Twenty-five years since South Africa’s first democratic election, the country reels in anxiety. Poverty levels sit at 55 percent overall, while potential destitution hangs over another 76 percent of the population. South Africa has recently been again awarded the title of most unequal country in the world, with recent research finding that 10 percent of the population owns 90 percent of the country’s wealth and 50–65 percent of the country’s income.

Violence and unrest result. The country is plagued by regular and increasingly militant protests and haunted by political killings, as political activists and politicians, particularly those pursuing careers within the governing party, increasingly seek subsistence through the state machinery. Gender and racial discrimination continue due to entrenched apartheid-era hierarchical and patriarchal workplace environments. Meanwhile, health and education systems have crumbled. Regular power cuts and public transport failures add to South Africans’ woes.

One need not venture far from the nation’s capital cities to find rural communities that are virtual wastelands. Black Economic Empowerment, a program adopted by the ANC ostensibly to address racial inequality, has only produced an elite black class nurtured by extraordinary corruption and cronyism. Each day, revelations of government officials’ corruption and compromised institutions are revealed through the work of the Zondo Commission of Inquiry, an official commission established in 2018 to investigate allegations of “state capture.”