This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Hampstead at dusk, dismal and soundless. The iron gates of your compound yawn open to reveal the urban warscape of Neo-Pretoria. Your armoured Tesla tracks its lane as you head to the inhab bar. The sound of gunfire, off in the distance; you’re getting used to it now. You check the data on your neurosurgical Russian military detector sleeve and see it’s the Latinarcos flaring up again. They iced three of your SynSec guards last week.
You look out at the needle galleries on Heath Street and turn on the radio. Prime Minister Tapp is holding a press conference on the border clashes with the Autonomous Calais Enclave neo-Kurdan guerrilla mesh-units. He says he understands their “excess of legitimate anger” and announces he has a twelve-point conciliation plan.
Fiction, perhaps. But for how long?
Britain is not South Africa — yet. But there is a sense that the scaffolding of a once-functional state is buckling, and the grand edifice it supports is gradually tumbling down with it, brick by brick. For those with a doomerist bent, comparisons to the Rainbow Nation’s dysfunction, division and decay feel grimly inevitable — and the parallels harder to ignore.
South Africanisation is not just a metaphor. It is a process, and it has already begun. But what does it entail? Practically speaking, South Africanisation can be broken down into these sub-processes:
- Collapse of public infrastructure and services — often due to corruption or managerial incompetence
- The retreat of the state in face of growing criminality, prompting a rise in private security, gated communities and parallel, informal systems of governance
- Communalist politics, drawn along ethnic, racial or religious lines
- Increased social stratification, with an increasingly detached elite able to escape the inexorable collapse of baseline quality of life
- Disillusionment with formal politics and the development of radical political apathy
Rolling blackouts have become a totemic example of South Africa’s failure. “Loadshedding”, the euphemised term, sees the state power utility company Escom deliberately cutting power to different regions.
The only other viable alternative is a catastrophic nationwide grid failure. This is because the power infrastructure is zombified, surviving on the remnants of 20th century coal-fired plants. Rusting, obsolete, unmaintained and molested by decades of political interference, they break down with astonishing regularity. The country’s only nuclear facility, Koeberg, a Cold War relic brought online in the 1980s, tripped offline in March.
But power is only the most visible case. South Africa’s entire infrastructural system is collapsing. Roads, railways, ports and even the water supply are falling apart. Parts of Joburg were without running water for almost two weeks last year. The rail system, Africa’s largest, has dropped a third of its freight capacity in five years. The rolling stock gradually rusts, rails and signals are looted by gangs, and procurement is log-jammed by systematic corruption.
South Africa can no longer maintain what it has, but the extreme planning and legislative processes for building new infrastructure mean it cannot build what it needs, either. Even where infrastructure is built, it is designed for political ribbon-cutting: inauguration rather than operation. Maintenance, it seems, is nobody’s job.
Another critical factor in the breakdown of South African infrastructure is crime — not as a side effect but as a driver. Criminal syndicates known as the “construction mafia”, often operating under the cover of community development forums, use extortion, sabotage and violence to hijack public projects. More than 180 have been targeted at a cost estimated at R63 billion, according to the National Treasury. A wave of copper theft is sweeping the nation, further hobbling the infrastructure network.
Crime is not limited to theft. Over the past 13 years, the murder rate in South Africa has surged by more than 50 per cent, placing the country amongst the most homicidal on Earth. Six of Africa’s most dangerous cities are in South Africa. Local crime gangs now act as something approaching a government, dispensing illicit goods, weapons and protection in areas they control. A 2024 Institute for Security Studies report found that the widespread circulation of illegal firearms is fuelling a feedback loop of escalating violence.
Faced with increased crime, more heavily armed suspects and the establishment of no-go zones, the police are increasingly powerless. They, too, are hamstrung by institutional corruption — there are many cases of officers having to buy their own ammunition and uniforms. Since 2012, the South African Police Service’s ability to detect murders has dropped by 65 per cent. The national conviction rate for murder stands at just 13 per cent. Recidivism is endemic: around 90 per cent of released prisoners reoffend.
Opting out is, for those who can afford it, less a choice and more an imperative. The country has seen explosive growth in private security; South Africa now has more private security personnel than police and military combined. Increasing numbers of people are withdrawing into fortified compounds.
