This year, the Free Market Foundation (FMF) – one of the oldest classical liberal think tanks on the African continent – is celebrating its 50th anniversary.

Tomorrow, over a hundred people, including FMF staff, board members, associates, and friends will gather in Johannesburg to celebrate this significant milestone. The FMF’s Golden Jubilee is an appropriate opportunity to pause and reflect with pride on the work of the Foundation over half a century.

A light in the darkness

Founded in August 1975, the six co-founders were Leon Louw, Ed Emary, Mike Lillard, Fred Macaskill, André Spies, and Marc Swanepoel. In its founding announcement, the steering committee explained that the FMF would make the case for a free market economy to counter the “creeping socialism” occurring in South Africa.

The timing was perfect.

By the mid-1970s, South Africa was ripe for political and economic change, and a clear voice for free market capitalism was needed as an alternative to the status quo of interventionist nationalism on the one hand, and the looming prospect of communism on the other.

In the 1980s, as the apartheid system began to buckle under the combined weight of foreign pressure and its own internal contradictions, the FMF advocated for constitutionalism and a federal system of government as a means of diffusing political power and protecting individual freedom.

Direct education was the FMF’s preferred medium, with over a million workers across two thousand companies introduced to basic free market concepts through the “With Justice for All” training course.

Other initiatives like the FMF’s “Liberty School” exposed university students to liberal thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, FA Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Ayn Rand. The FMF was privileged to host both Hayek and Walter Williams, who visited South Africa in 1978 and 1980 respectively.

Democracy’s teething pains

Throughout the turbulent years of the transition to democracy in the 1990s, the FMF made the case for individual liberty, private property rights, free enterprise, and limited constitutional government to whoever would listen. Most notably through its “Project Transition”, the FMF advocated strongly for the inclusion of a private property rights clause in the final constitution.

Post-1994, the FMF generated support for the privatisation of key industries hitherto monopolised by the state, including aviation and telecommunications. In doing so, the FMF could point to successful models of privatisation in the West – particularly under Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States – as models of how profit-seeking and increased competition could improve economic dynamism while rolling back the mighty leviathan of the state.

As Eastern Europe threw off the shackles of communist repression, and many countries in East Asia embraced free trade, the case for liberalisation in South Africa became ever stronger. In the early-to-mid-2000s, the Mbeki government implemented a raft of macroeconomic reforms, reducing fiscal deficits and public debt, and boosting economic growth to over 5% while lowering unemployment.

However, the same Mbeki government also undermined property rights through the nationalisation of mineral and water rights and initiated market-distorting policies such as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), which the FMF critiqued in a comprehensive recent report.

Khaya Lam

In the 2010s, the FMF launched its flagship land reform project, Khaya Lam, aimed at promoting property ownership by ensuring families living in previously council-owned rental stock become titled owners of their properties.

Since 2013 to the present day, Khaya Lam has facilitated the transfer of over 20 000 properties from municipalities to residents, turning former tenants into homeowners at no cost to themselves (our generous donors covered the costs of these transfers).

Khaya Lam is a recognition of the fundamental right of ownership that all South Africans should enjoy. Title security is also an important rejoinder to harmful policies like Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC), which seeks to dilute private property rights and empower the state to confiscate land.

Holding the line

Throughout the democratic period, the FMF made countless submissions to Parliament, published various books, monographs and essays, appeared thousands of times in the media and hosted numerous seminars and policy conferences – all in an effort to make the case for liberty more widely known and understood.

Today, the FMF is determined to stand firm against EWC and other socialist policies such as National Health Insurance (NHI) that look to violate people’s rights in the name of the “public interest.” Whether in the courts or in the media, we register our dissent in the name of freedom.

We oppose vigorously but also offer alternative solutions such as the Job Seeker’s Exemption Certificate (JSEC). If implemented, the JSEC would empower aspirant jobseekers to voluntarily exempt themselves from South Africa’s rigid labour laws.

A principled stance

As we celebrate our Golden Jubilee, it is worth remembering why freedom matters in the first place.

As classical liberals, we believe that all people – regardless of race or cultural background – are endowed with the same inalienable rights to determine their own lives autonomously. When we advocate for a minimal state with limited government interference in the economy, we do so not merely for the sake of efficiency or expediency, but because the principle of voluntaryism and constrained government power are the most moral approaches to ordering human affairs and preserving individual freedom.

And with freedom comes personal responsibility. Responsibility for your own actions and a duty to uphold the rights of others.

Empirical proof

While our commitment to freedom is a principled one, the data is also on our side.

Yesterday, the FMF published the Economic Freedom of the World: 2025 Annual Report (EFW) together with the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank. The EFW is a measure of economic freedom in 165 countries around the world, aggregating 45 data points across five key areas. These are:

1. Size of government
2. Legal system and property rights
3. Sound money
4. Freedom to trade internationally
5. Regulation

The EFW reveals strong correlations between economic freedom, prosperity, and human flourishing. For example:

• Free countries are wealthier: GDP per capita in free countries is approximately US$55 000 while people in unfree countries earn a meagre US$7 000 on average;
• It is better to be poor in a free country than in an unfree country: the poorest 10% of the population in free countries earn approximately US$7 500 per annum while in the least free countries – where governments intervene more in the economy, usually in the name of ‘helping’ the poor – the poorest 10% earn less than US$1 000 per annum;
• Life expectancy is 79 years in the freest countries compared to 62 years in the least free; and
• Children in free countries are 2.5 times less likely to work than children in unfree countries.

Of the 165 countries with EFW scores, South Africa’s ranking has remained stagnant at 83rd place for the second year in a row, with a score of 6.61 out of 10. This is South Africa’s lowest level since 1994 and a long way off from its highest ranking of 47th in 2000.

To climb back up the rankings, the Government of National Unity should adopt the policy proposals laid out in the FMF’s Liberty First policy agenda, which explicitly draws on the EFW methodology and makes economic freedom the guiding principle of policymaking.

Free markets, private property rights, limited government, and the rule of law. These are the fundamental ingredients of a free society – and principles well worth fighting for. May the Free Market Foundation continue its noble fight for freedom for many decades to come.

Ansara is CEO of the Free Market Foundation.