IN the early years of Zimbabwe’s independence, anyone predicting the eventual collapse of Robert Mugabe’s rule would have been dismissed as a traitor, an impimpi or a doom merchant too bitter to celebrate liberation.
The flags were new, the rhetoric sounded sincere and for a moment it seemed that a country torn apart by racial injustice had discovered a shared future.
Schools expanded, literacy rose and the new State projected confidence in its democratic credentials.
Yet beneath the triumphant speeches, the seeds of decay were already being watered: intolerance to dissent, the demonisation of opponents and the quiet fusion of party and State.
What looked like democratic consolidation was, in reality, a fragile performance, masking the growth of unchecked power.
Gukurahundi was the first major crack in the façade — a brutal reminder that even a “people’s government” can turn the guns on its own people once accountability is seen as optional.
But the region and the world largely looked away, preferring the neat story of a heroic liberation movement now in charge of a democratic republic.
Over three decades, the promise of a prosperous and democratic Zimbabwe curdled into a nightmare.
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Zanu PF hollowed out electoral institutions until voting became a ritual with a pre-ordained ending.
The economy disintegrated into hyperinflation and mass unemployment and citizens learned that a party that once fought for freedom could just as easily suffocate democratic life in the name of “protecting the revolution”.
It is this arc — from liberation to dominance to democratic decay — that now hangs over South Africa like a storm cloud.
The African National Congress (ANC), once the embodiment of hope, has taken roughly the same period to move from overwhelming popular support, to a crisis of legitimacy.
For three decades, it wrapped itself in the language of democratic struggle, presenting 1994 as a permanent shield against criticism.
Yet democratic legitimacy is not a once-off reward; it is a renewable contract that depends on performance, accountability and the ability to self-correct.
As service delivery fails, corruption becomes systemic, and inequality deepens, that contract is visibly fraying.
South Africa still possesses what Zimbabwe lost: relatively independent courts, a noisy media and a vibrant civil society willing to call out abuse.
But institutions do not protect a country automatically; they must be defended everyday by a citizenry that still believes democracy is worth the fight.
The more South Africans experience rolling blackouts, crumbling municipalities and indifferent leaders, the more the word “democratic” begins to sound hollow, like a branding on a product that no longer works.
When people say “Voting changes nothing”, they are not rejecting the idea of democracy in theory; they are rejecting a practice of democracy that has become ritualistic and disconnected from their material lives.
ANC’s decline has not yet produced a democratic renaissance; instead, it has opened a messy, uncertain chapter.
The loss of parliamentary majority and the birth of a sprawling coalition could have been an opportunity to renew democratic culture — to normalise power-sharing, compromise and real oversight.
Yet the instinct of a dominant liberation party under pressure is rarely to democratise itself.
The language of “unity” and “stability” easily becomes a cloak for backroom deals, patronage pacts and attempts to claw back control through State resources.
In that sense, the next five years will test whether South Africa’s multiparty arrangements deepen democratic accountability or simply rearrange the same elite players around the table.
The parallels with Zimbabwe become sharper when one looks at how both liberation movements conceptualised criticism.
In Harare, opponents were painted as stooges of imperialism; in Pretoria, critics are still casually dismissed as defenders of “white monopoly capital” or as unpatriotic.
This defensive reflex is fundamentally anti-democratic because it treats dissent not as a vital part of public life, but as a security threat.
A truly democratic movement welcomes being held to account, knowing that only scrutiny keeps it honest.
Once a ruling party decides it is too historic, too beloved or too indispensable to be questioned, it stops being democratic in any meaningful sense, whatever the constitution says.
Marikana is in South Africa’s story where Gukurahundi stands in Zimbabwe’s: A defining moment that stripped away the moral innocence of the liberation narrative.
When a democratic State mows down striking workers and then spends years evading full responsibility, something essential in the democratic compact breaks.
Add to that the 2021 unrest, rampant local-level corruption, and the casual theft of funds meant for the poorest, and it becomes clear why ordinary people have started to see the democratic State as just another machine of extraction.
If the next five years offer more of the same — more commissions, more scandals, more talk of “renewal” with little consequence — the damage to democratic legitimacy may become irreversible.
The danger is not only authoritarianism from above, but also disillusionment from below.
Young South Africans, born long after apartheid, experience “democratic South Africa” as a place of joblessness, crime and broken promises.
For them, “democratic” is not a sacred word; it is an adjective attached to a system that has not delivered.
Into this vacuum steps populists who offer easy answers: tear up the constitution, nationalise everything, silence critics and trust a strongman to cut through the noise.
This is precisely the turn Zimbabwe took when its rulers chose expedient populism over difficult but necessary reform.
Once democratic norms are abandoned in desperation, it is very hard to bring them back.
Yet trajectories are not destinies.
The same democratic tools that can be abused can also be reclaimed.
Over the next five years, South Africa still has a window in which to prove that democratic politics can solve democratic crises.
That would mean a Parliament that actually bites, not just barks; a prosecuting authority that jails the untouchable; and a ruling party willing to lose tenders, positions and even provinces in order to save its soul.
It would mean opposition parties taking democratic responsibility seriously, not merely waiting to feed at the same trough.
Above all, it would require citizens to refuse the luxury of cynicism and to insist that “democratic” must once again describe lived reality, not just legal form.
The Zimbabwe trajectory starts with small, reasonable compromises — a tolerated abuse here, a politicised appointment there — each defended as necessary for stability or transformation.
South Africa has already made too many of those compromises.
The choice now is stark: double down on a liberation mythology that justifies permanent power or reinvent the political culture so that no party, no matter how historic, stands above democratic rules.
If South Africa fails this test, the word “democratic” will become an empty slogan, much as it did north of the Limpopo.
If it passes, the next five years will not mark the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning — the moment when South Africans finally move from celebrating democracy to truly practising it.
