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Thabo Mbeki’s central argument is that South Africa’s post-2008 decline was not simply the result of African National Congress (ANC) incompetence, the global financial crisis, or policy failure. He argues that an organised counter-revolution, rooted in elements of the old apartheid security establishment, deliberately infiltrated and weakened the ANC and the democratic state in order to defeat the National Democratic Revolution (NDR)* and preserve much of the old socio-economic order.

*[The NDR was the ANC’s historical strategy to move South Africa to a socialist and later communist future.]

His argument works roughly as follows:

1. The first fifteen years after 1994 were, in his telling, broadly successful. He cites economic growth, falling public debt, job creation, expanding welfare, and service delivery, and argues that the post-apartheid constitutional order was therefore demonstrably capable of working. He adopts the distinction between a successful first age before 2008 and a deteriorating second age thereafter.
2. He says the break after 2008 requires a political explanation. His claim is that there remained people inside the former National Party state and security establishment who never accepted the ANC and South African Communist Party as legitimate political opponents. They continued to regard communism, the ANC, and the NDR as strategic enemies that had to be defeated. Mbeki says these people formed an organised counter-revolutionary grouping, including former Defence Intelligence elements.
3. The key instrument, according to Mbeki, was infiltration. He argues that apartheid intelligence services had placed agents throughout the ANC, the democratic movement, universities, the media, business, and civil society. After 1994, he says, these agents were never fully identified or neutralised.
4. His most extraordinary claim is about Polokwane in 2007. Mbeki argues that the counter-revolution intervened in the ANC leadership contest to ensure that the leadership elected there suited its purposes. He further alleges that assassins were taken to the conference as a contingency in case the desired leadership outcome was not achieved. In his account, the objective was to capture the ANC from within and then use its own leadership structure to frustrate the programme of the ANC government.
5. He then links this directly to state capture and institutional decay. The South African Revenue Service, Eskom, Transnet, South African Airways, Denel, the police, the prosecution service, and other arms of the state were, he argues, deliberately weakened. The result was lower growth, corruption, failing services, and the collapse of public confidence in the ANC.
6. In Mbeki’s argument, the purpose was bigger than merely removing or weakening the ANC. The real target was the NDR itself. The counter-revolution allegedly wanted to prevent the construction of a capable developmental state able to change the racial and economic structure inherited from apartheid. A weakened state would make meaningful redistribution, black economic advancement, and structural transformation much harder.
7. He therefore interprets the rise of private provision, enclaves, self-governing communities, and what some writers call a lean state as the political end state of this process. In his reading, the state becomes too weak to transform society, private capital and civil society increasingly perform state functions, and the socioeconomic structure created under settler colonialism survives even though democratic political institutions formally remain.
8. He then connects this to Solidarity and AfriForum. His argument is that the counter-revolution first weakens the democratic state, creating empty spaces, after which Afrikaner civil society organisations move into those spaces with schools, security, infrastructure, and other institutions. He sees this not as an accidental response to state failure, but as part of a broader historical movement towards Afrikaner autonomy, enclaves, and what he describes as a partial restoration of separate development.

In his account, corruption and institutional destruction were instruments of a counter-revolutionary strategy designed to produce four outcomes: a weaker ANC, a weaker developmental state, the defeat of the NDR, and the preservation of the racial socioeconomic structure inherited from apartheid. He treats the fall of the ANC’s vote from near 70% in 2004 to around 40% in 2024 as evidence that the strategy is succeeding politically, because the ANC can no longer govern alone and therefore has less power to determine the country’s future.

His thesis in one paragraph is therefore that elements of the old apartheid security state never accepted the 1994 settlement as final. They infiltrated the ANC, took control of its internal management and policy-making infrastructure, helped shape the leadership outcome at Polokwane, facilitated the destruction of state capacity during the Zuma era, and thereby weakened both the ANC and the developmental state. The resulting vacuum is now being filled by private capital, civil society, and increasingly autonomous Afrikaner institutions. In his interpretation, this is the counter-revolution’s victory because democratic politics survives, but the material transformation envisaged by the ANC does not.