The Real Pipe Dream is Waiting for South Africa to Fix Itself
The Western Cape has voted to fix this country at every election since 1994. The system will not let it. Cape Independence is the sober response, not the fantasy.
Chris Roper (Financial Mail, 1 October) argues that those of us campaigning for Cape independence want to abandon South Africa rather than help fix it. On one point we agree entirely: South Africans cannot simply walk away from what has been broken. The question that matters is not whether it should be fixed, but how.
Roper’s answer is the people, communities and civil society organisations pushing back against corruption and incompetence. They do essential work. But civil society can expose, resist and limit the damage. It cannot govern. In a democracy, the direction of a country is set at the ballot box. If South Africa is to be fixed, its voters must fix it.
The Western Cape has been trying to do exactly that since 1994. In every national and provincial election, its voters have refused the ANC a majority. In 2024, the ANC, MK and EFF together won roughly a quarter of the provincial vote. Nationally, the same three parties took nearly two-thirds. Election after election, the Western Cape votes for a different direction and a different vision of the future. And election after election, it is governed by national policy it did not choose.
That is not opting out. It is the opposite: a province doing everything a democracy asks of its citizens, only to find that its vote stops at the provincial boundary on almost every power that matters. Economic policy is a national competence. So is foreign policy. So are policing, rail, ports, trade, and labour. The province’s current competitive advantage is that it is administered well, but when it comes to critical policy decisions, it must follow the national government’s lead, however ill-conceived that may be.
Coalition governments alone are not the answer
We were told by many that coalition government would change this. Empirical data tells a different story. The Government of National Unity is a case in point. Under its stewardship the economy shrank by 0.2% in the second quarter of 2026, and this year’s growth forecast has been cut to about 1.2%, nowhere near what is needed to absorb the unemployed. Official unemployment rose to 33.6% in the same quarter; on Stats SA’s broader measure, which includes those who have given up looking, it stands at 43.8%. Crime remains out of control, the army is on the streets of Cape Town, and South Africa still records around 58 murders a day — a murder rate more than six times the global average. Meanwhile, the GNU has pressed ahead with the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act and the Expropriation Act, both opposed by the party the Western Cape keeps electing.
This is not bad luck. It is arithmetic. I have no objection to coalitions in principle. But when the ANC lost Johannesburg in 2016, coalition government was sold as the city’s salvation. A decade later, Johannesburg is in worse shape than when the experiment began: fragile alliances, a revolving door of mayors and collapsing services. Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay tell the same story. By 2023 the DA itself was tabling motions to dissolve the Johannesburg council, and a year later, as the city chose its 11th mayor in eight years, it declared Johannesburg ‘ungovernable’. The DA was right, but its logic extends far beyond “the City of Gold”. The problem is not coalitions as such: it is that the parties of sensible government cannot form a majority, so coalitions hand the balance of power to the parties that caused the decline. That is as true nationally as it is in Johannesburg. The only province where those parties can govern without them is the Western Cape.
The coming election will not change this. The News24/SABI poll, modelled for turnout, puts the DA at 29% in Johannesburg. Helen Zille personally polls at 36%, but voters elect parties, not mayors, and it is the party vote that fills the council. Nor is the gap new. In March, a Social Research Foundation poll found that 84% of Johannesburg voters believed the DA could fix the city, yet only 39% intended to vote for it. Johannesburg’s voters know what good government looks like. They are still not choosing it. The DA will not win a majority. To govern, it will need partners, and the most likely partner is the ANC.
That is the structural reality of South African politics. The African nationalist bloc of the ANC, MK and EFF commands around two-thirds of the national vote, which makes it the permanent power broker. There is no viable national coalition of non-racial, pro-market centrists, and without one there is no lasting solution. Any reform must first be acceptable to the parties that created the problem.
Cape Independence opens the door to success
It is often said that the Western Cape should stay and serve as a beacon for the rest of the country. In one sense it already is. It is far better run than any other province, and Capetonians know it: the same News24 poll found them gloomy about South Africa but optimistic about their own city. Measured against its international peers rather than its neighbours, however, the Western Cape performs poorly, because the policies holding it back are made in Pretoria. A province can only shine as brightly as its powers allow.
Nor is it the Western Cape’s job to rescue the rest of the country from the governments it elects. Its responsibility is to its own people, above all the poorest, who depend most on the police, trains, schools and jobs that national policy keeps failing to deliver. Taking responsibility for ourselves is not desertion. And a Western Cape free to show what good policy can achieve may do more to change how South Africa votes than another 30 years of making the case from inside a system built to outvote it.
That is what Cape independence offers: a peaceful, democratic and lawful path, decided by the people of the province in a referendum. It rests on evidence, not promises. The Western Cape already raises far more in revenue than is spent on it. Our fiscal research shows that if that money were kept and spent on the policies the province’s voters already choose, its economy, and the lives of its people, would be materially better within a decade. On 17 November, together with Lex Libertas, the Cape Independence Advocacy Group will be releasing the Western Cape Fiscal Flows report in Cape Town. It has been produced by Econometrix and investigates the extent to which the fruits of good governance in the Western Cape are being extracted and used to subsidise bad governance elsewhere in the country. I invite Chris Roper and the Financial Mail to come and to test the numbers.
Roper calls independence a pipe dream. But consider what we are actually being asked to believe: that a system which has failed for three decades will succeed on the next attempt; that coalitions brokered by the parties that caused the decline will reverse it; and that the province which votes for reform at every election should keep waiting for the rest of the country to agree. That is the utopia. The Cape’s proposal is the sober one: allow the people who keep voting for good government to finally get it.
This article was submitted to the Financial Mail requesting a right-to-reply
