South Africa’s current crisis is directly linked to the strategy developed by the African National Congress (ANC) to combat apartheid and to seize power, according to Institute of Race Relations (IRR) policy head Dr Anthea Jeffery.

In an interview with Sakeliga executive director Russell Lamberti, Jeffery argued that the ANC’s use of political violence and intimidation during the final decade of apartheid was not simply about resistance, or even winning power, but about securing the dominance needed to reshape South Africa after 1994.

She said that this strategy, the People’s War, about which she has written extensively in The People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa, can still be seen in the concentration of political power, the weakening of opposition, and a policy agenda that has damaged the country’s economic prospects.

Jeffery said the strategy pursued from the mid-1980s combined mass mobilisation, intimidation, violence, and propaganda to undermine political opponents and build the ANC’s position ahead of the transition to democracy.

Jeffery argued that the People’s War treated ordinary people as instruments of political struggle, using boycotts and stayaways alongside intimidation to compel participation and silence dissent.

She said the ANC’s black political rivals, particularly Inkatha and the Black Consciousness movement, were targets of a strategy designed to weaken competing sources of political support.

Jeffery also challenged accounts of the period that, she argued, placed too much emphasis on violence attributed to the apartheid state and Inkatha while overlooking the ANC’s role. These are contested historical interpretations presented in her research – for the most part, her contemporaries have avoided analysing this, preferring to default to a frame of analysis sympathetic to the ANC.

This was undertaken with an eye on pursuit of the ANC’s long-term ideological programme.

The strategy had a second stage: using the power secured through the transition to pursue socialism through the National Democratic Revolution (NDR).

“The ANC had this two-stage agenda,” Jeffery told Lamberti, “First we have the People’s War to gain power and then we use power to move to socialism through the National Democratic Revolution.”

She argued that this longer-term objective had not received sufficient scrutiny in public debate, leaving South Africans less aware of how the ANC’s historical strategy relates to its conduct in government.

Jeffrey also pointed to the post-1994 political settlement, arguing that South Africa had become highly centralised, with substantial power concentrated in national government and limited scope for meaningful devolution.

Jeffrey criticised electoral reliance on party lists, arguing that MPs were more accountable to party leadership than directly to voters.

In her view, these arrangements make it harder to hold political representatives accountable and to achieve changes in government.

She warned that there were signs that the ANC was committed to expanding political determination into other areas, and was finding some success: “We also have within the ANC a strong push for what they would call the East German system of adjudication, where the judiciary must also harmonise its rulings with what the executive and the legislature want. And sometimes I fear that we see in our rulings that kind of tendency.”

For Jeffery, the consequences extend beyond the transition itself. She argued that a fuller understanding of the People’s War and the ANC’s subsequent political objectives would help South Africans assess the country’s current political arrangements and consider alternatives.