By Prof Joseph Sekhampu, chief director of the NWU Business School

Imagine a state-of-the-nation address delivered without triumph or ceremony. The President rises, not to announce renewal, but to offer thanks. He thanks the households for installing solar panels that kept the lights on when the grid could not. He thanks parents who found ways to send their children to private schools as public classrooms became more crowded and less reliable. He thanks communities that drilled wells when taps ran dry, and businesses that paved roads, fixed wells, installed streetlights, and hired private security as policing quietly retreated. Applause is restrained, even respectful. The speech sounds practical and appreciated. It also reads as a quiet admission that the state has withdrawn from the everyday work of holding society together.

That moment would not feel like a rupture. It would feel familiar because South Africa has been living with this logic for some time now, even if it has never been spoken so plainly. The country is not marked by sudden collapse, but by a slow recalibration of expectation. What once provoked outrage is now met with adjustment. The absence has been normalised, and coping has replaced demanding.

Private substitution is often celebrated as resilience. Households are praised for their ingenuity. Businesses are applauded for acting where the state cannot. Communities are encouraged to be self-reliant. These narratives sound affirming but obscure a deeper retreat. When families must become energy planners, water managers, security coordinators, and education strategists simply to live with dignity, the burden of governance has moved decisively downward. The work of the state has been absorbed into private life, quietly and unevenly.

At first, this arrangement seems manageable. Daily routines continue and some neighbourhoods remain functional. Economic activity persists, although unevenly. Yet beneath this surface stability lies a growing sense of loss of services, but also of shared expectation. Citizenship no longer carries a dependable promise of care or protection from the state. Rights remain intact in law but fragile in practice. What replaces them is a culture of coping, in which people learn not to expect too much and to organise their lives around institutional absence.

This withdrawal is deeply unequal in its effects. Those with resources exit public systems and construct parallel ones. Those without remain exposed to failure with few alternatives. Over time, inequality becomes spatial and visceral. Almost all areas are defined by decay, while others retreat behind the walls of private provision. The country is divided into zones of functionality and zones of endurance. This is not only inefficient, but emotionally corrosive. It teaches people that belonging is conditional and that dignity must be purchased.

There is also a cumulative economic cost that rarely appears in macro debates. Businesses divert capital from productive investment into defensive expenditure. Money that could expand operations, create jobs or develop new capabilities is instead used to replicate basic public goods. The economy grows stronger and more cautiously. Innovation slows, not because ambition has vanished, but because energy is consumed by survival. Growth becomes harder, more expensive, and less inclusive.

As private substitution expands, the state capacity further erodes. Tax compliance weakens as citizens question the value of what they fund. Skilled professionals drift away from public institutions that no longer reward competence or protect integrity. Municipal finances deteriorate as billing systems collapse and payment resistance spreads. Each private solution makes the next public failure easier to accept. Retreat becomes self-reinforcing.

What deepens the lament is the language that accompany this shift. The political leadership speak of partnership, collaboration, and community initiative. These words once implied a shared project anchored by a capable state. Increasingly, they soften abdication. When citizens are thanked for replacing the state, the responsibility is inverted, and absence is reframed as cooperation, while failure is recast as collective effort.

A society can endure this arrangement for some time. People adapt and carry burdens quietly and without drama. But endurance is not a development strategy. It is a holding pattern sustained by fatigue and deferred hope. Over time, even the most resilient households and firms begin to fray.

The imagined address would close, as they often do, with a promise to rebuild capacity and restore trust. Listeners would be urged to remain patient, to recognise progress, and to believe that the corner is being turned. There would be reassurance that reforms are underway, that the machinery of the state is being fixed, and that better days lie just ahead. The thanks would sound sincere and optimism would sound familiar.

So, as you listen to the State of the Nation address, perhaps from a home powered by solar, protected by private security, supplied by a borehole, and connected by roads fixed at community expense, it may be worth pausing. Applaud politely. Note the confidence and rhetoric. Then ask, quietly, whether this is a speech about recovery, or a well-mannered acknowledgement that the work of the state has already been outsourced to its citizens.

Prof Joseph Sekhampu, chief director of the NWU Business School