When the African National Congress (ANC) reflects on its precipitous decline, it must look beyond its immediate scandals and interrogate the external ideological architecture that it came to adopt. By eagerly implementing paradigms of radical climate transitions and identity-driven social justice, the ANC, post-2008 especially, dismantled its economic foundation, crippled its state infrastructure, and alienated its working-class base. In that introspection the ANC should track who encouraged it to do that, and who sought to warn it off.

A lethal, quantifiable blow to the ANC's control of South Africa was the systematic destruction of its electrical infrastructure, a crisis accelerated under the banner of international “climate justice”. During global climate summits, external powers, and activists heavily incentivised and praised the ANC for pioneering the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP).

Backed by billions in loans, this framework pressured South Africa, a developing nation fundamentally reliant on coal for over 80% of its baseload power, to aggressively plan the decommissioning of its fleet of coal-fired power stations.

In functional reality, this premature push toward intermittent, unlocalised renewable energy effectively starved the state utility, Eskom, of the focus and capital required to maintain its existing coal infrastructure. The result was catastrophic, multi-year “load-shedding” that paralysed South African manufacturing, crippled small businesses, and drove skyrocketing unemployment.

Internal realist actors, right-of-centre think tanks, domestic trade unions such as the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and traditional engineers repeatedly tried to warn the party off this path. They argued that a developing economy cannot survive by destroying its own baseload power before a viable, state-controlled alternative is built.

Simultaneously, the ANC’s interpretation of “social justice”, transitioning from the goal of dismantling apartheid into the institutionalisation of equity-based patronage systems, hollowed out the capability of the South African state. Under policies like broad-based black economic empowerment (B-BBEE) and strict cadre deployment, the foundational metric of public (and a degree of private) sector recruitment shifted from raw technical competence to political loyalty and identity metrics.

National Survival

When fields critical to national survival, such as water management, rail logistics, and grid engineering, subordinated objective merit to ideological alignment, innovation and maintenance stagnated. Municipalities and state-owned enterprises transformed from service-delivery mechanisms into factional feeding troughs. The ultimate tragedy of this ideological inversion is that it completely failed the black majority it claimed to elevate.

While a small, politically connected elite amassed vast wealth, the broader populace was left with collapsing water systems, broken transport, and an unliveable 33% unemployment rate. Realist critics who warned that abandoning meritocratic, strict public standards would inevitably lead to structural paralysis were labelled as opponents of progress, yet their warnings were vindicated by the total decay of public utilities.

On top of that, the party then hounded capital out of the economy in pursuit of the - again - “social justice” goal of expropriation when land reform might easily have been achieved by granting title to existing land holders and ensuring discounted loans for emerging commercial farmers.

There are many theories as to why the ANC adopted such suicidal ideas. Was it just fundamentally idiotic or institutionally corrupt? Perhaps. But a theory that must stand alongside those is that it was, at least to a degree, the victim of an external subversion movement that caused it to become the architect of its own destruction while viewing that decay as a form of moral enlightenment, and that in pursuit of such enlightenment the ANC traded tangible economic sovereignty for abstract moral validation.

The ANC was repeatedly warned off these ideas and explicitly warned that the consequences would be the loss of political control. Yet it always rebelled against that advice. The party would gain immensely from an audit of which actors stood on which side of that debate, because if the liberation movement is to ever recover, it must urgently decouple genuine social progress from external ideological subversion.

It must look back at those who tried to warn it off, critically re-evaluate the actors who encouraged it to trade away its energy security and economic sovereignty, and restore the unyielding, realist values of objective truth, raw merit, and economic survival.

Alfred Thayer Mahan was a United States Navy officer and historian in the 19th and 20th centuries and is considered by some to be one of the most important American strategists. His spirit writes an occasional column for The Common Sense.