The spectre of racial politics, of course, underlines all of this. South Africa’s official ideology remains “non-racialism”. But the real currency of the country’s politics is what the former editor of South Africa’s Sunday Times, Brian Pottinger, calls “reverse racism”. What began as a moral project of redress and equity has metastasised into racial preferment.
The rampant corruption and incompetence of the ANC has failed to build broad-based prosperity, and the party has doubled down on a politics of racial redistribution. Wealth, jobs and contracts flow not through meritocratic competition but through racial quotas, political connection and cronyist enrichment.
May’s elections suggest that ethnic communalism is now hardwired into political behaviour: the ANC drew 98 per cent of its support from black Africans, whilst the EFF and MK received similarly ethnically homogenous votes. The Democratic Alliance is the only major party with a multiracial base, and it remains stuck below 25 per cent support.
To Britons, rolling blackouts and crumbling infastructure were once unimaginable
Political apathy is an entirely rational response to such conditions. South Africans, particularly the young, are losing interest in a system that appears incapable of delivery. Just 66 per cent of adults are registered to vote, and turnout has declined steadily since 1999. Amongst the youngest cohort, registration is lowest. Surveys conducted by the Centre for Risk Analysis show that whilst many still believe in the idea of democracy, they no longer believe in any of the parties.
To Britons, rolling blackouts, crumbling infrastructure, the rise of private security in place of a hollowed-out police force, brazen communalism and a collapse of faith in the political system were once unimaginable. But many of these will fast become familiar. Recent blackouts in Spain and Portugal have raised fears that hostile actors might target Britain’s grid. In truth, sabotage may be unnecessary; our own energy policy is doing the job already.
In January, Britain came “within a whisper” of blackouts when the wind failed to blow during a cold snap. In previous years we’ve burned coal and bought power from now-decommissioned Belgian nuclear plants to keep the lights on.
But under Net Zero, the UK has been decommissioning reliable gas and coal capacity and replacing it with renewables that are abundant when not needed and absent when required. Dispatchable generation (electricity we can summon on demand) has now fallen below peak demand and is projected to fall further. By 2027, we may have just 85 per cent of the power we need.
Britain’s infrastructure crisis isn’t one of neglect but of overload: it was not built for a population approaching 70 million. We are similarly unable to build new capacity, hampered not by entrenched criminal gangs but by bureaucracy — although the difference between criminal sabotage and regulatory paralysis is tone rather than outcome. Every year we fail to build whilst the population grows larger, the problem compounds.
Whilst violent crime is on the decline in Britain, it must be considered a matter of miracle rather than solid policing policy. Overly lenient judges, a prison system at least a decade beyond its capacity staffed by officers desperate to start relationships with prisoners, a police force that seems at best overwhelmed and at worst uninterested in the small matter of physically real crime — but frothing to deal with “non-hate crime incidents” — give little reassurance that the decline will be reversed.
The development of communal politics, too, is more advanced in Britain than politeness would allow us to admit. Riots after Black Lives Matter, Gaza and the Southport murders can all be seen as expressions of the slow intensification of ethnic identification — accompanied, inevitably, by political factionalism. The Gaza Independents now have candidates vowing to end free mixing between the sexes, Sikhs have threatened to “no-platform” Labour MPs over the lack of a public inquiry into UK complicity in the 1984 Golden Temple massacre and Bob Blackman hangs on gamely in Harrow thanks to his open expressions of Indian nationalism.
Faced with all this, faith in the system is fading. Last year’s British Social Attitudes survey painted a bleak picture: just 40 per cent believed the government delivers effectively, whilst a record 45 per cent said they “almost never” trust those in power to put the country’s needs first. Fully 79 per cent thought Britain’s system of governance needs major reform.
A member of a More In Common focus group — Gary, a sales manager — summed up the discontent with the clarity that often escapes those inside the system: “I’ve given up on the system. The country almost needs a coup d’état.”
It may be grim, but we are not yet in a South Africa-style dystopia. What is more likely is a slower and murkier slide backwards; perhaps Birmingham, rather than Pretoria may prove to be the blueprint for Britain’s cities in future.
