Enemies do not always create the weaknesses they exploit. Sometimes they find the door already open, the alarm switched off, and the house neglected. The ANC’s enduring problem is not the existence of adversaries, but the vulnerabilities it repeatedly allowed to deepen.
By Themba Khumalo
When disaster lands, we reach instinctively for villains abroad: secret cabals, foreign saboteurs, sinister puppeteers.
That narrative comforts; it spares us the humiliating work of looking at the fingerprints smeared on our own furniture. Blaming shadows is political self-preservation. It lets leaders avoid the harder question: who left the door open?
Listen to diehard ANC loyalists and the same liturgy unfolds — “third forces”, foreign plots, conspirators bent on unmaking everything since 1994.
The country is painted as a pristine cathedral under siege.
The homily collapses with one blunt question: who forgot to lock the front door? Who turned off the alarm and then acted astonished when someone walked in?
Suggest that some of the ruin could have been prevented by competence, courage or foresight and you are promptly pronounced a traitor. Accountability transmutes into treason. In this theology, criticism becomes evidence of conspiracy; correction is branded betrayal. It is a defence mechanism: when power frays, invent enemies rather than mend the cloth.
Yes, external actors exist. Geopolitical interests and opportunists always have. But they are rarely omnipotent puppet masters. More often they are scavengers: they spot a cracked wall, smell the petrol, and bring the matches. They exploit weaknesses others created. That truth is less flattering than imagining all-powerful villains — it is a confession of domestic failure.
This is where the language of the “third force” becomes both potent and perilous. We cannot, and should not, pretend the phrase lacks historical substance. The historical “third force” was real. Evidence placed before the Goldstone Commission and, later, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established that elements within the security apparatus and allied actors were involved in covert operations, political violence and attempts to destabilise the transition.
There were victims and perpetrators, investigations and corroborated testimony. This was not folklore. That history is ugly and must be named, held to account and not reused as a rhetorical talisman.
But invoking that history as an automatic explanation for every contemporary crisis is intellectual laziness and political sleight of hand. The fact that clandestine operations once occurred does not prove that a single, omnipotent shadow now puppeteers every instance of dissent, protest or political defeat. History should illuminate, not become an alibi. Past sins cannot be recycled into a universal excuse for present incompetence.
The “third force” trope performs a neat political trick: it shifts the argument away from why millions are angry to the comforting question of who is making them angry. Once an invisible hand is invoked, accountability dissolves. Unemployment becomes manipulation; collapsed clinics become propaganda; electoral punishment becomes evidence of sabotage.
Everything that looks like failure becomes proof of malevolent design. It is an escape hatch through which leaders slip to avoid the audience of consequences.
People do not need a clandestine organisation to tell them their lives are failing. They feel unemployment in their bones, corruption in their clinics and neglect in their streets. They know what broken promises sound like after decade upon decade of repetition. Often, they reach the conclusion that the state has failed them without any external puppet master to whisper in their ear. It is precisely this popular judgement — born of lived experience — that terrifies the ANC. It is far simpler to blame shadows than to confront the fingerprints of political failure.
Take Phala Phala. Diehards insist public outrage was manufactured by enemies bent on toppling President Cyril Ramaphosa. Yet the scandal did not appear from some subterranean propaganda lab. The awkward questions about conduct and the foreign currency were not conjured by spooks; they were traces of decisions and misjudgements.
The opposition did not produce the corpse; it exposed it. What happened was the simplest, most brutal exercise of politics: the opposition found what the ruling party had tried to smother with damage control and dragged it into the light. That is not exotic sabotage; it is the raw mechanics of political life.
The migration story offers the same lesson. To insist that xenophobic outbreaks were orchestrated by shadowy manipulators conflates exploitation with creation. Opportunists exploited mass joblessness, failing services and the conviction that the future had been put on hold. Their “art” was not to invent grievances but to give them a face, a nationality and a chant. That is not the handiwork of master conspirators. It is the predictable harvest of chronic neglect.
The ANC’s problem is not that its enemies have grown cleverer. It is that years of factional infighting, toleration of corruption and half-hearted reform hollowed out its capacity to govern and its moral claim to leadership. It had the power to see the cracks, the resources to repair them and repeated opportunities to do so. It knew where the rot was. It knew what corruption was costing the state. It knew unemployment was becoming a generational wound and that public services were deteriorating. It had the machinery, the information and the political authority to act.
Too often, it chose political survival over political repair. That matters because a party cannot spend years ignoring vulnerabilities and then discover, when opponents exploit them, that the vulnerabilities themselves are evidence of a conspiracy.
When the machinery of state corrodes, and the moral foundation of leadership erodes, demagogues and opponents do not need to manufacture grievances. They simply pick up what is lying around and amplify it. Discovering and exploiting an opponent’s vulnerabilities is not an aberration of democracy; it is its most elemental function.
Every opposition worth its salt will press an exposed flank. To call this sabotage while ignoring the exposed flank itself is to demand saintly behaviour from adversaries while excusing your own decay.
So the decisive question is not whether opponents weaponised the ANC’s mistakes — of course they did — but why the party handed them such an arsenal. It had years to clean house, to confront corruption regardless of factional cost, to pursue structural reforms with urgency, and to rebuild public confidence through visible improvements in living conditions.
Had it done so, the political market for scapegoats would have been much smaller. People who genuinely believe tomorrow will be better are less likely to be seduced by yesterday’s grievances in new packaging.
Instead, too many chose self-preservation where renewal was required, caution where courage was needed and factional advantage where national repair was demanded. The bill has arrived, larger because it was deferred. Every broken promise, every scandal and every dilapidated service is ammunition strewn across the floor. When someone picks it up, the cry is sabotage. This is not cleverness; it is the predictable arithmetic of neglect.
The conspiracy narrative is an escape hatch: it converts accountability into victimhood, allows the guilty to imagine themselves innocent, and transforms defeat into persecution. But democracy is an unforgiving accountant. It does not care how many enemies you can name. It asks, bluntly: what did you do with the power you were given?
The ANC had the keys — state machinery, political capital, historical legitimacy and decades of trust. Nobody needed to break down the door. The door was left ajar, the alarm silenced, the wiring neglected.
The occupants now stand amid the smouldering ruins and demand to know who set the fire.
The answer is uglier and simpler than any conspiracy: the outsiders did not create the weakness. They simply noticed it and had the ruthlessness to use it. Naming those fingerprints is not cruelty; it is the only path to repair.