Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Ivor Chipkin, Associate lecturer, University of Pretoria
For much of the past two decades, South Africa’s recurring waves of protest have been interpreted through a dominant lens: the failure of the post-apartheid state to deliver services to its poorest citizens. Rising unemployment, corroding infrastructure and inadequate housing are the familiar explanations offered.
We are political scientists who have been analysing protests and protest data for years. In a recent article we propose that the overall pattern of protest activity in South Africa cannot be explained by socio-economic conditions alone. It tracks the internal power struggles of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC).
This has led us to a new reading of state capture.
As we set out in a paper in 2025, state capture in South Africa is often reduced to a phenomenon of large-scale corruption. The focus has been on the way that private businesses, working with politicians, repurposed legislative and administrative processes to serve their interests and disable the criminal justice system to avoid consequences.
The conventional understanding casts state capture as looting: the opportunistic and organised theft of public resources by politically connected networks and enabled by a compromised presidency.
We do not contest the reality of this pillaging. But we argue that it was also something more structurally purposeful. State capture, in our account, was the mechanism by which former president Jacob Zuma sought to forge a “power elite” in the ANC.
This is a term we borrow from the sociological tradition of C. Wright Mills to refer to a small cohesive group that is able to make decisions with national consequences in political, military and economic institutions. In contrast a politically connected network may have influence but is too diffuse to exercise power as such.
The power elite matters because it explains who really makes the biggest decisions in society and why democratic institutions do not always fully control those decisions.
The argument we’re presenting has consequences for how the country understands what state capture is, and the trajectory of South African democracy itself.
Protests as a barometer
Drawing on data from the South African Police Service, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, and the Institute for Security Studies, we identify a striking pattern. Protest events rose sharply from around 2006, reaching what some researchers called “insurrectionary proportions” by 2011.
Then they stabilised and began to decline between roughly 2013 and 2017. This period coincided with the consolidation of Zuma’s hold on power and the height of state capture.
After 2018, protests surged again to unprecedented levels. In 2021, the country experienced its worst civil revolt since the end of apartheid.
The socio-economic conditions typically cited to explain protest – unemployment, inequality, poor service delivery – do not follow this same pattern. They did not improve during the 2013-2017 lull. If anything, they worsened. As our paper records, municipal audit outcomes deteriorated sharply by the end of the period.
Inequality, measured by Gini coefficients across South Africa’s major cities, remained essentially unchanged. The exception was Cape Town, where inequality seems to have declined.
The stabilisation of protest activity, we conclude, cannot be attributed to improvements in the living conditions of poor South Africans.
Something else was suppressing the mobilisation of discontent.
Our answer draws on political sociology and on comparative work on elite formation in Africa and beyond. We conclude that protests are instruments of elite competition. This includes the tactical deployments of professional agitators by local politicians and their networks contesting for control of resources, positions and patronage within the ANC.
When these competitions are acute and unresolved, they spill outward as protests. When they are contained, protest subsides.
The how
By repurposing state-owned enterprises away from their public mandates, the Zuma network generated enormous rents that were then used for private enrichment and to finance factional political activity. This included paying for party rallies, sustaining provincial and regional networks, creating sympathetic media infrastructure, and distributing cash and contracts to potential opponents in exchange for loyalty or silence.
The result was a temporary stabilisation of what had been a fractured and contested elite terrain.
Between roughly 2013 and 2017, a group of politically aligned operators was able to discipline internal competition, in part by allocating positions in government, state-owned enterprises and the party apparatus.
Those who would not be bought were expelled, marginalised, or subjected to violence. We note that political assassinations rose sharply during Zuma’s second term. Evidence before the Zondo Commission into state capture pointed to the deployment of armed units under presidential operational control.
The relative “stability” observable in protest data between 2013 and 2017 was the successful suppression of elite competition through corruption, patronage and coercion. The modest improvement in municipal spending was the result of elite power exercised over administrative systems.
The unravelling under Ramaphosa
If Zuma’s presidency saw the construction of a power elite, Cyril Ramaphosa’s has seen its unravelling.
The consequences have been severe.
At the ANC’s 54th national conference in December 2017, Ramaphosa narrowly defeated Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma for the party presidency. Zuma’s internal compact then began to fracture. The spike in protest activity that followed was almost immediate.
Ramaphosa was not prepared to deploy corruption and violence as political solutions. But without an alternative basis for managing elite competition, the ANC’s internal fissures deepened.
There were symptoms of this disintegration in 2023:
Gatekeeping became decentralised and unregulated. Elite contestation began migrating out of the party system altogether.
A sobering conclusion, and hint of hope
We conclude that some of it will be pushed towards organised crime. Mafia-type networks, we suggest, should be expected to grow.
There is, however, a more hopeful possibility. The reason the ANC has functioned as the primary arena for elite competition is that it has controlled access to the “gate” – the allocation of positions in the state, the civil service and state-owned enterprises.
Remove that control, and the character of elite competition changes. This is precisely what is at stake in the amendments to the Public Service Act of 1994. Signed into law by Ramaphosa on 26 March 2026, it was gazetted on 1 April 2026.
The legislation aims to:
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reduce executive discretion over appointments in the public service
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insulate civil service recruitment and operations from party-political interference.
If implemented, political parties will be compelled to compete for support through policy and performance rather than patronage. Elite competition will shift to the public administration system itself. Ideally, this will be governed by merit, transparency and professional standards.
We are cautious about the prospects for this reform. History is not encouraging and the political conditions are challenging.
But if it can end gatekeeping, new legislation like the Public Service Amendment Act will change the elite social terrain in South Africa.
– Political violence in South Africa is driven by a power elite trying to establish dominance – new research
– https://theconversation.com/political-violence-in-south-africa-is-driven-by-a-power-elite-trying-to-establish-dominance-new-research-280504