Frans Cronje’s departure point was that South Africa’s political difficulties cannot be understood independently of the economic circumstances of its people. The country began a process of economic emancipation after 1994, achieved considerable success over its first 15 years of democracy, and then interrupted that process around 2008. The consequences have been economic stagnation, rising public frustration, the collapse of the ANC’s electoral dominance, and the gradual weakening of the authority of the central state. Unless that trajectory is reversed, the country is likely to evolve into a collection of enclaves in which those with sufficient resources can secure their own futures while the poor become increasingly vulnerable to the authority of powerful private actors.

Fundamental to understanding this process, Cronje argued, is a proper appreciation of what South Africa achieved after 1994. In the period following the democratic transition, the country’s investment rate increased sharply, economic growth accelerated towards emerging-market averages, and living standards improved considerably. The number of South Africans in employment roughly doubled, with approximately eight million jobs created between 1994 and 2008. Over the same period, the proportion of households without electricity fell from approximately 49.0% to 19.0%. These improvements were accompanied by declining levels of violent protest, rising confidence in the national government, and an increase in ANC electoral support from approximately 63.0% in 1994 to nearly 70.0% in 2004.

This experience, Cronje said, demonstrated that the ANC’s early electoral success was not principally the result of liberation loyalty, as many analysts had assumed. Rather, voters were responding rationally to improvements in their material circumstances. Liberation loyalty was certainly present, but it was reinforced by the experience of rising employment, improved services, and the prospect of a better future. The ANC was rewarded because it was delivering tangible improvements in people’s lives. That distinction is fundamental to understanding why the party subsequently lost its majority.

Between 2008 and the present, South Africa created only approximately two million additional jobs, compared with the eight million created during the preceding period. Investment weakened, growth stagnated, and improvements in living standards slowed. The early indications of political discontent appeared not in election results but in rising protest activity, as communities sought to communicate their growing frustration with the state. Cronje recalled the killing of protester Andries Tatane in Ficksburg in 2011 as a particularly important moment, illustrating both the depth of public frustration and the failure of the authorities to appreciate what was occurring. The Covid-19 pandemic subsequently accelerated the deterioration, compressing years of economic and political damage into a much shorter period.

The ANC's fall from the 57.5% it secured in the 2019 national election to approximately 40.0% in 2024 was therefore not the sudden political rupture it appeared to be. It was the culmination of a deterioration that had been evident in economic and public opinion data for well over a decade. The ANC had lost the support of millions of voters because it had failed to sustain the economic progress that had originally secured their loyalty. Cronje argued that the same process now threatens the Government of National Unity (GNU).

Although the establishment of the GNU after the May 2024 election was an important achievement, particularly in stabilising financial markets and preventing a potentially damaging loss of investor confidence, Cronje told Ndlozi that it had failed to make sufficient progress on the reforms necessary to improve living standards. South Africa continues to grow at approximately 1.0% annually, against an emerging-market average of roughly 4.0%, while unemployment remains above 30.0%. The political consequences are already visible. According to polling cited by Cronje, the proportion of South Africans who believed the GNU was performing badly increased from approximately 20.0% in September 2024 to 40.0% two years later.

The danger is that the GNU has inherited not only the responsibilities of government but also the economic conditions that destroyed the ANC’s majority. Unless it substantially improves those conditions, the same public dissatisfaction will increasingly attach itself to the coalition and the parties participating in it.

Cronje was particularly critical of the absence of a coherent strategy to increase investment and employment. South Africa’s fixed investment rate, which he placed at approximately 14.0% of GDP, remains far below what would be necessary to sustain rapid economic growth. He dismissed government employment schemes and subsidies as inadequate substitutes for the investment required to generate productive employment. His estimate was that each percentage point of economic growth generates approximately 100 000 net new jobs annually. The solution to unemployment therefore lies in raising investment, accelerating growth, and creating the conditions in which businesses can expand.

Energy policy was central to this argument. Cronje maintained that South Africa could achieve sustained economic growth of approximately 4.0% if it made the necessary decisions to expand electricity generation, including refurbishing existing coal-fired power stations and developing its oil and gas resources. He argued that the country’s existing generating infrastructure and transmission capacity could be used much more effectively, while the emphasis on renewable energy was constrained by insufficient grid capacity in the areas where new projects were being developed.

