The party of Nelson Mandela is imploding

Londiwe MkhizeANCANCANCanc walks through her unfinished home in Cato Crest, a poor part of Durban, South Africa’s third-largest city. Concrete blocks lie wet from the rain that has fallen through roofless rooms. Completing the half-built house was the task of her husband, Siyabonga Mkhize. But he was shot dead in October 2021 when out campaigning to be a councillor for the African National Congress (), ’s ruling party. It was too late to take his name off the ballot, so he was posthumously elected. In March the by-election to find a living replacement was won by another candidate, Mzi Ngiba. Two months later Mr Ngiba was one of four people arrested for his predecessor’s murder. (All deny the charges.) “He was a kind person,” says Ms Mkhize of her husband. “But he was murdered for his choice of becoming an politician.”Stories like Mr Mkhize’s are surprisingly common. From 2000 to 2021 at least 418 political assassinations took place, most of them in the past seven years. These typically involve competition for positions within the . The murders are an extreme consequence of what it—and the country it governs—have become. The party that fought apartheid is now a patronage machine draped in revolutionary rhetoric. In a state where almost half of black South Africans are unemployed and where crime goes unpunished, it is grimly rational to kill to get a lucrative political job.