“How are things in South Africa?”
I was asked this question in early 2024 by many living outside the country: family, friends and guests. I answered with a blog summarising the political landscape of 2023 as best I could with my very superficial knowledge. The question has been asked again and, since 2024 and 2025 have been momentous years, here goes.
South Africa, and particularly Johannesburg, gets bad press internationally. There is no question that the country faces huge challenges, some of which are very summarily addressed below … but I’m going to start with some positive news.
South Africa may be turning the corner
It seems there are many positive developments at prominent levels, particularly in the relationship between business and government. I’d urge you to read the Thought Leader Lecture given at Stellenbosch University (published in the Daily Maverick on 11 Nov 2025), in which Adrian Enthoven, CEO of Yellowwoods, a private investment group, assesses the progress the country has made in the past few years.
Enthoven summarizes the huge gains made in South Africa between the 1994 democratic elections and 2014/16 (when the country, under then President Jacob Zuma, became the victim of State Capture). In those years GDP grew, inflation fell, foreign exchange reserves and tax receipts increased and government debt as a percentage of GDP dropped, while credit ratings were upgraded.
I don’t understand much about economics, but I do understand that it meant that employment nearly doubled, the middle class grew, four million people were lifted out of poverty, access to clinics increased and millions of households were electrified. These times were far from perfect (education, security and access to water and sanitation were, and are, still hugely problematic) but the move was in the right direction.
Enthoven tracks the decline of the economy in the 10 years after 2014 and then turns to the areas in which business has begun to work with government, namely the network industries, which include energy, freight rail, ports, transport, communications and water and sanitation.
He believes that a turning point was Ramaphosa’s revival of former Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s 2019 National Treasury discussion paper, which mooted the dismantling of state monopolies, opening up opportunities for the private sector to fund and invest these essential industries. Initial areas for economic improvement were identified as:
- Ending load shedding. This was Enthoven’s area of involvement and he covers the implementation that led to load shedding ending in April 2024. Hallelujah!
- Fixing the country’s ports and freight rail. While he believes the logistics sector has not made as much progress as the electricity sector, there has been an improvement in the functioning of ports and an increase in freight rail volumes.
With regard to the country’s water and sanitation infrastructure, which is still in a state of dreadful neglect, the long-term plan, according to Enthoven, is structural reform, recruiting the efficiency, skills and investment of the private sector.
Johannesburg is particularly prone to lengthy water outages and until the water infrastructure is overhauled the ‘Band-Aid’ surface fixes completed by the Johannesburg Roads Agency, are useless. The number and size of potholes continue to increase, playing havoc with vehicle tires, suspension and drivers’ patience and good will and possibly even Santa’s timeous delivery.
Government of National Unity
In the National Election in May 2024 the ANC lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in 30 years, dropping to around 40% of the vote. The result was the formation of a Government of National Unity (GNU) consisting of the ANC; the Democratic Alliance (DA), the centrist previous official opposition; the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the previous dominant Zulu party in KwaZulu-Natal; and other smaller parties. This coalition signalled a new political era, requiring compromise and shared decision-making. It also made for a more precarious government. For example, a proposed VAT increase was scrapped after coalition partners threatened to pull out of the GNU.
Corruption
In the past decade South Africa has been rocked by a series of major corruption scandals involving state-owned companies, provincial governments and national departments and exposing deep failures in governance and oversight.
The State Capture project, laid bare by the Zondo Commission (2018-2022) revealed how one family, the Guptas, together with Zuma and their allies, hollowed out state owned entities (SOEs) such as the electricity supply commission Eskom, freight transport and logistics company Transnet, aerospace and military technology conglomerate Denel and South African Airways, among others, installing administrators who would do their bidding so they could siphon off billions through inflated contracts and political interference.
In the Free State asbestos scandal hundreds of millions of rands intended for the removal of toxic roofing were paid to politically connected firms for work that was largely never done.
COVID-19 PPE procurement became another flashpoint, with emergency funds diverted via inflated and irregular contracts, including those linked to senior politicians’ families. (South Africa, however, is not the only country to have suffered from this scourge).
The Zondo Commission report exposed systematic bribery of officials and politicians for state contracts and “services” by Bosasa, a company specialising in providing services to government, most notably correctional services.
Another scandal involved the misappropriation of an estimated R2 billion in funds by VBS Mutual Bank.
Ongoing persistent corruption in municipal water and sanitation projects has left communities without basic services.
President Cyril Ramaphosa himself has not escaped the whiff of scandal – US$580 000 in cash, its origins, according to him, being the proceeds of the sale of Ankola cattle, and unaccountably hidden in a sofa in the farmhouse, was stolen from his game farm in 2020. After multiple investigations and legal challenges Ramaphosa has not been prosecuted.
