Democracy and authoritarianism: Can the people remain patient for much longer?

Chris Maxon

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The ANC employs a holding strategy in the absence of the state’s capacity to secure meaningful, long-term, popular legitimacy through radical social, economic and political redress for the past, argues Chris Maxon. Picture: iStock/Gallo Images

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Author Dr Alexander Beresford, associate professor in African Politics at the University of Leeds, and others have borrowed an anthropology concept of productive liminality to explain our potentially indefinite suspended state of “authoritarianism and democracy”.

This as the “Ramaphoria” moment in South Africa diminishes, corruption is rampant and shows no sign of slowing, and the liberation movement in power is becoming the spitting image of our former oppressors.

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