There is a recurring theme in the comments on The Common Sense podcasts and social media about how to handle the fragmenting African National Congress (ANC). Quite a lot of frustration emerges when this newspaper cautions, as it has repeatedly done, against seeking to grind the ANC into the dust. Beyond resolving that debate, the fact that it is a debate at all is a pretty wild insight into where South Africa finds itself.

This newspaper has stressed over and again that the risks in the second-order effects of collapsing the ANC and freezing it out of government may be deeply negative for South Africa. This line triggers a lot of reader pushback – and this has caused us to think a lot about the line. The Common Sense has also written at length on ANC successes in government and that the return to a 50%-plus majority would not be that hard for the party (if it ditched its dim-witted advisers) and that such a majority may in the end be the best thing for South Africa if it wishes to remain a unitary state. It has also stressed that the bulk of the ANC’s remaining voters are good and decent people with good values.

The Common Sense wants to be a two-way street to become a community of sorts in which its readers participate. To that end projects are under consideration, from live streams to Q and A platforms and cutting-edge tech options. Hopefully through 2027 many of those functions will be in operation and The Common Sense family will have a lot of opportunity to bounce ideas off each other.

If those platforms were already on hand, we might say to a reader arguing that the ANC was beyond the pale, and that we were mad to even suggest keeping it around, that could we at least find common ground on it being important to take its remaining supporters along into whatever new dispensation lies ahead for South Africa, or at least to try very hard to take them along. It is this that concerns this newspaper almost the most – the consequences of abandoning, stigmatising, and walking into the future without that remaining ANC base on board. The second-order effect risks arise from that concern.

Regardless of where one stands on that point, is it not extraordinary to think that a moment has been reached in South Africa where people not in the ANC have to think about what to do with the party as it falls apart and how best to manage the consequences? And that part of this debate now involves the question of to what extent the ANC should be included in the future of South Africa! The balance of forces of the revolution, as well-read ANC thinkers will understand the term, has shifted massively.