The Motsepe PM27 Campaign and Whether it Will be a Game Changer for South Africa

The success of a potential Patrice Motsepe presidency will lie in whether it can repeat a cycle of events the African National Congress (ANC) presided over between 1994 and 2008. That cycle saw a confidence–investment–growth–jobs feedback loop work to lift and sustain ANC dominance.

Last week The Common Sense reported on the emergence of a PM27 website advocating for Motsepe’s elevation to the ANC leadership. He has not endorsed the platform and cannot formally declare without branch nomination. However, if his camp does formally enter the race for ANC leader, this newspaper has reported that he will likely win and go on to become South Africa’s President.

What happens after that is, of course, extremely important and should be quite easy to predict.

Empirically, ANC electoral performance has done nothing more complex than track the material conditions of South Africa’s people. In the post-1994 period, declining political risk and improved institutional certainty lifted investor confidence. Rising confidence translated into higher levels of fixed investment. Increased capital formation supported job creation and rising household incomes. As living standards improved, protest intensity moderated and ANC vote share lifted to just shy of 70%.

ANC support levels have had little to do with historical liberation loyalties, ideological leanings, or blind confidence in the party. Instead, chiefly shrewd policy allowed capital inflows. Capital inflows expanded productive capacity. Expanded capacity generated economic growth and employment, and living conditions leapt to a far greater degree than the ANC ever received credit for.

Over the past decade and a bit, that sequence inverted. Policy incoherence and populist ideas around expropriation and nationalising healthcare, governance failures, and energy constraints eroded investor confidence. Fixed investment as a share of GDP weakened by around a third to where it today sits at what are essentially care and maintenance levels. Labour absorption stalled. Household living standard stress increased. Protest frequency rose. ANC support declined accordingly. Political vulnerability mirrored economic stagnation.

Yet even post the ANC’s 2024 defeat, few party leaders, and even fewer South African observers or investors, understand this causal chain. Several observors and party leaders still ascribe ANC weakness to chiefly irrelevant ideas around messaging, tone, and ideology that are at best secondary considerations for voters but more often than not, not considerations at all.

The idea of a Motsepe candidacy as a game changer for South Africa must be predicated on reversing the causal inversion of the past decade. Short of that, his presidency too will fail. As a globally connected business figure with established capital networks, he could plausibly recalibrate investor perceptions. Matched with actual reforms the investment rate might lift quickly and with it South Africa and the ANC’s prospects.

Perhaps out of early necessity the PM27 platform has stressed the objectives of unity, integrity, and growth as well as the importance of broad consultation with South Africa’s public.

Frans Cronje told The Common Sense that “that’s all good and well but only the word in that list that really matters is ‘growth’...the restoration of unity and party integrity will in the fullness of time hinge on the extent to which growth is realised…with our read on public opinion data being that South Africans are deeply sceptical of political assurances around buzzwords like unity and integrity...they want to see actual leadership behind solutions far more than they want to be consulted on what should be done...show don’t tell has been a key finding of our political research work”.

Cronje does think though that “should Motsepe successfully catalyse a recovery in fixed investment the ANC could realistically re-establish itself above the 50 percent threshold...there is enough latent support within its former support base to do that quite easily”.