The Thabo Mbeki Foundation holds that South Africa’s decline since 2008 was manufactured by people with the power and the motive to weaken the state. Some of them worked within it; others pursued their interests from outside, exploiting damage that had already been done. South Africans deserve an honest account of how we got here.

On 30 September, The Common Sense described this view as “the most extraordinary conspiracy”. In the editorial board’s telling, we believe that sleeper agents were planted in apartheid’s final days to bring down the African National Congress (ANC), so that private capital and Afrikaner institutions could assume the state’s functions. It offers a simpler explanation of its own: investment, growth, and employment rose until 2008, three policies then reversed those gains, and the ANC paid the price in the 2024 election.

The trouble with that explanation is the dates. Employment equity became law in 1998, the mining legislation in 2002, and broad-based empowerment in 2003. All three were in place before the growth the editorial board praises had peaked. And by 2008, fixed investment had risen from 15% to 22% of GDP, employment had nearly doubled, and public debt had fallen to 24% of GDP.

Those figures do not settle every policy debate, but they leave concerned South Africans with two questions to answer: why the economy grew under these laws, and what changed when that growth gave way to decline.

Even analysts who share the editorial board’s critique of these policies recognise the break; John Endres of the Institute of Race Relations divides democratic South Africa into a first period ending in 2007 and a second beginning in 2008, when growth fell to a third of its earlier rate. Frans Cronje, whose firm supplies much of the data behind these claims, has written that growth of 4% to 5% is possible if we apply the lessons of the first 15 years. If those years hold lessons worth recovering, they can hardly be the cause of everything that followed.

Electricity is where the break has been felt most directly, in every household and business.

The editorial board attributes the “lights-out era” to affirmative action. Yet electricity output rose by almost half between 1994 and 2008, with the same law in place for much of that period. What the editorial board leaves out is what happened to the power stations themselves.

Even at its recorded peaks in 2007 and 2008, demand barely exceeded 36 000 megawatts, which was less than the fleet’s installed capacity. More recent figures put capacity above 48 000 megawatts and peak demand below 35 000. The problem, in other words, was never the size of the fleet but how much of it actually worked. The share available to generate fell from 88% in 2006–07 to 55% in 2023–24, amid deferred maintenance, corrupted coal contracts and sabotage. It has since recovered to above 67%, without any change to the three policies the editorial board blames.

None of this is intended to absolve the Mbeki government. The 1998 White Paper warned that Eskom’s surplus would run out around 2007 unless new generating capacity was authorised, and the government was slower to act than it should have been. But that delay does not explain why so much of the existing fleet became unavailable over the following fifteen years.

Some of what happened can still be tested against the record. President Mbeki has said that a Special Investigating Unit report submitted to the presidency found that the power cuts were internally generated. By his account, Eskom’s systems had warned from November 2007 that coal stocks were running low. Nobody acted. The emergency that followed was manufactured, and it allowed coal to be bought without tender at roughly twice the price. Its consequences are with us still.

The report has never been published. We invite The Common Sense to join us in calling for its release, so that South Africans can read the findings and judge the evidence for themselves.

That leaves the question of who benefits as the state weakens. The Zondo commission documented networks of patronage that profited from public institutions. But our concern extends further, to older networks whose reach after apartheid has never been fully established. Meanwhile, interests that never accepted the 1994 settlement have used the state’s failures to argue against it. Those inside the state who profit from dysfunction and those outside it who seek political advantage need not sit around the same table for their actions to serve each other.

After News24 reported that Ernst Roets had asked the White House to broker talks with minorities on “sustainable settlements”, three South African journalists responded on the same Sunday. Ferial Haffajee read the proposal as a call for a return to apartheid. Pieter du Toit argued that its proponents had never accepted the 1994 settlement and were using a weakened state, with support from the United States, to pursue what they could not achieve in the 1990s. Redi Tlhabi warned of the Afrikaner right’s enthusiasm for its standing in America and the reckoning that could follow.

