Daily Maverick
Dailymaverick logo

Opinionistas

This article is an Opinion, which presents the writer’s personal point of view. The views expressed are those of the author/authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Daily Maverick.

A dead state, a failing machine and a desperate need for visionary leadership

Since 2015 the state and the government have been in fatal free fall, and there is an urgent need for visionary leadership beyond the current regime and crop of leaders.
Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
12 Sep 2025
Facebook
6

Sometimes you wish you were wrong, and that you erred on the side of false hope and optimism. And so it was startling, at the outset, yet unsurprising and disappointing that eight in 10 South Africans have said that South Africa is heading in the wrong direction.

This was the conclusion of a poll, a web-based global study, “What Worries the World”, published this month, September 2025. The poll results were startling because pessimism, negativity and catastrophism have all slipped into common sense, based on our selective recollections, confirmation biases, or our ideological beliefs and values.

The results were unsurprising and disappointing, because it felt a bit like kicking the corpse of someone or something that has been dead for a decade.

The evidence of degeneration should not be dismissed.

I should go back, then, a decade, to 2015, when I wrote, on these pages, that I had no faith in South Africa’s future. In hindsight, “faith,” was the wrong choice of words; I should have said “hope for”.

We don’t need David Hume to believe that hope, especially false hope or romanticised hope, will be the death of us. Never mind. It was that year, 2015, that Justice Malala published his book, “We have now begun our descent”. I think we came to our conclusions in different ways.

Malala had established himself as a respected and popular public intellectual, endorsed by The Economist, and I had, by that year, had middling and short-lived professional experiences.

I don’t actually know how Malala reached his conclusions, other than what was written in the book. We converged on the idea that South Africa faced a crisis of governance and leadership, but we split, mainly, based on some of what I saw in the machinery of the state, and parallels I drew, or the echoes with what I had learned in Guyana and Haiti a few years earlier. I was less inclined towards panic and catastrophism, but I had a sense that there were serious ethical failures across society.

Fulufhelo Netswera has addressed some of the specificities of leadership failures, and very few among us would believe that things are going well. Eight in 10 of us, actually.

Status quo


I am not defending the status quo nor am I being Panglossian. We may, of course, believe that there is only one thing happening in society, and that that one thing has to be written over and again, every day, on the school blackboard the way that teachers used to punish pupils.

Society is a multifaceted and complex thing, so we tend to pick on one or two things that make us feel good about ourselves. We try to cope with this complexity by sticking to single-story narratives and believing in things that make us feel good about ourselves.

Nonetheless, the disappointment runs deep because the despair of a decade ago has not diminished, notwithstanding glimmers of positivity. I have moved, over the years, from believing that we can change things, to wanting to believe. It’s a rather fine distinction.

I want to believe that things will get better for the people in rural villages, in informal settlements and in townships around the country. I actually believe that very many of the people in government leadership positions share this belief, or would say what they are expected to say.

The problem is that they are the very wheels and gears, shafts, links, bolts and nuts that keep the machinery of state running. If the analogy holds, the machine is outdated, has lost its purpose and has to be replaced — though complete replacement is more difficult than recalibrating or replacing parts.

Nobody remembers the progress of the past


This is not to say that there has been no progress over the past several decades, or even over the past 10 years. It’s just that conventionally measured “progress” or “growth” and “expansion” — the vocabulary that shapes economics-speak — of the past 10 years may be relatively positive, but there has been a slow decline and disorder that is evident in the daily lives of people.

It’s correct to say that overall poverty has declined since 1994, but it is also correct to say that inequality has increased. It is correct to say that more people have greater access to healthcare, but it’s also correct to say that in some hospitals doctors have given up because of budgetary cuts.

The same can be said about access to water, electricity, sanitation and education. We give more access, but quality and sustainability have decreased.

Facts, claims or statements fall differently and have different meanings to different audiences. For instance, according to the World Bank, in 2015 South Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was R346.71-billion. A decade later (last year’s data) it was R365.41-billion. A relatively small bounce, yes, and not forgetting the disaster of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This ought to be positive news. Some people may say that that growth is meaningful because it shows expansion, others may say that it is meaningless, and others would insist that we need more. All of those are meaningful, but for different reasons.

My view is that growth cannot be discussed without discussing distribution. In other words, you can have as much growth as you like, but when it becomes an end in itself and there is backslapping and self-dramatising apostasy, it is meaningless. It’s like raising a glass and bowing to a round of applause because “the macroeconomic fundamentals are in place”.

There is another complication (among many more, to be sure); the verifiable fact that GDP was around “a mere” R187.38-billion in 1994, and for the first decades or so growth was accompanied by distribution, inequitable as it tends to be, until growth and distribution fell sharply in about 2009.

We can say, therefore, that there has been progress since 1994 and point to the not insignificant evidence of access to water, electricity, sanitation, social welfare, healthcare, housing and education — and voice!

All of that is good. But what good is access to water if the wells are poisoned. What is the benefit of access to healthcare if it is marked by absences in attentive care. What good is access to electricity when supply is erratic.

Brigandage, gangsterism and lawlessness


What good is opening up opportunities for the provision of public transport when brigandage, gangsterism and lawlessness make everyone on the road fearful of minibus taxi drivers and operators, and nobody believes that the police serve and protect. We could go on and on.

There were marked improvements across Human Development Index metrics over the first 10 to 15 years of democracy in South Africa. A second “phase” between 2009 and 2018 saw a rapid decline at that nexus of state and government. That was what was so fearsome in 2015.

Since then, the state and the government have been in fatal free fall that accounts for eight in 10 of us thinking the country is heading in the wrong direction (see the South Africa National Human Development Report 2022).

I actually don’t share the near total condemnation of Cyril Ramaphosa. I have some insights into what held Ramaphosa back while he was deputy president (it was the awful obeisance to the ANC, and how it became increasingly outmoded and corrupt — almost to the core), and remember the poisonous snake pit he stepped into when he entered the presidency, by which time the “good people” had already left, or were on their way out.

State and society sent foreboding messages in 2015. The opinion poll results released this month confirmed that premonition.

There is little to add to what almost everyone says every day, and which we are expected to repeat over and again. As previously written on these pages, we all seem to know what has gone wrong. The facts and the evidence, all carefully curated and presented, as they are, tell a tragic story.

From the results of this month’s poll, and a general sense across society, it is clear that the ANC in government, the state-liberation movement nexus, has lost its purpose, and that there is an urgent need for visionary leadership beyond the current regime and crop of leaders.

A better cadre/corps of leaders lies waiting. It’s a great pity that they, too, would, a bit like Ramaphosa in 2018, have to work with machinery that is unfit for purpose.

The state is a corpse that has been dead for a decade — we have nothing to gain from kicking it over and over, unless that is what we want to do to make us feel better about ourselves. DM