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Received: 2025-05-12 | Accepted: 2025-08-30 | Published: 2025-09-30

Title

State territory and power relations in South Africa: national unity or oligarchy government fiefdoms?

Abstract

This article argues that South Africa’s 2024 Government of National Unity (GNU) re-institutes elite democracy for political incumbency self-preservation in favour of the African National Congress (ANC) and president Ramaphosa. Historically, the ANC appropriated state territory as personal presidential and party fiefdoms, to leverage state and political power, while eroding democracy, accountability, rule of law and the universality of freedoms. The article theorises elite democracy and conceptualises “state idea” to reveal that the universality of freedoms, necessary for national unity and stability, is not a natural right, and thus disambiguates South Africa’s hasty GNU. Consistent with Hegel’s philosophy of freedom and Nkrumah’s consciencism political ideology, the article distils elitist characteristic features of the GNU that exude political incumbency self-preservation. Methodologically, the article conducts desktop literature review, analytical conceptualisations and evaluation of South Africa’s contextual politics for the hastily established GNU. The article finds that the GNU re-institutes elite democracy through a fictitious 71.75% majoritarian politics, thereby appropriating state power, “state territory” and GNU member political parties to repurpose them as the ANC’s fiefdoms for regeneration of political power in service of party political tenure and presidential incumbency self-preservation, while shirking accountability and the rule of law. Therefore, the article concludes that this GNU undermines national unity and stability. The article recommends that national unity and stability require a “state idea” founded on obeyance of the nation-state’s laws and the universality of freedoms for all South Africans as equals.

Keywords

power relations, freedom, state idea, state territory, oligarchy government, South Africa

JEL classifications

O13 , Q40

URI

http://jssidoi.org/ird/article/213

DOI

DOI 10.70132/p8477964789

Pages

170-183

Funding

This is an open access issue and all published articles are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Authors

Tsheola, Johannes

University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa https://www.unisa.ac.za

Articles by this author in: CrossRef | Google Scholar

Journal title

Insights into Regional Development

Volume

Number

Issue date

September 2025

Issue DOI

DOI 10.70132/t9255692945

ISSN

ISSN 2345-0282 (online)

Publisher

VšĮ Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Center, Vilnius, Lithuania

Cited

Article views & downloads

HTML views: 508 | PDF downloads: 304

References

Ajei, M.O. (2016). Kwasi Wiredu’s consensual democracy: Prospects for practice in Africa. European Journal of Political Theory, 15(4), 445-466. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885116666451