The real question about MK is not who betrayed whom - but who can govern

South African politics is renowned for changing its clothes without changing its habits.

A familiar face turns up beneath a new banner. An old grievance acquires a fresh slogan. Yesterday's faction becomes tomorrow's movement. We are assured the past has been buried. The past, meanwhile, strolls in through the front door. Same grubby underwear. New membership card.

So let us ask the question properly. Is the uMkhonto weSizwe Party a new political project, or the African National Congress arguing with itself in a different coat?

Neither answer is as tidy as the shouters would like. MK is a lawfully registered party. Jabulani Khumalo registered it with the Electoral Commission in September 2023. Jacob Zuma became its public face and, by April 2024, its leader. The ANC later expelled him for campaigning for a rival. That is the legal position, and nobody serious disputes it. MK is not the ANC in a false moustache. Whoever says it was built as a secret ANC vehicle has a theory. They do not have evidence.

Yet the better question is why this split mattered when so many others did not. The liberation movement has been leaving itself for sixty years. Few noticed that it never quite managed to go.

Start with Robert Sobukwe in 1959. He took the Pan Africanist Congress out of the ANC over the Freedom Charter and the question of who the struggle belonged to. History was kind to the man. The ballot box was not. The IFP grew from Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha in 1975, with its own ANC roots and its own Zulu heartland.

Bantu Holomisa was expelled in 1996 and built the UDM. In 2008, after Thabo Mbeki was recalled, Mosiuoa Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa founded COPE. It won 30 seats the following year, then withered to a handful. In 2013, Julius Malema, thrown out of the ANC, built the EFF. It has endured, but it has never come near the ANC's total.

Each of these splits had a quarrel at its heart. Doctrine, ethnicity, a sacked president, a banished youth leader. Each took a slice. None cut the loaf.

Then came MK. In May 2024, in its first election, it took about 14.6 per cent of the vote and 58 seats. The ANC fell from 230 seats to 159 and lost its majority for the first time since 1994. In KwaZulu-Natal, MK finished first. Neither COPE nor the EFF came close in their first outing. So much for the idea that the old faces were yesterday's news.

Three things set it apart. First, the leader. Zuma is no expelled youth leader or recalled deputy. He was president of the party and of the country. Second, the name. MK was the ANC's own armed wing. The party did not simply leave the house. It walked off with the family silver and hung it over its own door. Third, the timing. It arrived just as the ANC's moral credit ran dry.

The earlier rebels challenged the ANC's ideas. MK challenges its monopoly on the story. It says to the voter: you need not choose between loyalty and change. We are both.

But a registration certificate is a thin thing. Parties are made of people. Of memories, loyalties, grudges and a shared vocabulary of comrades, deployment and historical mission. Measured that way, MK is no stranger to the house it left.

Consider the man at its head. Zuma led the ANC from 2007 to 2017 and the country from 2009 to 2018. When he declared for MK in December 2023, he still insisted he was an ANC member. The party's 2024 parliamentary list carried Des van Rooyen, who held the finance portfolio for four famously chaotic days in 2015, and Nathi Nhleko, a former minister of police. Veterans of the liberation structures sit in its leadership. This is no visitor from another planet. It is a mutation.

Let me borrow a biologist's word, and borrow it carefully. A parasite lives on a host. It feeds, it grows, and in the strangest cases it ends up wearing the shape of the creature that fed it. I do not say the ANC planted MK. The record does not support that. I say something humbler and, I think, more damning. MK grew out of the ANC's own rupture, fed on the ANC's own electorate, and has since developed the ANC's own symptoms.

A caution is owed on the arithmetic. The ANC's slide was not MK's work alone. Not every MK voter was a former ANC voter, and no honest analyst claims so. Some voters stayed home, some drifted to the DA and others. Anyone claiming a clean transfer from one party to the other is selling something. Yet MK drew hard on ground the ANC had long treated as its own, above all in KwaZulu-Natal. A fragment broke off and took a large bite out of the body.

Here is the irony, and it is almost Dickensian. A man who spent a lifetime inside the house became the face of the rebellion in the yard. The ANC called him a traitor. His supporters called him a martyr. Both sides, you will notice, were quarrelling over the same family silver.

