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The trouble with the thesis is that, to succeed, it must establish that these secret agents were responsible for the trio of policies that sank the African National Congress (ANC), and this is a mountain that defies all credibility.

A quick lesson in 30 years of South African cause and effect: Between 1994 and 2008, investor confidence in South Africa rose, driving the fixed investment rate from around 15% to nearer 22% of GDP, which caused the rate of economic growth to lift from near 3% to over 5% of GDP, which in turn caused the number of people with jobs to double, while buoyant revenues and conservative fiscal management sank the debt curve, thereby freeing vast funds for delivery and welfare programmes. Living standards shot through the roof, protest levels fell sharply, and ANC support peaked.

But even as that was occurring, the seeds of future destruction were being sown. Affirmative action hollowed out the civil service and the capacity of the state. The best people left the civil service with consequences that stretched into the collapse of rail and port infrastructure and the lights-out era at Eskom. Black economic empowerment policies taxed capital to such an extent that the investment rate reversed back to its post-apartheid low and stayed there. And mineral and water rights were expropriated without compensation, which crashed the mining industry and drove fears that the ANC was sincere about its expressed desires to take land (which would collapse food production), medical aid funds, and pension funds too.

This trio of policies reversed the confidence, investment, growth, jobs, protests, and ANC support cycle, and this caused the ANC to lose the 2024 election.

To sustain the argument that the ANC was collapsed from without, it would need to be established that the sleepers had sufficient command of the ANC to determine those policies and then drive them, for 30 years, with increased intensity even as their results began to show in the economy and in ANC voter support. And more than that, that as the ANC sought to stop and reverse those policies it was prevented from doing so by these same sleepers.

The furthest an analyst can credibly get down that road is that a cross-section of business leaders, leftist intelligentsia, the legacy media, and Western governments supported the ANC in these policies for reasons of political correctness, and that, for each of these groups, being popular in ANC ranks mattered more than the fact that the policies they supported the ANC in pursuing would bring about the party’s destruction.

But the evidence stands quite at odds with what Mbeki alleges. An entire cross-section of analysts, think tanks, and civil society groups outside of business, the woke West, the legacy media, and the ANC cautioned for more than 30 years that the trio of policies would sink the economy and the ANC with it. For that, they were vilified, castigated, and isolated, often on the allegation that it was they who were trying to undermine the very National Democratic Revolution that Mbeki says has now been lost.

That private actors have now assumed more responsibility for functions the state once provided is not evidence of some final stage of what would have to rank as the most astonishing conspiracy, but rather the organic and necessary consequence of the breakdown of the capacity of the state. The ANC brought itself down by its own policies — and in the face of cautionary warnings from people who had South Africa’s best interests at heart.