From State Capture to Mafia State
A further challenge facing the country is the gradual entrenchment of organized criminal networks in multiple industries, including construction, transport, township businesses, mining and nightlife.
In 2021 whistleblower Babita Deokaran, Acting Chief Director of Financial Accounting at Johannesburg’s Tembisa Hospital, flagged irregular contracts totalling R850 million. Shortly afterwards this brave and ethical woman was assassinated. Subsequent investigations by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, commonly known as The Hawks and the South African Revenue Service (SARS) uncovered three major crime syndicates involving hospital executives, officials, and service providers using shell companies, kickbacks and money laundering to siphon off resources.
And then in mid-2025 came the Mkhwanazi bombshell
In July 2025 the KwaZulu-Natal Police Commissioner, Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, claimed that criminal syndicates had infiltrated the country’s law-enforcement, justice and political systems.
In July 2025 Mkhwanazi publicly accused the then Police Minister, Senzo Mchunu, of political interference and links to underworld figures, sparking broad national uproar and prompting two parallel investigations: a Parliamentary Ad Hoc Committee and the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry, a judicial investigation appointed by the president.
Evidence presented to the Madlanga Commission since September 2025 has pointed to a sophisticated Big Five cartel with international links that has penetrated South Africa’s political sphere and captured key elements of the criminal justice system. Said to be involved in drug trafficking, cross-border hijackings, tender fraud, kidnappings, extortion and even contract killings, this Gauteng-based crime network has cropped up repeatedly in various contexts (including the Tembisa Hospital case mentioned above).
The interim report of the commission is not yet complete and will only be made public after the commission concludes its work.
As with virtually all underworld organized crime, the public at large is not physically threatened in any way.
But …. there are silver linings
The level and scope of this corruption and criminality is deeply shocking, but, like a boil that is lanced releasing toxic poison, the corruption is at least being exposed. Investigative journalism has been central to uncovering systemic corruption in South Africa in the past decade and official commissions of enquiry are broadcast on public television. Our judiciary is still largely intact, and we have a Constitution that is regarded as one of the most progressive in the world. We are doing better than many other places in this regard.
Caveats
- Whistleblowers are not adequately protected, and assassinations are all too common.
- The wheels of justice are slow. The slow pace of prosecutions arising out of the Zondo commission, completed three years ago, has been a point of deep public concern given the number and positions of implicated individuals. Although four top Eskom executives were arrested in June 2025, the biggest question for the public is why are no high-profile actors in prison? And how long will it be before action is taken to arrest those implicated by the Madlanga Commission?
- Given the murkiness of the criminal underworld, it is difficult for members of the public (and maybe even insiders) to work out who the “goodies and baddies” are. Officials who were removed from their positions because they were so-called baddies, have now claimed they were in fact framed by the “baddies” and so have now become “goodies” and are testifying against the “baddies”. The tactic of smearing adversaries is not new, but in the era of post-truth it has become an all-too-frequent strategy. Untangling this web of lies and intrigue must surely be a huge challenge.
- and so it goes on …
South Africa and the US
Policy shifts in major economies — such as the withdrawal of USAID funding distribution or the imposition of tariffs — tend to land harder and travel further through the economy of a country like South Africa. Where external partnerships play an outsized role in health systems, trade access, and investor confidence, abrupt policy shifts can magnify uncertainty well beyond their nominal scale.
Withdrawal of USAID
In February 2025, almost overnight, South African-born Elon Musk, who briefly headed President Donald Trump’s hastily created Department of Government Efficiency, shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This was another blow to South Africa’s attempts to deal with its widespread poverty crisis. USAID, along with the Centre for Disease Control, is the main distributor of the funds of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in the country. The impact in South Africa was immediate and human.
As with the rest of the world where USAID was active, the sudden closure led to thousands of job losses, several non-governmental organisations were forced to close and community services collapsed within weeks. Although domestic funds have been channelled from other areas to cover core treatment, many programmes remain under resourced.
The result has been that fewer people are being tested for AIDS, more patients default on treatment, viral suppression rates will fall, new infections will rise and clinics will be overwhelmed. Most seriously, modelling warns that without sustained replacement funding the number of infections and deaths could rise significantly in the coming years.
Tariffs
In August 2025 the 30% tariffs imposed by Trump’s administration on South African export goods came into effect. The US was South Africa’s third-largest trading partner, accounting for nearly 7.5% of the country’s exports internationally and a surplus with the US for 2024. The 30% tariffs will have the largest impact on agricultural products (particularly citrus, grapes, nuts and avocados) and on the automative industry – the US has always been one of South Africa’s top export destinations for vehicles.
