I recently spoke to a veteran of SA’s liberation struggle, a leader who understood sovereignty not as a slogan but as a lived condition.
He told me that the true test of freedom was simple: whether the general public experienced dignity, security and a tangible stake in the wealth of their country.
“States,” he said, “do not lose sovereignty in conferences. They lose it when they fail their people.”
That insight is increasingly relevant to SA’s current predicament.
On the global stage, SA has projected moral courage.
Its stance on Palestine, its solidarity with Sahelian states reclaiming control over their mineral wealth, and its alignment with Namibia’s insistence on resource sovereignty, position the country as a principled voice against imperial domination.
These positions resonate deeply with the anti-colonial foundations of the liberation movement and enhance SA’s standing among Global South nations.
Yet this moral authority is steadily undermined by contradictions at home.
Domestically, the state continues to pursue neoliberal austerity, fiscal contraction, and market-first reforms that weaken public institutions, hollow out state capacity, and entrench inequality.
While SA condemns imperial extraction abroad, it tolerates internal economic arrangements that concentrate wealth, privatise risk and socialise hardship.
The result is a state that speaks the language of sovereignty internationally while presiding over structural dependence and social fragility internally.
The consequences of this contradiction are not theoretical; they are already visible.
Governance failures manifest in collapsing municipalities, chronic infrastructure breakdowns, energy insecurity, weakened public health care and rising unemployment.
These failures erode citizen trust and create fertile ground for populism, xenophobia and authoritarian impulses.
Internationally, they weaken SA’s credibility: a state that cannot guarantee reliable electricity, water, logistics or basic service delivery struggles to persuade allies and investors that it can lead a coherent developmental agenda.
History shows that foreign policy credibility is inseparable from domestic governance.
Anti-imperialism without developmental capacity risks becoming performative.
Over time, global partners begin to question consistency, reliability and implementation capability.
Strategic allies hesitate. Progressive coalitions weaken. Moral leadership becomes symbolic rather than material.
This trajectory places the national democratic revolution at a dangerous crossroads.
The post-1994 state achieved real gains: mass electrification, social grants, public healthcare access, housing delivery and ARV rollout saved lives and reduced extreme deprivation.
These advances reflected a developmental and redistributive orientation grounded in the Freedom Charter’s insistence that “the people shall share in the country’s wealth”.
But sustained austerity, creeping privatisation, and the delegitimisation of the state itself have reversed momentum.
The state is increasingly framed as inefficient rather than indispensable, even as no credible alternative exists to deliver inclusive development at scale.
This ideological retreat does not shrink the crisis; it deepens it.
If this contradiction persists, SA faces three interlinked risks.
First, domestic instability: declining service delivery and inequality will continue to fracture social cohesion, delegitimise democratic institutions and weaken the social contract.
Second, international marginalisation: without governance credibility, SA’s anti-imperialist positions risk being dismissed as rhetorical posturing rather than actionable leadership.
Third, strategic vulnerability: weakened state capacity increases dependence on external capital, conditional financing and private monopolies, precisely the dynamics anti-imperialism seeks to resist.
Struggle icon Chris Hani warned that “revolutions fail when they are captured by elites and disconnected from the people”.
Oliver R Tambo reminded us that “freedom is hollow if it does not reorganise economic power”.
These warnings speak directly to the present moment.
A state cannot claim sovereignty abroad while presiding over exclusion, precarity and institutional decay at home.
Nor can it expect trust from citizens or the international community without policy coherence, delivery capability and moral consistency.
SA’s challenge is therefore not one of rhetoric, but of alignment.
Until foreign policy principles are matched by a domestic economic path that rebuilds state capacity, expands social investment and restores developmental ambition, sovereignty will remain fragile.
And a liberation project that fails to materially transform the lives of its people risks becoming history rather than a living mandate.
The question is no longer whether contradictions exist.
It is whether the state has the courage to resolve them.
- Tumelo Nkohla is a public sector governance specialist and chief risk officer who writes on ethics, systems failure, geopolitics and SA’s future strategic trajectory.
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