Prof. Joseph Sekhampu, the chief director of the North-West University (NWU) Business School.

By Prof. Joseph Sekhampu, the chief director of the North-West University (NWU) Business School.

For much of democratic South Africa, politics could organise itself around recognisable adversaries. Apartheid, corruption, state capture, white monopoly capital and, more recently, illegal immigration each offered a simple explanation for complex problems. They gave voters someone to blame and politicians someone to defeat. But South Africa has entered a different political economy. The country's binding constraints are increasingly structural rather than political. Weak growth, declining state capability, low productivity, and demographic pressures cannot be defeated in an election. However, our politics continues to search for villains as though every structural problem were simply a political opponent in disguise.

This matters because democratic politics is organised around conflict. Elections require parties to identify obstacles, assign responsibility, and persuade voters that a change of government will produce a different outcome. That logic works when the obstacle is a corrupt administration, discriminatory laws, or a captured state. It becomes far less convincing when the principal constraints on development are institutional weakness, stagnant productivity, fiscal limits, or decades of underinvestment in human capability. Structural problems do not conform to electoral cycles. They accumulate over decades, span successive governments, and cannot be resolved by replacing one governing coalition with another. 

The consequence is that South African politics increasingly mistake symptoms for causes. As the country's room for policy manoeuvre narrows, political competition becomes more symbolic than transformative. It is easier to campaign against corruption than to explain why productivity has stagnated for more than a decade. It is easier to blame migrants than to confront the consequences of prolonged economic exclusion. It is easier to attack political opponents than to explain why municipalities struggle to attract engineers, planners, and financial managers. Politics therefore continues to manufacture political conflicts around problems whose roots are increasingly institutional and structural.

The recent debate on immigration illustrates this transformation. Immigration has become one of the country's most emotionally charged political issues, not because it fully explains South Africa's economic difficulties but because it provides a visible target for frustrations that are otherwise diffuse. Public anxiety about unemployment, weak public services, crime, and economic insecurity is channelled into a debate that appears politically manageable. Immigration becomes more than a policy question. It becomes a political language through which broader structural anxieties are expressed.

The Government of National Unity reflects a different aspect of the same transformation. Coalition politics has narrowed the ideological distance between parties that once defined themselves through sharp political antagonism. Governing increasingly requires negotiation, compromise, and incremental adjustment. As the practical differences between governing parties become less dramatic, political competition shifts towards symbolic conflicts that preserve partisan identities even when policy choices become more constrained.

This helps explain why South African politics often appears simultaneously more polarised and less transformative. Political rhetoric has become increasingly confrontational, yet the country's room for meaningful policy divergence has narrowed. Fiscal constraints, weak economic growth, fragmented electoral mandates and institutional fragility limit what any government can realistically achieve, regardless of ideology. The language of politics has become more dramatic precisely as the country's structural constraints have become more resistant to dramatic solutions.

None of this suggests that ideology no longer matters. Political values continue to shape debates about redistribution, identity, immigration, and the role of the state. The problem is that ideology increasingly collides with structural realities that no government can legislate away within a single electoral cycle. Democracies are highly effective at resolving conflicts between competing interests. They are less effective when the main obstacles to progress are slow productivity growth, weak institutions, and long-term demographic pressures rather than identifiable political opponents.

The real divide in South African politics may no longer be between left and right, liberation and opposition, or even government and opposition. It may increasingly be between those who continue searching for political enemies and those prepared to confront structural constraints that have no face, no party and no obvious villain.

As campaigning intensifies ahead of municipal elections, South Africans should pay close attention not only to the enemies that political parties identify, but also to the problems they choose not to discuss. The easiest campaigns are built around villains. The hardest conversations are about structural constraints that no election can remove overnight. South Africa's democratic maturity will ultimately depend less on how effectively it identifies political enemies than on how honestly it confronts the institutional realities shaping its future.