Unlike many other countries in Africa, SA has a home-made Constitution under the rule of law which was negotiated painstakingly by the politicians and the people active in politics in SA during the period between 2 February 1990, when FW made his speech ending apartheid, and the commencement date of the Constitution in its final form on 4 February 1997. Over 2 million of our citizens participated actively in the drafting of the Constitution.

The column penned by Jonny Steinberg published by News24 on 22 June 2026 is critical of the power of the Constitution in ways that suggest he is not seeing the wood for the trees.

The most fundamental difference between the old SA and the new is that the country abandoned the parliamentary sovereignty of the old order and replaced it with a supreme constitution under the rule of law. Supremacy of the Constitution and the rule of law are entrenched in section 1 of the Constitution itself. It will take a 75% majority in our multi-party parliament to reverse the continuance of our multi-party system of democratic government designed to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness. Any new laws and all conduct inconsistent with the Constitution are invalid and may be struck down by the Constitutional Court. The state is bound to honour the promises made in the Bill of Rights which is Chapter Two of the Constitution.

With the exception of the new MK party, all parties in parliament favour the Constitution’s abolition of parliamentary sovereignty. MK, presents as allergic to the supremacy of the Constitution and campaigns for a return to parliamentary sovereignty in which traditional leaders will have a separate house of parliament like the Senate of old.

The power of the Constitution is considerable, but it is not the problem that Steinberg seems to think it is. Even the most perfect of Constitutions is only as good as the people tasked with implementing it, be they politicians or public servants.

Herein lies the rub in SA. We were a dominant party state until the general elections of May 2024 when the ANC lost its thirty years of majority support. The ANC dropped to 40% of the votes cast (by 16% of the electorate that turned out to vote). The seventh parliament is different from the first six; parliament is no longer the rubber stamp of the executive branch of government; the GNU, as the governing coalition is called, has only one party in it, the ANC, that subscribes to the tenets of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). The strategy and tactics of the ANC remain the securing of hegemonic control of all levers of power in society, a deeply unconstitutional aim. The SA Communist Party, also pro-NDR, has left the tripartite alliance which held sway in national politics until May 2024.

The power of the Constitution is not the problem Steinberg seems to think it is. A different diagnosis of the ills of SA politics has been offered by Professor Bonang Mohale, Chancellor of the University of the Free State, and a “values sherpa” for the V20 hosted by SA last year as part of the G20 activities held in SA.

Mohale opines that:

“The great problem for South Africa is rampant greed,[It] is essentially a problem for the once glorious African National Congress that has morphed into an organised crime syndicate, primarily because for a solid 30 years of our democracy, they held the absolute majority power in everything that matters”.  

Any country in which an “organised crime syndicate” is dominant will obviously have a problem with good governance. Before President Mbeki was succeeded by President Zuma, his biographer, Mark Gevisser, wrote that Mbeki:

“…worried that Zuma and his backers had no respect for the rule of law, and would be unaccountable to the constitutional dispensation the ANC had put into place if they came to power… for Mbeki the possibility of a Zuma presidency was a scenario far worse than the dream deferred. It would be, in effect, a dream shattered, irrevocably, as SA turned into yet another post-colonial kleptocracy; another ‘footprint of despair’ in the path of destruction away from the promises of uhuru” . [The Dream Deferred, Mark Gevisser, page xli].

As it turned out the Zuma presidency amounted to a vigorous attempt to capture the state and to repurpose it to serve the private interests of Zuma and his cronies. Not that the Mbeki period was much better. It will be remembered for the irregular and crooked arms deals, HIV-AIDS denialism that cost over 300,000 lives and for the “quiet diplomacy” that enabled Robert Mugabe to steal an election in Zimbabwe thereby condemning our neighbouring country to failed statehood.

Even the best Constitution ever devised is only as good as those who administer it. Between the corruption to which Mohale alludes and the practice of cadre deployment in the public administration and state owned enterprises which the ANC led tripartite alliance put in place, it is no wonder that the lofty promises of the Constitution lie in the ruins of “tenderpreneurism” and misrule today.

It is only if the voters of SA recognise and act on the causes of their plight. They must return to the polls in droves to vote out those involved in corruption and cadre driven mismanagement, replacing them with politicians who take their oaths of office seriously. Then the Constitution will come into its own as the blueprint for that “ better life” it envisages. We all need to show “the resolve of South Africans, as individuals and as a nation, to live as equals, to live in peace and harmony, to be free from fear and want and to seek a better life.” (Section 198 of the Constitution). Voting for “an organised crime syndicate” is no way to achieve a better life for all.

Paul Hoffman SC is a director of Accountability Now.

23 June 2026.