In 1994, people looked to ANC leaders for freedom. South Africa entered democracy carrying two enormous expectations: political participation and, ultimately, economic emancipation. More than three decades later, the former has been delivered, while the latter remains largely unfulfilled for the Black majority. That failure to deliver carries consequences. It has created a persistent gap between political participation and economic freedom, leaving fertile ground for populism and demagoguery.
As of 2026, South Africa's official unemployment rate remains above 30%, with millions of people unemployed. Among those aged 15 to 34, unemployment remains close to half of the youth labour force. This is the daily reality of a democracy that has delivered political participation but cannot deliver comparable economic inclusion. In 2022, twenty-eight years after apartheid ended, the World Bank ranked South Africa as the most unequal country in the world, first among 164 countries in its global poverty database.
As before political freedom in 1994, the majority of South Africans today remain trapped within a system of economic exclusion, although its mechanisms are no longer those of formal apartheid. Apartheid was a system designed to dispossess, segregate and subjugate the African majority, and was enforced by law. It was sustained through a vast body of legislation. We need only consider three. First, the Population Registration Act legally classified South Africans by race, determining many of the rights and opportunities available to them from birth.
Then came the Bantu Self-Government Act, which created the framework for the apartheid homeland system and sought to confine African political citizenship to these artificial territories. Finally, the Bantu Education Act institutionalised an education system deliberately designed to prepare Black South Africans for a subordinate economic position. Its consequences did not conveniently disappear when apartheid formally ended.
Now, compare apartheid South Africa with the country we have built since 1994. Millions of Black South Africans still live in peripheral townships and informal settlements such as Khayelitsha, Diepsloot or Alexandra, often travelling enormous distances simply to reach their place of work. Under apartheid, legislation reserved the overwhelming majority of South African land for white ownership and occupation.
Today, decades after liberation, racial disparities in land and wealth remain extraordinary. White South Africans, who comprise roughly 8% of the population, continue to hold a vastly disproportionate share of the country's wealth and agricultural land. The material gap created by apartheid has not disappeared simply because the laws that created it have been repealed.
The problem is not merely economic. Much of South Africa's institutional and intellectual infrastructure remains shaped by a European intellectual tradition: our courts, legal concepts, constitutional architecture and significant parts of our education system. Economic policy continues to place considerable emphasis on stability and investor confidence, sometimes at the expense of confronting inequality through more radical but necessary redistribution. Political liberation changed who could vote. It did not fundamentally reconstruct the economic foundations upon which that political freedom was built.
The lived reality of the South African majority has remained, in many respects, painfully familiar three decades after political freedom, a freedom for which thousands sacrificed their lives believing that it would produce something more complete. This economic stagnation has inevitably created a political vacuum, and populism tends to thrive in such vacuums.
The South African context of 2026, however, is fundamentally different from the populist revolt that brought Donald Trump to power in 2016. Trump's rise was, among other things, an expression of profound dissatisfaction with an established political order. South Africa's populist surge carries a heavier historical burden. It emerges from decades of unmet expectations, layered upon the material and psychological consequences of apartheid and centuries of colonial domination.
Those who sacrificed their lives before 1994 did not die merely for the right to periodically cast a vote. They believed political liberation would fundamentally alter the material circumstances inherited by their children. Years and years of unmet expectations have brought millions of South Africans face to face with what they perceive as a profound betrayal. That is the political climate of 2026, fertile ground for populism, increasingly exploited by political actors with the greatest incentive to turn legitimate grievances into collective rage.
Just as Donald Trump presented himself as the political answer to American frustration, South Africa's vacuum is increasingly being exploited by actors who recognise that public anger is a valuable political resource. In recent months, xenophobic mobilisation has intensified through protests targeting undocumented migrants, while political relationships have emerged between actors with historically divergent ideological positions, including the May 2026 meeting between Jacob Zuma and AfriForum.
Zuma has also been publicly associated with figures linked to anti-immigrant activism. In August, March and March and AfriForum established a working collaboration.
None of this, by itself, proves a coordinated political project. It does, however, reveal something more important. South Africa's political frustration has become sufficiently deep that actors who once occupied very different ideological worlds can find common ground in exploiting it. When legitimate grievances become detached from structural causes, they become remarkably easy for political opportunists to redirect towards convenient enemies.
We are nearing 2027, and from the hopes of 1994, when political participation was meant to become the gateway to economic emancipation, we have arrived at the reality of 2026, where the failure to deliver that emancipation has itself become a political resource. The populist and xenophobic climate we have entered is no accident of history. It is the consequence of years of collective rage going unheard.
For as long as the South African majority remains economically trapped, the conditions for scapegoating, hatred, division and populism will remain. And there will always be political actors willing to exploit that desperation for their own gain. The promise of 1994 was that political freedom would lead to a better material life. If that promise remains broken, we should not be surprised when people begin looking for freedom somewhere else.
* Pieter Kriel is a political commentator and writer.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of IOL