there is little consensus as to how these problems arose, and how to correct them. The programmes of the major parties represented in parliament offer - if implemented - an array of likely outcomes ranging from ongoing incremental decline, to some kind of renewal, to national suicide. 

In Europe and the United States meanwhile South Africa's liberation movement long enjoyed the support of a powerful bodyguard of sympathiser-intellectuals who promoted its heroic visage, while suppressing or minimising the many aspects of its character, history and programme that jarred with Western sensibilities. As the world has swung from unipolarity to multipolarity, and the ANC government's foreign policy has begun to matter again to the West, its stances on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Hamas-Israel war, have been met with shock, surprise and disappointment.

Making sense of today's problems requires unsparingly facing up to current realities, identifying their origins and evolution, and looking to other countries and societies that faced the same challenges at similar points in their development.