Renew or Perish: Has the ANC Reached the Point of No Return?

The ANC is no stranger to crossroads, but this one feels different.

At the party’s National General Council in Boksburg, conversations were less about celebration and more about survival. Once the face of liberation and hope, the ANC is now grappling with uncomfortable questions about its future. Support has slipped, coalitions have become its new reality, and the revolutionary dream that once electrified the masses is beginning to look like a fading photograph tucked away in an old family album.

The room wasn’t filled with denial, leaders openly admitted what the public has been saying for years: the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), the ANC’s ideological anchor, is under siege.

President Cyril Ramaphosa put it plainly, the revolutionary project faces a “total onslaught”.

But many South Africans online responded with a sharper summary:
“Ons is moeg vir speeches. We want delivery.”

A Revolution Wounded From Within

For decades, critics labelled the NDR as a creeping socialist agenda, echoing apartheid-era fears of the “Rooigevaar”. Yet history has a twist, the harshest attacks haven’t come from external forces but from internal decay.

Corruption during the Jacob Zuma years left the party deeply compromised. One analyst captured the mood succinctly:

“2024 wasn’t a surprise, it was the bill finally arriving.”

The ANC’s electoral collapse did not happen overnight; it was a slow erosion, township by township, municipality by municipality, until even loyal supporters felt disillusioned.

Where the Ground is Crumbling: Rural Decline and Weak Unions

ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula pointed to two red blinking warning lights:

1. Weak unionisation

2. Failing rural municipalities

Rural communities were once the ANC’s heartbeat. Even today, those areas carry memories of struggle heroes, posters on church walls, and old rally T-shirts worn with pride. But dignity doesn’t fill stomachs, and grants aren’t development. Clinics and schools exist, yes but jobs do not.

The revolutionary promise was never just freedom it was economic emancipation.

And in that promise, millions feel short-changed.

When Capital Meets Revolution: The Neoliberal Turn

After 1994, the ANC chose a market-friendly path, privatisation, liberalisation, GEAR.
Cosatu shouted betrayal. The SACP held its fire, staying in the alliance despite ideological discomfort. For years, unity held, sometimes out of loyalty, sometimes out of necessity.

That glue is dissolving.

SACP leader Solly Mapaila has made his intentions clear: the party plans to contest upcoming local elections independently. It’s a move political historians may one day mark as the beginning of the Alliance unravelling.

What happens when the tripartite pillars no longer lean on one another?

A Movement at a Crossroads, Reinvention or Slow Fade?

ANC veteran Snuki Zikalala didn’t sugar-coat it.
The organisation must “renew or perish.”

But renewal means tough decisions not another conference resolution printed and forgotten. Does renewal look like doubling down on the NDR? Or does it mean reinventing beyond liberation-era frameworks into something modern, digital, practical?

Because nostalgia doesn’t win elections. Service delivery does. Jobs do. Trust does.

South Africa is no longer waiting for the ANC to lead, it is watching to see whether it still can.

The Big Question

Is this decline a symptom of internal collapse, or just the natural sunset of liberation movements, like ZANU-PF’s slow crumble or FRELIMO’s legitimacy battles?

Either way, history is demanding an answer.

Whatever the ANC decides now will shape not only its future, but South Africa’s. The party that once freed the nation must now prove it can rebuild it.

Because struggle credentials have an expiry date. And renewal, real renewal, requires more than slogans.

It requires courage.

{Source: The Citizen}

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