One of the defining features of post-apartheid South Africa is the ANC’s persistent inaction when it comes to delivering public goods and services. Rather than leveraging its vast political mandate to drive governance and reform, the ANC has normalised what might be called the politics of non-action. Its governing style rests on delegation, delay and deflection rather than decisive leadership.
This tendency reveals a structural incapacity within the ruling party to translate political power into administrative performance. The ANC’s reluctance to take ownership of delivery has allowed other actors, particularly the judiciary and civil society organisations, to become the real engines of social change. The provision of antiretroviral therapy to people living with HIV, for example, materialised not through government initiative but through judicial intervention compelled by civil society litigation.
South Africa’s reputation as a litigious society is not accidental. It emerges from the fusion of two historical currents: the ANC’s origins in legal activism and the country’s adoption of an advanced constitutional democracy. Many ANC leaders were trained as human-rights lawyers; their instinct is to interpret politics through the prism of rights and legality rather than pragmatic governance. As Jürgen Habermas observes in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, legalism can substitute for political deliberation in rights-based democracies, creating a culture of procedural paralysis.
• Judicialised Governance and the Subordination of the Executive
Consequently, the ANC habitually delegates responsibility for policy decisions to courts and commissions. Serious social and economic issues, from housing rights to environmental regulation, are usually resolved only after lengthy litigation; otherwise, they remain overlooked. Even when the judiciary rules against the state, the implementation is slow or contested through appeals. This pattern turns governance into an ongoing legal drama in which policy is shaped by court judgments rather than executive action.
The ‘Commission Presidency’, as some critics have termed it, further entrenches this inertia. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration has relied heavily on commissions of inquiry to handle political crises, from state capture to public sector corruption. While these forums promote transparency, they also defer decision-making. Their reports accumulate faster than the political will to implement them. The Zondo Commission’s findings, for instance, exposed systemic rot but produced limited administrative reform. Even the Madlanga Commission (investigating criminality, political interference and corruption in the criminal justice system) is likely to result in zero consequential action.
Underlying this is a deeper deficit of policy comprehension within both the party and state structures. Many ANC cadres deployed to key departments speak past one another, reflecting an absence of ideological coherence and technical expertise. The interface between Luthuli House and the state bureaucracy is marked by duplication, rivalry and poor communication. As Weberian theory would predict, bureaucratic rationality collapses when political patronage overrides meritocratic norms.
This fragmentation erodes bureaucratic excellence and alienates technocrats who might otherwise improve state performance. Capable civil servants are demotivated by conflicting political instructions or obstructed by partisan interference. In many cases, they become pawns in corruption and conflict, deepening systemic collapse, prebendalism and deprioritisation of service delivery. In practice, this means the ANC behaves less like a coherent governing party and more like a federation of factions, each pursuing survival rather than service delivery.
• Bureaucratic Fragmentation and Governance Clutter
At the same time, the ANC has strategically co-opted civil society into governance spaces, ostensibly to promote participation but in reality to diffuse accountability. NGOs are encouraged to occupy service-delivery terrain traditionally reserved for the state. The resulting “governance clutter” slows decision-making and legitimises executive passivity. In Africa Works, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz argue that African political systems rely on the management of disorder to preserve power. South Africa’s hybrid of activism and bureaucracy fits this pattern.
The consequence is the judicialisation of politics, in which NGOs and courts set the developmental agenda. Crucial policy shifts, especially on housing, education and social security, have originated from litigation that forced reluctant ministries to act.Legal eagles frame this as a justiciabilisation of socio-economic rights, a dynamic that inevitably reduces the executive’s political role to reactive compliance.
In this situation, the ANC happily waits for judicial instruction, effectively subordinating democratic choice to legal enforcement.This phenomenon also narrows the scope of political discourse. Governance becomes equated with the fulfilment of socio-economic rights rather than a proactive vision. Politicians andbureaucrats frequently invoke the “sub judice” rule to avoid answering questions about ongoing investigations or cases.
Originally a sound legal safeguard, it now functions as a political shield to evade scrutiny. Matters remain “under investigation” indefinitely, ensuring that responsibility is never clearly assigned.The habitual misuse of “sub judice” reflects a more profoundaversion to political risk-taking. The ANC has learned that inaction carries fewer consequences than error. By outsourcing controversy to courts or commissions, leaders preserve internal unity while appearing constitutionally compliant. However, this also hollows out democratic accountability. Citizens experience the state not as an agent of change but as a spectator of litigation.
This state of bureaucratic stagnation is particularly evident at the local government level, where factionalism and patronage hinder service delivery. Internal municipal councils paralysemunicipal councils, while protests over service delivery occur almost daily. In such environments, ANC structures usually act as their own opposition, undermining rivals within the same party list system. Without direct constituency representation, voters cannot hold individuals accountable, and internal party loyalty takes precedence over public service.
• Constitutional Idealism and the Crisis of Political Agency
A constituency-based electoral system, even as a hybrid, might have alleviated this dysfunction by reinforcing vertical accountability between citizens and their representatives. The proportional representation model, while inclusive, encourages disengagement and facilitates factional control of candidate lists. As Tom Lodge argues, South Africa’s political culture remains dominated by party hierarchy rather than participatory citizenship.
The ANC’s governance model thus reveals an uneasy blend of constitutional idealism and administrative fatalism. The party venerates democratic legality yet resists the executive discipline required to make that legality meaningful. Its moral authority as a liberation movement coexists with a technocratic weakness as a governing organisation. This disjuncture produces a form of performative democracy, where the symbols of accountability, including courts, commissions and public consultations, mask a vacuum of implementation.
The long-term consequence is the erosion of state legitimacy. When courts, activists and journalists become the de facto policy drivers, the executive’s constitutional mandate is diluted. Citizens begin to see justice as something delivered through legal struggle rather than political representation. Postcolonial states usually oscillate between juridical excess and administrative absence: thiscontradiction fits South Africa’s predicament with unsettling precision.
At the end of the day, the ANC’s politics of non-action undermines the very democratic model it helped design. Constitutional democracy was meant to protect rights and enable accountable governance. Yet the party’s reliance on legality as a substitute for leadership turns the Constitution into a cage rather than a guide. Governance becomes an exercise in avoidance, where every crisis waits for “judicial clarification” rather than political resolution.
Reversing this trajectory requires institutional re-engineering and political courage. First, mechanisms of accountability, especially in local government, should connect directly to communities rather than party lists. Second, the executive must reclaim its policymaking role by acting on commission findings and constitutional obligations without waiting for judicial compulsion.Such measures would restore a sense of agency in the political realm, reaffirming that democracy is not sustained by courts alone but by decisive, ethical governance. The judiciary should remain a guardian of rights, not a substitute for political will.
Unless serious political changes occur, South Africa risks entrenching a legalistic stalemate in which politics becomes the art of waiting. In this vacuum, citizens will continue to turn to courts, commissions and street protests as instruments of accountability. The tragedy is that the very party that once fought for democratic self-determination now governs as though bound by its own indecision. The liberation movement, it seems, has liberated everyone but itself.
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