Earlier this week March and March and AfriForum met in Pretoria to get to know each other and talk about matters of common interest. For people who don’t understand South Africa, that might have seemed odd: the most prominent Afrikaner civil society group finding common ground with what is becoming the most prominent black civil society group. But the two share common origins, have arisen in response to the same frustrations, share common values, and their coming together reinforces something important about South Africa’s future.

March and March is a South African civic activist movement that emerged around public frustration with issues such as illegal immigration, crime, law enforcement failures, and the inability of government institutions to put South Africans first. The movement is led by Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, a former radio presenter and civic activist. The movement organises public marches and campaigns to highlight concerns among citizens who believe the state has failed to address problems affecting communities. Its supporters see it as a grassroots movement focused on restoring order and accountability and doing what the government and politicians can’t or won’t. It is well on its way to becoming the most prominent civil society organisation in South Africa.

AfriForum is a South African civil rights organisation established in 2006 that campaigns primarily around the protection of Afrikaner culture, language, minority rights, and property rights, while also involving itself in broader issues such as crime, corruption, and service delivery. The organisation forms part of the broader Solidarity Movement and uses advocacy campaigns, legal action, research reports, and public mobilisation to influence government policy and defend the rights of communities and citizens. It is led by Kallie Kriel, a former teacher, and has become one of the most prominent civil society organisations in South Africa.

Both groups arose and grew from the same thing: failures of the state and politicians that alienated their respective constituencies.

Hostile state policy, matched with media rhetoric against Afrikaners, was the impetus for that community to organise around AfriForum. With more than 200 000 fee-paying members, that could easily be extrapolated to a similar number of households. AfriForum is far and away the premier representative of narrowly defined Afrikaner interests in South Africa today. Its leaders are a tough group that broker no nonsense from the government or politicians, even as it works to ensure South Africa’s broader success.

The state’s wholly inept economic and migration policies, frightening levels of violent crime, and corrupt and inept policing, all while presiding over an unemployment rate of over 30%, was the similar impetus that saw March and March get going. And based on polls conducted by this newspaper on the issue of illegal immigration, it must have the support of hundreds of thousands of households (two thirds of South Africans say communities would be within their rights to take the law into their own hands and throw out the immigrants). Its leaders are a tough lot too and like their colleagues at AfriForum take a hard line on the government and politicians.

Beyond their essentially identical origins in community responses to state failure and neglect, they share a common values base. South Africa is a right-of-centre conservative society in the main. But little in formal politics caters for that – partly because opposition donors are chiefly left-of-centre social democrats. The result is a values vacuum in the politics which allows hardline appeals to nationalism, law and order, and hard work coming from outside politics to resonate with people across the old racial divide. A member of this editorial board quipped that it’s “Rainbow MAGA”, and that is not far off.

Looking ahead, the coming together of the two groups is the latest manifestation of the enclave future that this newspaper’s 2034 scenario assessment, published a few weeks ago, argued was the most likely long-term outcome for the country. It envisaged a future where South Africans frustrated at the failures of the government and the weakness of politicians come together in parallel structures to usurp what were once the functions of the state.