South Africa is a black country now

The ANC will win the forthcoming elections, the DA will come second and the EFF third, former ANC exile intelligence leader Oyama Mabandla tells Peter Bruce in this edition of Podcasts from the Edge. “Even if the ANC misfires,” he says, “there is still no alternative to it. In South Africa black people vote for black parties.” Mabandla came home to a business career that has seen him make deputy CEO of SAA and chairman of Vodacom and, more recently, a widely recognised public intellectual. His new book, Soul of A Nation is, says Bruce, the best and most easily digestible recording of the first 30 years of democracy available. In the book Mabandla argues that under ANC rule, or the last half of it, things have gone so badly wrong that the only way out is a new Codesa, a new national convention to hammer out a new consensus and a new future. Otherwise citizens have become so alienated from our politics the only certain result is a repeat of the 2021 violence…