South Africa’s Impossible Farewell

By Mphuthumi Ntabeni

It has become, for me, an unexpectedly painful thing to watch the African National Congress hold its political events. Once, these gatherings crackled with a kind of historic electricity — the sense of a people who had seized history by the throat and refused to let go until justice blinked. Now they resemble something else entirely: a beloved grandfather with terminal illness, once powerful and upright, struggling to climb a short flight of stairs, pausing halfway, breathless. You stand there, helpless witness to an irreversible decline. Even the nutritious food you place before him — the programmes, the policy documents, the renewal commissions — he can no longer digest. They bloat and suffocate him. The body rejects what the mind insists is good.

The ANC, Khongolose, is that old man.

For nostalgia, for gratitude, you find yourself wishing he would simply lie down, sort out his affairs, and allow the family to grieve with dignity. Because watching him stumble toward yet another podium, mouthing yet another promise he lacks the vitality to keep, only sharpens the ache of squandered greatness. The truth sits there like a stone in the throat. The liberation movement that once carried the moral hopes of a continent is fatally ill, rotting from within with the incurable cancer of corruption.

In politics as in families, the death of the patriarch is rarely a private matter. It determines the fate of the entire household.

South Africa has been trapped for years in this purgatorial interregnum — that dangerous space Antonio Gramsci warned of, where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” and where “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” In our case, the morbid symptoms are not metaphorical: failing municipalities, collapsing infrastructure, schools without toilets, hospitals without medicine, a governing party whose internal battles have become more important than the country it was elected to steward.

Still, to wish death upon a liberation movement feels almost sacrilegious. This was, after all, the party of Luthuli’s humility, Tambo’s discipline, Mandela’s impossible grace. The ANC delivered one of the most miraculous transitions in modern history. It pulled South Africa back from the brink of civil war, crafted one of the world’s most admired constitutions, expanded access to housing and water, extended social grants to millions, and stitched together a fragile but real democracy in a land where none had existed before.

We cannot deny the good simply because the good has been overwhelmed by the bad. But neither must we blind ourselves to what the ANC became once the intoxication of power replaced the sobriety of purpose.

Under its watch, the civil service ossified; the state hollowed out; public institutions became feeding troughs for the politically connected; and an entire generation of young South Africans — the very children whose future the struggle was fought to secure — inherited a scorched landscape of joblessness, decayed infrastructure, and widening hopelessness.

Some analysts speak of “decline,” but decline implies a gentleness, a slow fading. What we have lived through is closer to decomposition. The great liberation party has not only lost its way; it has lost the moral antibodies necessary to fight the infections of its own making.

And so, with the deepest respect — with the gratitude owed to a parent whose sacrifices made our freedom possible — I say what no loving child wishes to say aloud: Hurry up and die, Khongolose.

Not the heroes. Not even the ideals it propagates and betrays. Not the memories. But the organisation as it currently exists as the bloated with corruption stumbling block to our progress. The sickly, self-consuming version of itself that clings to life long for the purpose of providing the feeding through for virus of corruption that has invaded it.

In many African cultures, families on migration would sometimes wake to find the elders no longer able to walk with them. They would leave them behind, intentionally, with food provisions for a few weeks. This was not cruelty. It was wisdom. Facing up to reality in order to save the rest of the tribe. The people knew that dragging the dying along a harsh and uncertain journey would doom everyone. The old understood it too. Their staying behind was an act of love — a gift to the future.

South Africa is long overdue for such a moment of cultural clarity.

The ANC cannot renew itself because the ANC is the disease it seeks to cure. The antibodies are gone. The young in its ranks have learned only the dark arts of factional survival, not the bright obligations of public service. What remains is the inertia of the past, a party too weak to govern but too weighty to dislodge without decisive action from the electorate.

The tragedy is that the ANC had everything it needed to lead South Africa into a prosperous century: legitimacy, moral authority, national trust, and time. It squandered all four.

Fare thee well, Khongolose. You were the best of what was needed in our past, and now — painfully, undeniably — the worst of what our future requires. Your passing is necessary because the children you liberated deserve the freedom and prosperity you can no longer give. Like all liberation movements you self immolated due to inability to evolve into a proper governing party.

It is time for South Africans to move on. The journey cannot wait any longer.