He was especially critical of what he regarded as the influence of European climate policy on South African decision-making, arguing that the country’s overriding environmental and moral challenge was the poverty and unemployment experienced by millions of its citizens. In his assessment, failing to exploit available energy resources carried immense social consequences because it prevented the economy from growing at the rate necessary to lift people out of poverty. He also argued that South Africa could become a significant oil and gas producer if it pursued the resources believed to exist off its coast more aggressively.

From this economic assessment, Cronje turned to what he regarded as the most important process shaping South Africa’s future, namely the gradual disintegration of the authority that has held the Union together since 1910. He argued that South Africa’s different regions and communities had been held together historically by the strength of the central state, initially through coercion and the suppression of civil rights, subsequently through the moral authority of Nelson Mandela, and later through the economic achievements of the early ANC administrations. As the capacity and authority of Pretoria weakened after 2008, however, communities, businesses, and criminal organisations increasingly began assuming functions previously exercised by the state.

The evidence, he suggested, is visible throughout the economy. Private security has expanded from approximately one security officer for every police officer in 1994 to roughly four private security personnel for every police officer today. As the state railway system deteriorated, privately operated road freight absorbed much of the displaced commercial traffic. As Eskom’s generating capacity declined, businesses and households increasingly installed private electricity generation. Residential estates developed their own security arrangements, schools, medical facilities, and other services, allowing their residents to become progressively less dependent on the institutions of the state.

The same process, Cronje argued, was occurring in poorer communities, although its consequences were very different. Illegal mining syndicates, construction mafias, criminal gangs, and other organised interests were assuming control over economic activities and territories where the state had lost its authority. These were not separate developments but manifestations of the same phenomenon. Whether wealthy residents were securing their independence through private infrastructure or criminal organisations were exercising control over mineral resources and construction projects, the underlying process was the transfer of power away from the state.

Cronje described this as South Africa’s enclave future. It would not necessarily involve provinces declaring independence or new borders appearing on maps. Instead, the country would remain formally united while its practical authority became dispersed among increasingly autonomous institutions and communities. He estimated that perhaps 15.0% of South Africans could already live within, or benefit from, arrangements capable of sustaining high living standards independently of the wider deterioration of the state. For these communities, the weakening of government might be manageable. For poorer South Africans, however, the consequences would be much more severe.

Cronje assigned a roughly two-thirds probability to this becoming South Africa's long-term condition. It was the first and most likely of three scenarios he outlined to Ndlozi for the country’s future. Under this outcome, weak economic growth, ineffective national governance, and political fragmentation would persist, while private interests progressively displaced the central state. South Africa would continue to exist as a country, but the national government’s practical authority over the lives of its citizens would diminish.

The second scenario was a political and economic recovery driven by the emergence of a strong reformist leader capable of restoring direction to the ANC and the national government. Cronje suggested that a figure such as Patrice Motsepe, although not necessarily Motsepe himself, could potentially perform such a role. His argument was that an individual with sufficient political authority and public credibility could pursue a comparatively straightforward programme of reform, including energy expansion, greater investment, and improved trade and investment relationships with China and the United States.

If such reforms lifted economic growth towards 3.0%, Cronje believed that the ANC could stabilise its electoral support around 40.0% in 2029 and potentially recover its national majority by 2034. The historical precedent was the period after 1994, when improvements in economic circumstances translated into greater public confidence and electoral support. Former ANC voters, he argued, had not necessarily abandoned their attachment to the party’s historical identity. Many had simply concluded that its performance left them no alternative. He assigned this recovery scenario a probability of approximately 15.0%.

The third scenario, which Cronje placed in a probability range of approximately 15.0% to 20.0%, was a much more severe economic and political breakdown. Its central trigger would be the loss of fiscal discipline, potentially through excessive money creation and uncontrolled public borrowing. Such a development could provoke capital flight, rising government borrowing costs, currency depreciation, accelerating inflation, and a prolonged collapse in living standards. Unlike the enclave scenario, in which relatively prosperous communities could maintain their independence, a sufficiently severe financial crisis might overwhelm even those private arrangements.

