The leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) Youth League at their 27th conference held at the University of Limpopo. Photo: Lunga Mzangwe
The 27th National Congress of the African National Congress Youth League, held at the University of Limpopo, was presented as a routine gathering of youth to discuss South Africa’s challenges and scenario planning for the strategy to respond to these issues. It exposed something more troubling: a widening generational rupture within South Africa’s governing party.
The African National Congress (ANC) is not merely facing electoral slippage. It is confronting a structural disconnect between its governing framework and the lived experience of a young, economically precarious electorate. That rupture now threatens its long-term political durability.
A doctrine out of time
The ANC’s intellectual anchor remains its 1969 Strategy and Tactics document, crafted in exile during a struggle defined by racial oppression and political exclusion. That framework provided clarity and cohesion. It identified race, class and gender as the central axes of domination in apartheid South Africa. Those categories remain relevant. But they are no longer sufficient.
Post-1994 South Africa has been shaped not only by liberation but by globalisation, technological change and repeated economic shocks. The 2007-08 global financial crisis, originating in the United States housing and credit markets, triggered South Africa’s first recession since 1992 and cost the country more than a million jobs. The recovery was weak. Average GDP growth since then has hovered below 1%. Population growth has outpaced economic expansion. Real incomes have stagnated. Youth unemployment has climbed above 50% among active job seekers.
These outcomes were not solely the result of domestic policy. Yet policy choices mattered. The post-apartheid state embraced fiscal consolidation and market openness in the mid-1990s. This delivered macroeconomic stability. It did not deliver sustained industrial expansion or labour-absorbing growth. Deindustrialisation thinned sectors capable of employing large numbers of semi-skilled workers. The supply side of the economy weakened.
The result is a paradox: political liberation succeeded; economic inclusion has not.
A young country without a youth dividend
South Africa is demographically young. Roughly 19 million of its population are under 35. The median voter is urban, digitally connected and economically insecure.
This generation did not experience apartheid directly. It experiences the state through job applications that yield no response and the rising cost of living. Its political engagement is less likely to occur through branch meetings and more likely through digital platforms, informal networks and episodic protest.
Voter turnout has fallen steadily from the highs of the late 1990s. Participation among the voting-age population has reached historic lows. This is not simple apathy. It is displacement. Political energy has shifted beyond the ANC’s organisational reach.
Yet the party’s internal culture remains highly centralised. Feedback often arrives only in the form of electoral decline. In such a structure, leaders risk speaking primarily to one another rather than to society. Strategic adaptation becomes slow. Dissent becomes visible only after damage is done.
The limits of rhetorical continuity
The ANC continues to frame its programme around the “National Question”: dismantling racial inequality while confronting class exploitation and patriarchy. These imperatives endure. But they do not automatically generate growth. Building a non-racial and non-sexist society without delivering broad-based prosperity weakens the credibility of both goals. Social justice without economic dynamism is politically fragile.
The deeper challenge lies in the economic base of society. South Africa’s growth model has struggled to generate productivity gains, industrial depth and skills alignment in an era defined by artificial intelligence, platform economies and rapid technological diffusion. A party formed in the era of peasantry and industrialisation now governs in the digital age. This is not a crisis of African nationalism. It is a failure of strategic renewal and organisational design framed around the changes of recent decades.
A structural contradiction
President Cyril Ramaphosa has repeatedly acknowledged the urgency of the employment crisis the state of the nation addresses. Programmes exist but they are not making substantial change. The promise of creating five million jobs stands against more than 16 million people who are unemployed in South Africa. Interventions have been announced but have not been able to address the structural unemployment problem facing the youth of South Africa.
The contradiction is stark. The ANC seeks electoral endorsement from young citizens while presiding over an economy that excludes them. In 1985, the ANC described working youth as the most reliable segment of the revolutionary struggle. Today, many young South Africans are outside both the labour market and the party’s political imagination.
That gap erodes credibility. It also narrows policy space. A country with a large youth cohort but weak growth risks squandering its demographic advantage. Without sustained expansion above population growth, per capita incomes stagnate. Expectations rise faster than opportunity.
Adaptation or decline
If the ANC is to arrest its decline, it must move beyond rhetorical continuity. Race, class and gender remain essential analytical tools. They cannot substitute for a coherent growth strategy. The party faces a stark choice: grow or maintain electoral support, or continue a decline that will erode it further.
A credible renewal would require several shifts: serious industrial policy aimed at labour-absorbing sectors; investment in skills aligned with digital and technological change; access to entrepreneurial finance; reliable energy and logistics; and administrative reform to restore state capability. Political education must address not only liberation history but the constraints of a middle-income economy struggling to reindustrialise.
Finally, and more fundamentally, the party must reopen channels of internal and societal feedback. A movement that once prided itself on mass mobilisation now needs institutional listening. The choice facing the ANC is not between tradition and modernity. It is between adaptation and gradual marginalisation. For the party, the stakes are electoral and existential. For South Africa, they are developmental.
Ashley Nyiko Mabasa is a national executive committee (NEC) member of the ANC Youth League and head of drafting and data analysis, and coordinator for policy, monitoring and evaluation. He holds a double master’s degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in public policy and economic and labour sociology and is currently pursuing an MBA.
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