The continuity of corporate capture, of corruption, of the arrogance of state and executive power, of the demobilisation of the grassroots, is crucial to understanding what Zuma has done and will continue to do. And this rot did not start with the rise of Zuma to the throne. It is deeply rooted in the politics of the ruling ANC party post-apartheid.

South Africa’s democracy is in trouble. The present situation is, in objective terms, a house divided; a house that is tottering on rotten foundations. Despite the more general advances that have been made under the ANC’s rule since 1994, power has not only remained in the hands of a small minority but has increasingly been exercised in service to capital. 

The ANC has morphed from its earlier transition days as a ‘modern’ bourgeois political party designed to consolidate a class-based system of power overlaid with narrow racial interests to an inveterately factionalised, patronage-centred, corrupt, rent seeking and increasingly undemocratic ex-liberation movement.

In a democracy worthy the name, no specific belief, conscience, thought, opinion or religion has special legal or societal status.

In 20 years, the population which has chosen not to vote has increased by 9.4 million. What does this largely hidden tale tell us about South Africa’s political system and its democracy?

Public opinion is fast shifting in South Africa about the use of marijuana, which is criminalised. A key legal argument in the debate is that prohibiting dagga use while allowing tobacco and alcohol amounts to discrimination, which violates equality as guaranteed by the Constitution

Despite government and ruling party hype, South Africa remains a country in which the capitalist class and their small minority of middle class and political hangers-on ride the ‘world class’ gravy train while telling the rest of the people to cram into the ‘third class’ carriages

There is a very broad conception of national security wherein state spooks have come to see themselves as the main watchdog of society, almost separate and above the constitutional and democratic order

If capital is to be believed, it is the worker who is the main source of South Africa’s contemporary social and economic problems

After many years of lack of broad-based civil society coalitions, there now exist new spaces and places in South Africa for progressive civil society to reclaim a unity of strategic purpose and action.