There is a good argument that Wednesday’s election matters considerably less than the attention devoted to it would suggest. Not because the outcome will have no bearing on the quality of local government, the fortunes of political parties, or the daily lives of millions of South Africans, but because the election is taking place within a process of political and institutional change that is already so advanced that no plausible electoral outcome is likely to reverse it. That process is the steady transfer of practical authority away from the central state and towards independent communities, businesses, institutions, and regional centres of economic power. It is the process through which South Africa is becoming an enclave society, and the most important thing to understand about that development is that it is almost certainly irreversible.

South Africa is in the middle of a regime change, and such changes occur in two stages. First, the political order that once commanded the confidence of the country loses its authority. Then, over what can be a very long period, a new order emerges to replace it. The loss by the African National Congress of its national majority in 2024 was a milestone in the first stage, but it was not the conclusion of the second. Wednesday’s election may mark another important step in that transition, as political authority fragments further across municipalities and regions, but it will not settle the much bigger question of what kind of political and institutional order eventually emerges. The mistake is to assume that because South Africa is undergoing a regime change, the conclusion must be the restoration of a strong and capable central government exercising something like the authority that Pretoria once possessed.

That is unlikely to happen. The more plausible conclusion is that the central state will never again exercise the degree of authority over South African society and the economy that it once did. Too much has happened, too much independent capacity has been created, and too many households and businesses have learnt that their prospects are better secured by building institutions and systems over which they exercise direct control than by placing their faith in distant political authorities. South Africa’s regime change is therefore different from the conventional understanding of one political establishment displacing another and then governing through the same institutions. The old order is not simply losing power to another political party. It is losing power to society itself.

Look at what is happening across the country. Electricity generation is increasingly decentralised. Security has become a vast private undertaking. Businesses have constructed their own transport and logistics arrangements. Residential communities have taken responsibility for infrastructure, public spaces, and the maintenance of neighbourhoods. Independent schools, private healthcare networks, and alternative municipal service arrangements have expanded as confidence in state provision has weakened. Some of these arrangements are sophisticated and highly capitalised. Others are informal, improvised, and constrained by poverty. But they are expressions of the same underlying phenomenon. South Africans have stopped waiting for the state to do things they increasingly recognise they must do for themselves. And once that recognition takes hold, it changes behaviour, investment decisions, institutional loyalties, and, ultimately, the distribution of power in ways that cannot readily be undone.

There is a tendency to regard this development as evidence of national failure, and in one respect it is. But to stop there is to miss the much more interesting and, in many respects, encouraging consequence. South African society is demonstrating an extraordinary capacity to organise, adapt, innovate, and preserve economic activity in circumstances that might otherwise have produced a more comprehensive national collapse. The businesses installing their own electricity generation, the communities maintaining their own infrastructure, and the institutions preserving educational and healthcare standards are not merely retreating from a failing state. They are creating new sources of capability, authority, and resilience. The emerging enclave system is therefore not simply a defensive response to failure. It is becoming a new model for how South Africa functions, and in important respects a better one, because responsibility and authority are being drawn closer to the people and institutions capable of exercising them effectively.

The strongest evidence that this process is irreversible is what would happen if a more capable government eventually emerged. Suppose a future administration restored economic growth, repaired the public finances, rebuilt state institutions, and attracted substantial investment. Would households abandon their independent energy systems? Would businesses surrender their security and logistics arrangements? Would successful communities hand back control over the institutions they had created? Almost certainly not. The capital has been invested, the expertise accumulated, and the relationships established. There is little reason for these arrangements to disappear merely because a future government performs better. Quite the opposite. A successful future administration will find that the best way to secure a national recovery is to complement and rely on the independent capacity society had already constructed. The centre would have to accommodate the enclaves because it would need them.

The implications for individual South Africans are enormous. The decisions that will have the greatest bearing on your future are increasingly not decisions made in the Union Buildings, but those you make about your wealth, income, geography, and family. Where you live, whether you acquire skills that can earn an income in competitive markets, whether you accumulate productive assets, whether you diversify your financial exposure, and whether you raise children with the education, independence, and discipline to prosper will matter more and more. Those who position themselves effectively within the emerging enclave society will be able to build very good lives in South Africa, even if the national political environment remains deeply troubled. Those unable to do so will face much greater difficulties, and that is a serious challenge, but it does not diminish the opportunities the transformation creates.

And that brings us back to Wednesday. There will be victories, defeats, surprises, coalition negotiations, and declarations that the country’s future has changed forever. Some of those developments will matter. But they will occur against the background of a much deeper transformation that is already determining South Africa’s future. The country is not waiting for an election to decide whether it becomes an enclave society. It is becoming one already, and there is very little reason to believe that the process can now be reversed, or that reversing it would even be desirable. A capable future government may improve the circumstances in which the enclaves operate, but it is unlikely to displace them or recover the authority that the central state has surrendered. South Africa’s future will increasingly be built from below, by people and institutions that have discovered they can do for themselves what the state once promised to do for them. And if you understand that, and make the right decisions about wealth, income, geography, and family, your prospects may be very good indeed, whatever happens in the Union Buildings.