A field guide to the South Africanization playbook.

When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani referred to the African National Congress’s (ANC) Freedom Charter as a key inspiration during his inaugural address, it prompted a pointed question: Will New York City undergo “South Africanization” under his watch?

If Afghanistan is famously referred to as the graveyard of empires, South Africa surely qualifies as the laboratory of empires. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the phenomenon of toppling statues, which originated in South Africa with the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement. At the University of Cape Town in March 2015, Chumani Maxwele threw human feces at the bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes, the 19th-century prime minister of the Cape Colony, sparking a movement that eventually succeeded in having the statue removed. From there, this phenomenon spread to campuses across the West, becoming one of the defining political spectacles of the following decade.

Whether it’s cash-in-transit heists in Italy, the escalating theft of copper cable in the United States, Mamdani urging New Yorkers to limit their air-conditioning use to support a strained power grid, or increasingly brazen race-based policies in Britain, Westerners can’t help but notice that their countries are becoming more like South Africa.

To understand the consequences of this trend, we need to ask: What does South Africanization look like as a political phenomenon and as a policy framework in practice?

De-development in South Africa

What one might call South Africanization is characterized by chronic decay of infrastructure and public spaces due to a lack of maintenance and the deterioration of state capacity to provide basic services. Parks, monuments, cemeteries, and sidewalks are the canaries in the coal mine. They start being stripped of all metal objects, then become polluted, neglected, and unsafe. Even war memorials are not spared, being the most visceral example of a nation’s heritage literally being scrapped for drug money.

Recently, the South African X account Jozi vs Jozi went viral for effectively exposing the country’s urban decay under ANC rule by comparing Google Street View images of Johannesburg from the mid-2000s with those from 2026. Shocking, even apocalyptic, scenes of urban degradation stunned onlookers worldwide. South Africa appears to have introduced a new category to geopolitics: a de-developing nation. To quote a popular South African joke: “What did South Africans use before candles? Electricity.”

South Africanization also entails a fusion of the ruling party and government, blurring the dividing lines between them. The vehicle for the ANC’s iron grip on state power for the past 30 years has been the policy of “cadre deployment.” This is when party loyalists are inserted into every level and facet of the government and public service apparatus.

Beyond rewarding loyal party members, family, and friends with sinecures, cadre deployment primarily serves to bring the government leviathan under the ruling party’s total control. This process of state capture has been one of the top priorities, if not the top priority, of the ANC since gaining power in 1994. This helps explain why some interpret criticism of the ANC as criticism of the country, and why threats to the ANC’s power are regularly framed as threats to South Africa—even as “treason.”

Unsurprisingly, corruption has become an embedded feature of the system. As investigative journalist James Myburgh has noted, “The point about corruption in South Africa is not that it is and was condoned, but that it has become compulsory. You can’t legally do business with the state or state-owned enterprises without essentially cutting in some or other ANC faction.” This state of advanced kleptocracy, where corruption becomes so normalized that businesses budget for it under “facilitation fees,” logically flows from the policy of cadre deployment. The ANC is fundamentally incapable and unwilling to effectively fight corruption, because by attacking corruption, they would attack themselves, and their allies would be caught in the crossfire.

Then there is the ever-increasing centralization of state power. The ANC has an insatiable drive to expand the government’s power, influence, control, and reach. This is the obligation imposed on them by their Cold War-era National Democratic Revolution (NDR) dogma. The ANC government has relinquished power only by a court order or, more commonly, as a result of the deterioration or even collapse of government capacity.

The increasing centralization of state control manifests itself in the vast and ever-expanding social grant patronage system, which has rendered more than 50% of citizens dependent on some form of government assistance. The emergence of this welfare-industrial complex is by design. The ANC has no incentive to combat poverty or the unemployment rate, which currently exceeds 43%, because a decrease in either would result in less state dependence among the populace. This dependence, in turn, helps to strengthen the party’s grip on power through the electoral leverage it provides, allowing the NDR to march on unimpeded.

Finally, there is the relentless and fanatical commitment to a top-down race-based social engineering agenda. The ANC refers to this discriminatory program as “transformation,” which demands that every facet of society, from corporate boardrooms to primary school sports teams, be altered to reflect the demographic makeup of the national population, under threat of government sanction. The ANC prioritizes this racialist agenda—the right to discriminate “positively”—above even the pressing need to provide basic services such as an uninterrupted electricity and water supply.

This racialist agenda serves as a moral veneer to facilitate and also obscure the other features of South Africanization. Under the guise of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), those with the right skin color, family ties, political connections, and loyalties obtain government jobs, tenders, and positions on corporate boards. BEE and transformation are the moral cudgels used to justify cadre deployment, which is the vehicle facilitating the NDR. All of this leaves a trail of de-development in its wake.

The Zimbabwe Endgame

If the ANC’s policies are inspiring Western politicians, which regimes and policies inspire the leadership of South Africa? You don’t need to dig deep to find the answer. Speaking in Zimbabwe in 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa heaped praise on the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front’s (ZANU-PF) policies, labeling the late dictator Robert Mugabe’s violent land confiscations as “ambitious” and “essential.” He emphasized that the South African government seeks to copy ZANU-PF’s policies so that the country can be more like Zimbabwe.

The Mugabe regime’s land policies of the early 2000s involved chaotic and often violent invasions and seizures. Private property rights were severely violated, as thousands of white farmers and their families were driven off their land and attacked. Some were even tortured and murdered. Mugabe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme resulted in mass human rights violations and the collapse of the Zimbabwean agricultural sector and economy. This caused millions of Zimbabweans to flee ZANU-PF’s “utopia,” some swimming across crocodile-infested rivers to reach South Africa.

Under Mugabe, the breadbasket of Africa was turned into the continent’s basket case. South Africanization is a stepping stone toward the final phase of de-development: Zimbabwefication.

From Disorder to Order

Fortunately, the ANC’s modus operandi contains the seeds of its own defeat. Over the past few decades, the South African government’s capacity and reach have been collapsing under the weight of chronic mismanagement, the rejection of merit-based appointments, skyrocketing expenditure, endemic corruption, abysmal service delivery, and a shrinking tax base.

From the dust of this collapse, decentralization of power, state-proof solutions, private-sector initiatives, community-based organizations, and a selfdoen (do-it-yourself) ethos are emerging as counterweights. Where government fails, civil society organizations, the private sector, and communities are picking up the slack. In doing so, they are creating growing oases of order amid a desert of disorder, to borrow Professor Koos Malan’s metaphor.

Notably, both the virtuous and the nefarious sense opportunity as a power vacuum opens due to deteriorating state capacity. It is therefore not surprising that both organized crime and organized communities are thriving in the “new” South Africa. Additionally, the South African private security sector has become one of the largest, most innovative, and competitive globally, with personnel significantly outnumbering the police and military combined. Private sector and community-based organizations are seeking to fill the gap faster than criminals can. Fortunately, that seems to be happening.

The bad news is that many Western nations seem doomed to continue down the pothole-pocked road of South Africanization. The good news is that effective responses are already being pioneered and stress tested at ground zero in South Africa. My advice to Westerners is to start researching, reaching out, and taking notes from organizations like AfriForum and the Solidarity Movement, which are at the forefront of developing state-proof solutions to these trends.

South Africa is once again a new frontier, and on the frontier, not only surviving but thriving favors the bold.