In 2024 South Africa exported about R28.7 billion in vehicles and components to the US (about 24 680 vehicles), a figure that plunged by over 80 % in the first half of 2025. The country’s automotive sector, located mostly in the impoverished Eastern Cape, directly employs 100 000 to 120 000 people, with hundreds of thousands in indirect jobs along the supply chain. There will almost certainly be job losses until new export destinations are established.
Ramaphosa in the Oval Office
In May 2025 South Africa watched the infamous meeting with President Ramaphosa in the Oval Office in which the Trump administration took their ambush attacks and bullying tactics to unprecedented new levels. The many grossly inaccurate statements made during the meeting have been well documented but might be little known by a wider international audience.
“White Genocide”
Trump announced that he was cutting off all future funding to South Africa because the government was “confiscating land” and “treating certain classes of people very badly”, repeating the lie that a “white genocide” is taking place in the country. An article by Cabral, includes a table of collated figures of farm attacks and murders from 1990 to 2025.
The Transvaal Landbou Unie (TLU – the Transvaal Agricultural Union) represents the interests of commercial farmers in South Africa. Figures published by AfriForum (a minority rights organization for Afrikaners) in May 2024, broadly match the TLU figures.
One murder is a heinous crime, but 67 murders on average a year does NOT constitute a genocide.
Sadly, South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world. But those at greatest risk are not white farmers but young black men who live in low-income, high-density, informal settlements in urban areas.
Land expropriation
Several gross factual distortions and lack of basic knowledge (SA History 101) about Land Reform in South Africa emerged during the Oval Office meeting.
Trump seemed ignorant of the necessity for land reform in South Africa. The 1913 Land Act, introduced when Britain ruled the country, prevented black people from owning land. This led to large-scale dispossession. Even after the Act was repealed in 1991 most commercial farmland remained in the hands of the country’s white minority.
In a complex academic article about Land Reform, University of Stellenbosch sociologist Cherryl Walker points to disparities of land ownership between ‘black’ and ‘white’ but states that they are not as acute as some reports suggest. In 1994 about 204 million hectares of land were owned by whites (the remaining 18 million hectares were taken up by the black “homelands” and “reserves”).
By 2024:
2.34 million hectares had been acquired by black South Africans and 9.23 million hectares had been acquired by the state with 5.3 million redistributed, 3.9 million restored to its original owners or given in restitution for land lost and 30 530 hectares had gone to tenant labourers.
These figures hardly suggest that there has been large-scale expropriation of white-owned land. The Trump administration implies that the land is being seized illegally. Again, the devil is in the detail … a word Trump does not know. The Expropriation Act of 2024 (Act 13 of 2024) did indeed cause great controversy in South Africa, where resistance to the government and the president are still permitted without being silenced or decried as “fake news”.
But there are checks and balances. Thomas Karberg, of the well-known and highly reputable law firm Werksmans Attorneys, makes it clear that both expropriation attempts and land claims must follow a formal legal process and that “False narratives are very dangerous”.
There is, of course, always the future danger of good laws being ignored by bad people.
The G20 Summit (well actually the G19 Summit)
In November 2025 South Africa hosted the G20 Summit, apparently very successfully, despite the fact that Trump refused either to attend or to send an official representative. His war against South Africa seems set to continue, with the announcement that he will ban South Africa’s representatives from attending the 2026 summit, which is to be held in Florida.
Tightrope walking — and the winds are getting stronger
South Africa’s activism in taking Israel to the International Court of Justice in December 2023 on the grounds that Palestinian rights were being violated (a claim since endorsed by many other countries and a UN Independent Commission of Inquiry), underscores its commitment to international law and human rights. However, it has been less vocal on other global crises such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine (seeking negotiation and peace rather than outright condemnation) and remaining relatively muted on Sudan and Iran’s internal clampdowns. On Venezuela South Africa has criticised perceived US intervention, aligning rhetorically with sovereignty and non-interference, yet this has drawn domestic criticism for inconsistency given its softer posture on Russia.
Sadly, the fraught international landscape of geopolitics clearly requires South Africa to continue its delicate balance of BRICS’ membership with the practical realities of encouraging trade and investment with competing powerful countries.
In Conclusion
In 2020 I wished for ongoing resistance to “fake news”, populism, climate change denialists and rampant capitalist greed.
Sadly, six years on, these issues have only worsened, fuelled by the rise of ultra-right nationalisms, imperial desires for spheres of influence, the dangers of unchecked AI, and a deeply concerning breakdown in ethical behaviour and international laws.
A grateful acknowledgement to Pat Tucker for her expert proof-reading eye in careful editing this post.