LUCKY MATHEBULA | When the town no longer trusts the sheriff

A country enters dangerous political terrain when succession ceases to be a search for the best leader and becomes a search for the least perilous one. South Africa is edging towards precisely that condition.

The image is almost cinematic: the town is uneasy, the sheriff is faltering, and those nearest the badge are not the upright custodians of order the public was promised, but figures with enough muscle or factional backing to inherit authority.

This is more than a serviceable metaphor. It is an alarm bell for a republic in which power too often passes not to the most credible figure, but to the one best able to outlast the disorder. Nowhere is that contradiction more glaring than in the ANC, still the central axis of South African political life.

The party’s long promised renewal project was supposed to answer this crisis. After years of state capture, scandal and institutional decay, renewal was sold as a moral reset: a pledge to restore integrity in public office and credibility in ANC leadership.

Yet renewal cannot live forever as a slogan hauled out at conferences and buried in practice. It matters only if it changes who gets trusted with power, who is removed from it, and who is allowed anywhere near the succession queue. If the governing party cannot persuade voters that its next crop of leaders is cleaner, steadier and more accountable than the last, then “renewal” is not reform. It is branding.

Any cloud over the presidency — justified or otherwise — darkens the wider political horizon. It raises a question more unsettling than the scandal itself: if the current sheriff falls, who rides in next?

In a healthy democracy, accountability at the summit reassures the public because there is a credible bench behind the leader. In South Africa, it often produces the opposite reaction: unease.

The line of succession itself can appear populated by figures expected somehow to become custodians of law, restraint and public virtue after prospering in a culture that rewarded the opposite

Political actors hesitate not only out of loyalty or factional instinct, but because the alternatives can appear no less compromised, no more capable, or simply more hazardous. The crisis is no longer only about whether one leader should leave; it’s about the alarming thinness of the field expected to replace them — and that dilemma is visible at every level of political life.

This is what makes integrity mechanisms so important, and so politically explosive. Rules such as the ANC’s step-aside principle were supposed to establish a simple ethic: those facing serious allegations should not occupy positions of public trust until their names are cleared. In principle, that is sound. In practice, however, integrity systems lose legitimacy when they seem selective, factional or negotiable.

The country’s altered electoral reality sharpens the problem. South Africa is no longer governed through the effortless single-party dominance that once insulated the ANC from internal contradictions. The governing order now rests on coalition bargaining, public scepticism and a thinner claim to popular consent than in previous eras.

In government and party politics alike, leadership is too often managed as a balancing act — among factions, provinces, patronage networks and reputational crises — rather than a serious effort to identify people of judgement, discipline and moral authority. That is how a governing party can speak endlessly of renewal while reproducing the very habits that made renewal necessary.

When a party cannot produce stable and credible local leadership, it’s a warning that the succession crisis is not temporary; it’s structural. The badge is there for the taking, but too many of those reaching for it arrive trailing allegations, factional debts, compromised loyalties or a record of administrative wreckage.

And so, the paradox deepens. South Africa’s leadership crisis is not simply that too many outlaws have worn the sheriff’s star. It is that the line of succession itself can appear populated by figures expected somehow to become custodians of law, restraint and public virtue after prospering in a culture that rewarded the opposite.

Politics, of course, allows for reinvention. Individuals can mature, repent, reform and govern better than expected. But a democracy cannot responsibly base its future on the hope of sudden moral conversion. Institutions are strongest when they are led by people whose reputations reduce uncertainty rather than multiply it.

That is the real succession conundrum facing South Africa. The question is no longer only whether current leaders have failed; much evidence suggests many have. It is whether our political parties — especially the ANC — can produce successors who restore trust rather than merely inherit office.

If South Africa is to break this cycle, succession must come to mean more than factional arithmetic and survivalist politics. It must mean credibility, constitutional seriousness and a visible break with the habits that brought the republic to this pass. Otherwise, we shall go on changing sheriffs while lawlessness continues to govern the town.

• Mathebula is founder of the Thinc Foundation and a research associate with the Tshwane University of Technology