Now watch the child's behaviour. By 2026, according to reports, MK had endured repeated leadership changes and open factional war. It expelled Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla and its former spokesman Nhlamulo Ndhlela, and both are challenging the expulsions in court. A party that promised a clean break from the old quarrels has learned, within two years, how to host them. That is not a rebellion against a political culture. It is a transplant of one.

Fairness matters here, because fairness is the only thing that makes criticism worth reading. MK's supporters may say it breaks with the present ANC leadership. Its opponents may point to the biographies that bind it to the ANC's past. Both can be true on the same afternoon. Neither excuses us from looking at the record.

And the record is not a rumour. The Zondo Commission documented, at enormous length, the capture of state institutions during the Zuma presidency. It remains the most substantial official examination of corruption in our democratic era. The lesson is not that everyone who served in that period is guilty. That would be unjust and lazy. The lesson is that movements must be judged by their people, their accountability and their results. Not by the volume of their anthems.

Then there is July 2021. We are not permitted amnesia. After Zuma's imprisonment, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal saw looting, arson and killing on a scale not seen since the end of apartheid. More than three hundred people died. Official inquiries found organised actors at work, alongside failures of intelligence and policing, against a backdrop of real hardship. Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla faces charges of incitement connected to that unrest. She has pleaded not guilty. The trial continues, with further proceedings listed for October 2026. Until a court says otherwise, those are allegations and nothing more.

The same discipline applies to the row over South Africans recruited for Russian military training. Zuma-Sambudla resigned from Parliament in November 2025 amid the controversy. She says she was herself misled about the programme. Questions about the use of MK-linked resources remain under investigation. The adult response is neither hysteria nor hero worship. It is accountability. A democracy cannot convict people in newspapers, and it cannot acquit them by political loyalty.

Now to the part the rallies avoid.

Anger is cheap. Every opposition movement on earth understands anger. The harder question is who can govern. A protest can fill a stadium. A government must keep the taps running, mend the roads and stop the lights going out. It must run clinics, police streets, collect revenue and spend it honestly. It must hire people because they are competent, not because they are loyal.

Politics lives at the microphone. Government lives in the maintenance schedule.

We have grown dangerously fond of the microphone. The politician beside the water tanker is visible. The engineer who stopped the system collapsing is not. The politician handing out food parcels makes the evening news. The municipal official who spent three years quietly repairing the billing system never will. Ask anyone in Johannesburg who has gone a week without water what a speech is worth. A republic is not repaired by theatre. It is repaired by dull, relentless, unglamorous work.

And here the host and the parasite look disturbingly alike. Neither has persuaded the country it can deliver. The ANC has a record and has squandered it. MK has a grievance and, as yet, no record at all. One has failed in office. The other has not yet been trusted with the keys. Voters are invited to choose between a tired promise and an untested one, and told that doubt is disloyalty.

I would suggest the opposite. Doubt is the beginning of citizenship.

We have had thirty years to learn hard lessons. Liberation credentials cannot maintain infrastructure. Revolutionary language cannot balance a budget. Corruption does not become virtuous because the thief shares our mother tongue. And the most uncomfortable lesson of all: a country can swap its political actors and keep its political habits. The sign above the door changes. What happens inside the building does not.

So what should a South African voter do?

Put the same questions to every party, including the one your family has voted for since 1994. What did you inherit? What did you do with it? What did you break, and what did you repair? Who benefited and who paid? Where is the evidence? And what stops you repeating the sins you condemn in others?

Do not vote from nostalgia. Nostalgia turns yesterday's failures into tomorrow's mythology. A struggle biography becomes a qualification. A famous surname becomes a policy. A grievance becomes a programme.

Do not vote from fear either. Fear is the oldest recruiter in politics, and it has never once fixed a pothole.

Vote for the track record. Back the party that can show you its work, in clinics that open on time and taps that run. Vote for peace, because July 2021 told us exactly what the alternative costs. Vote for change, but the real kind, the kind you can measure in services and not in slogans. Start at the municipality, because that is where the republic is felt first and failed first.

MK deserves scrutiny. Not because it is secretly the ANC, and not because it is necessarily sinister. It deserves it because it is the first breakaway to rewrite the arithmetic of power, and the most consequential offspring of the ANC's own collapse. The old question of who betrayed whom inside the movement has consumed enough of this country's imagination.

The new question is more brutal.

Who can actually govern?

That is where the romance ends.

And where the republic begins.

Lionel Jean Michel is a Johannesburg-based journalist, thought leader and communications strategist.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or post.co.za