A South African court ruling on Friday revived the impeachment risk against President Cyril Ramaphosa over the long-running “Phala Phala” cash-on-the-farm affair, and prompted calls from across the political spectrum for his resignation. Bloomberg reported that Ramaphosa’s political future is now genuinely uncertain for the first time since the 2024 coalition was assembled. The ruling does not in itself unseat him — the National Assembly would still have to act — but it has reopened a question the Government of National Unity was supposed to have closed. Inside the African National Congress, the succession briefing has restarted; outside it, the Democratic Alliance and the EFF are positioning for a parliamentary moment that has not arrived in the country’s democratic history.
The received wisdom
The mainstream commentary, both inside South Africa and at the IMF-World Bank end of the international press, treats the ruling as a regrettable distraction. Ramaphosa is presented as the moderate, technocratic, market-friendly figure whose removal would empower either the populist EFF or a return of the Zuma-era ANC faction; the Phala Phala affair is treated as comparatively minor in the context of post-1994 South African political scandal; and the broader argument is that South Africa’s stability, fragile as it is, is better served by leaving the incumbent in place. The Government of National Unity with the DA, on this account, is the one genuinely encouraging development of the past two years, and an impeachment process would jeopardise it. There is real merit in this case. South Africa has functioning courts, an independent reserve bank, and a press still capable of sustained investigation; these are not nothing, and they have been preserved partly by Ramaphosa’s instinct for institutional restraint.
A different read
The case for institutional restraint is real, and conservatives outside South Africa should not be glib about the alternatives. But the framing that treats the impeachment risk as a distraction misses what the impeachment risk is actually about, and what it tells us about the durability of the post-1994 settlement.
The South African constitutional order rests on a deal: that the ANC, as the heir of the liberation movement, would govern with a moral mandate that effectively suspended ordinary accountability politics, in exchange for committing to the rule of law, market institutions, and minority protections written into the 1996 constitution. That deal held, more or less, for two decades. It started visibly fraying under Jacob Zuma — whose corruption proceedings finally tested whether the ordinary law applied to ANC presidents and produced the answer “yes, but only after extreme delay.” Ramaphosa was elected, both inside the ANC and at the polls, on the promise that he would close that question without further damage. Phala Phala asks whether he in fact closed it or merely deferred it.
The deeper conservative reading — and Ross Douthat has made the analogous case about post-liberation governing parties more generally — is that the political form South Africa now needs is one the country has never had: a normal alternation of power between parties that disagree about policy but agree about constitutional order. The 2024 election, which forced the ANC below 50% for the first time, was the structural event that made this possible. The Government of National Unity, however awkward, was the institutional translation of it. An impeachment process, conducted lawfully and on the merits, would be the next translation — the demonstration that even the heirs of the liberation movement can be removed for cause through the procedures the 1996 constitution provided.
The historical parallel that ought to interest free-market conservatives, and that ought to be sobering to those who reflexively reach for the “stability” argument, is the long Mexican experience of PRI rule. The PRI presented itself for seventy years as the indispensable guarantor of stability against more dangerous alternatives. That argument was correct in the short term and corrosive in the long term: it produced an institutional ecosystem in which presidential corruption was managed rather than punished and in which the eventual democratic transition, when it came in 2000, had to be more disruptive than it would have been had ordinary accountability operated earlier. The risk for South Africa is precisely that — that the “leave the incumbent” reflex of international markets and centrist commentary defers a constitutional moment until the moment becomes more violent than it needs to be. Niall Ferguson’s longstanding argument about institutional decline is that the failure mode is almost never sudden collapse; it is the slow normalisation of unpunished elite misbehaviour until the public stops believing the institutions are there for them.
There is also a regional security point. South Africa is the largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa, the swing vote in the BRICS group, and the country whose domestic energy crisis is now disrupting French-allied operations as far away as the sub-Antarctic. Pretoria’s political stability is not an abstract good; it is a structural input into a continental security picture that already includes a collapsing Mali, a Sahel under jihadist pressure, and a Russian and Chinese push for client status across the continent. Whoever governs South Africa next, the underlying question is whether the ANC’s internal arrangements can be subjected to ordinary democratic accountability without producing the kind of disorder that Beijing and Moscow can exploit.
What to watch
First, the National Assembly arithmetic: an impeachment motion requires a two-thirds majority, and the relevant question is whether the DA’s GNU partners can be held in line or whether the EFF, ActionSA and IFP can together force a vote that splits the ANC. Second, the markets: a sustained rand sell-off and a widening of South African government bond spreads would tighten the political timetable independently of the parliamentary process. Third, Ramaphosa’s defence: whether he chooses an early voluntary referral to a section-89 inquiry or resists the constitutional process will signal how seriously he takes the precedent. Fourth, the ANC succession: any movement of Paul Mashatile or other deputy figures into a public posture would tell us the internal conversation has already begun.
— J