Those who sought a separate Afrikaner homeland did not secure it through the 1994 settlement; a weaker state offers them another opening. That is how we read the close of The Common Sense’s second editorial, Ask Not for Whom the Revolution Bays, It Bays for You. Gentlemen and Lady, which predicted that, if empowerment policy is not amended, South Africa would most likely balkanise while the middle classes held out in their enclaves. The editorial board describes private actors taking over the state’s functions as the “organic and necessary consequence” of its breakdown, and the enclaves that follow as the status quo of the past 400 years continuing. This is exactly what worries us. What the volkstaat movement could not win in the 1990s, a weakened state now hands over piecemeal, behind walls and private security.

Nor should the history of infiltration be dismissed out of hand. Apartheid’s penetration of the liberation movement was real, and it is well documented. It strains belief that people whose purpose had been to destroy a Soviet-inspired ANC underwent a Damascene conversion in 1994. The calls for a volkstaat, and the determined opposition to any form of redress proposed by Black people, suggest no such conversion. They point instead to a betrayal of the 1994 settlement’s promise of an equal, non-racial society.

The literature on that history is extensive. Jacob Dlamini’s Askari follows the turning of an uMkhonto weSizwe commander into a collaborator with the Security Branch, and in The Terrorist Album he shows how the police catalogued exiles in order to track and recruit them. Stephen Ellis’s External Mission traces the ANC’s years in exile, including its struggles with infiltration and with its own security apparatus. Moe Shaik’s The ANC Spy Bible recounts files indicating compromise at senior levels, while leaving the most senior figure unnamed. Hennie van Vuuren’s Apartheid Guns and Money widens the frame to the hidden ties between business, banks, and intelligence services that kept the regime supplied. These authors write about different things and do not always agree, but read together they leave little room for the claim that clandestine collaboration is a story added to South African history after the fact. There were handlers and there were agents, and there were financial relationships kept deliberately out of public view.

None of these books shows that any particular official today serves an apartheid network, and we do not claim otherwise. They do, however, give us reason to ask what became of those networks. Apartheid’s security state made infiltration central to its work and destroyed records that might have revealed how far it reached. It is not far-fetched to think that some handlers and agents kept up their relationships, adapted to new conditions or helped to weaken democratic institutions. Whether they did is a question for investigation, and any continuity has to be proved. But we cannot simply assume that every relationship ended in 1994, nor should forgetting this history be the price of a respectable place in the debate.

Whether or not any such continuity is ever established, the damage itself is already a matter of record. The generating fleet’s availability collapsed, coal contracts were corrupted, and an investigation into the power cuts produced findings that have never reached the public. None of this required a change in the law. It required people in a position to act, or to decline to act, at the moments that mattered. That is why our case rests on decisions and the people who made them, rather than on the statute book the editorial board keep returning to.

We do not pretend that our monograph explains everything. An honest account must weigh every competing explanation, including those that owe nothing to anyone’s intentions.

The financial crisis and the end of the commodity supercycle belong in it, and both dealt real blows to the economy. But they cannot, on their own, explain a decade of underperformance. Between 2010 and 2019, the world economy grew by roughly 3.7% a year, while South Africa managed 1.7%. Peru, another mineral exporter exposed to metal prices, grew by more than 4%. Why did South Africa fall so far behind?

Thomas Paine, whose title the editorial board has borrowed, urged his readers to question the conditions under which they lived. We ask the same of South Africans today. South Africa’s decline was not the accident of three laws, nor the misfortune of global markets. It was manufactured by people who had the power to weaken the state and reasons to want it weakened.

Some of them are termites in the floor: officials, contractors, and networks inside our institutions who hollowed them out from within, deferring the maintenance, corrupting the contracts, and declining to act when it mattered most. Others are wolves at the door: interests that never accepted the 1994 settlement and now present every failure of the state as proof that it should never have been built. The termites need not answer to the wolves for the work of one to serve the other.

Our account, like the editorial board’s, must be tested against the evidence. But South Africans should not be told that the collapse of their institutions simply happened. A decline that was made can be unmade, once we are honest about who made it.