The political formula most capable of preventing the fragmentation of the country, Cronje argued, remained cooperation between the ANC and the Democratic Alliance (DA). His reasoning was based less on ideology than on the social constituencies represented by the two parties. The DA broadly represented established middle-class voters, while the ANC retained an attachment among the aspirant middle classes and, by extension, poorer communities whose prospects were closely connected to the advancement of their children and grandchildren. Bringing those constituencies together offered the strongest prospect of maintaining a sufficiently broad political consensus to govern the country effectively.

Ndlozi challenged Cronje on the contradiction between his support for ANC-DA cooperation and his criticism of the existing GNU, which was itself built around cooperation between those parties. Cronje acknowledged the difficulty but maintained that the political arrangement was potentially appropriate while lacking the leadership, urgency, and willingness to make difficult decisions necessary to deliver meaningful results. The problem was therefore not simply the composition of the government, but the absence of an effective programme of national economic recovery.

The implications were particularly important ahead of the November 2026 local government elections. Cronje estimated that approximately 100 of the 214 councils being contested could emerge without an outright majority, creating an exceptionally complicated series of coalition negotiations. He cautioned against the temptation to regard the exclusion of the ANC from municipal government as an achievement in itself. Millions of South Africans remained attached to what the ANC had historically represented, and political arrangements that deliberately excluded large constituencies could produce dangerous consequences for social and political stability.

He also warned that the importance attached to changing municipal administrations was often exaggerated. Better management could improve local services, but a mayor could not be expected to overcome the consequences of national economic growth of only 1.0%, weak investment, and inadequate job creation. Local government reform, while necessary, could not substitute for a coherent programme of national reform.

A further challenge concerned the growing power of criminal organisations. Cronje argued that these organisations were often able to entrench themselves because they provided employment, income, security, and other services in communities neglected by the state. Although their activities undermined the rule of law, they could also acquire local legitimacy by providing forms of order and economic opportunity. He nevertheless maintained that properly resourced investigators and prosecutors, backed by sufficient political protection, could substantially weaken these organisations. He criticised the proliferation of commissions of inquiry, arguing that many of the allegations emerging from them should instead be pursued through ordinary criminal prosecutions.

The interview concluded with a substantial exchange between Cronje and Ndlozi about the leadership required to reverse the country’s decline. Cronje argued that successful reform depended on political figures willing to make ruthless decisions that overrode the ideological insecurities of the country’s elites in pursuit of long-term economic improvement. He cited international examples of decisive reformist leadership while emphasising that South Africa’s circumstances required an approach capable of holding together a deeply divided society. Ndlozi challenged the implications of this argument for constitutional democracy, stressing that the settlement of 1994 had been built around the need to accommodate competing communities, secure reconciliation, and prevent renewed conflict. He argued that decisive leadership need not come at the expense of the democratic and constitutional arrangements that made the transition possible.

Cronje accepted the importance of the constitutional settlement but maintained that the country could not indefinitely avoid difficult decisions while poverty and unemployment continued to undermine the foundations of that settlement. Stressing the need for ruthlessness, he was sharply critical of some of South Africa’s richest and most influential elites saying, “frankly, in the final analysis, they don't care enough [about the country, the poor and the unemployed] to force the ruthless decisions on the politicians that they support or fund or entertain or have dinner with”. In his assessment, the preservation of South Africa’s democratic achievements increasingly depended on forcing decisions to restore economic capacity and thereby the authority of the central state.

His final warning was that the enclave future would not be equally harmful to all South Africans. On the contrary, wealthy and middle-class communities might continue to prosper through private systems of security and service provision, while organised criminal interests could also flourish. The greatest losses would be suffered by ordinary citizens without the resources or influence to protect themselves. Their liberties, already weakened in communities where private and criminal actors exercised substantial power, would deteriorate further as the state retreated.

The fundamental choice facing South Africa was therefore not simply between competing political parties or coalition arrangements. It was between restoring a national state capable of delivering economic progress and protecting the rights of its citizens, or allowing the country to fragment into a series of disparate centres of private power.

You can watch the full interview here.