There is an argument, repeated with the ease of a political cliché, that the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) has outlived its usefulness. That it belongs to an era of Cold War frameworks and liberation movement nostalgia; that it is a relic dragging the ANC into theoretical cul-de-sacs; that South Africa’s complex present requires something fresher, more technocratic, more modern. These criticisms are not new. But they have recently resurfaced with renewed confidence, travelling through media commentary and policy debates with an air of common sense.
Yet this supposed “common sense” dissolves the moment one actually confronts the realities described in the NGC Base Document, which opens by observing that South Africa stands amid “a volatile, uncertain and insecure global situation” and faces a “confluence of forces that seek to derail the National Democratic Revolution and inflict lasting and irreparable damage on the ANC and the progressive movement”. What the critics call outdated theory is, in truth, the only framework capable of coherently making sense of these crises and mapping a path through them.
The NDR’s foundational proposition, that South Africa’s racial, class, gender and spatial inequalities stem from a system of colonialism of a special type, has not lost relevance. It has intensified. Even the base document’s most sobering passages show how inequality has deepened to global record levels, unemployment has entrenched generational despair and social fragmentation has sharpened across every sector. It is not the NDR that has failed; it is the incomplete implementation of its programme of social transformation.
Those announcing the NDR’s irrelevance forget that its purpose was never to be a museum artefact but an evolving theory of change. As the base document notes, “a conjunctural rethinking” of the NDR is required precisely because South Africa’s terrain of struggle has shifted, not because the NDR has expired. The vision of steadily transforming South Africa into a united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and shared society remains not only relevant but urgent (base document, page 3). What has changed is the complexity of the social forces at play, the sophistication of counterrevolutionary tendencies and the scale of global pressures acting on a young democracy.
No other political formation in South Africa offers a coherent programme of national transformation.
The idea that the NDR is outdated rests on a fundamental misreading: that history moves linearly and that societies graduate out of inequality by the mere passage of time. But South Africa’s crisis is not temporal; it is structural. The untransformed architecture of our economy, the persistence of racialised poverty, the moral and material devastation wrought by unemployment and the gendered burdens borne by working-class women are not peripheral concerns – they are the very contradictions the NDR was designed to resolve. If anything, the base document shows that these contradictions have sharpened so severely that abandoning the NDR now would be an evasion of responsibility.
What is outdated is not the NDR but the political imagination of those who think South Africa can reorganise itself around market forces and institutional tidiness without confronting deep power structures. It is this fantasy (not the NDR) that the base document exposes. The text states plainly that declining confidence in the ANC and the state is directly related to the unfinished business of the NDR and the weakening of its ideological coherence (base document, page 4). This is not an admission of theoretical failure but a call for political seriousness: a reminder that transformative projects collapse not because they are wrong, but because they are not carried through to their logical end.
The truth: uncomfortable to critics but self-evident to anyone grounded in the lived realities of the majority, is that no other political formation in South Africa offers a coherent programme of national transformation. This is not arrogance; it is fact. Every party, without exception, gravitated towards the ANC during the formation of the Government of National Unity. Not because of our electoral numbers or sentimental appeal, but because only the ANC possesses a philosophy, history and programme broad enough to unite disparate social forces under a shared national agenda. The base document is explicit: the NDR is the only programme with the capacity to forge a “thriving nation united in diversity” and to mobilise society towards shared prosperity (page 2). Others have retreated into narrow identities, ideological silos or sectoral interests. Only the ANC continues to articulate a vision for all South Africans.
The critics who announce the NDR’s demise rarely propose alternatives. They offer managerialism, not transformation; administrative correction, not social justice; institutional efficiency, not structural change. But a society as unequal as ours cannot be stabilised by managerial fixes. It requires a revolution in values, institutions and power relations – the very essence of the NDR. The base document echoes this when it warns that no sustainable transformation is possible “without a revolution in values and ideas” and without rebuilding the ANC’s ideological centre as the moral force for progressive change (page 15).
The ANC must reaffirm that the NDR is not simply relevant, it is indispensable.
The challenge, however, is not to defend the NDR as dogma but to revitalise it as living practice. The base document itself performs this work. It modernises the NDR by placing new issues such as demographic change, digital inequality, spatial restructuring, the gig economy, migration and climate transitions at the heart of our revolutionary tasks. It diagnoses weaknesses not to dismiss the NDR but to sharpen it. It warns, for example, that the collapse of local government, the fragility of the state and the fragmentation of the working class are not evidence of the NDR’s irrelevance but of the urgency with which it must be pursued.
This is why the timing of the NGC matters. The NGC is not a ritual gathering; it is a corrective mechanism. It is here, in this moment of political turbulence and national uncertainty, that the ANC must reaffirm that the NDR is not simply relevant, it is indispensable. The base document provides a contemporary reading of the balance of forces, identifying the opportunities and threats that shape our current struggle. It insists that renewal without ideological clarity will fail, and that organisational discipline without a theory of change will collapse under pressure.
The question, then, is not whether the NDR is outdated. It is whether we, as a movement and as a society, are prepared to pursue it with the seriousness it demands. It is whether the ANC is prepared to lead with the courage that history requires, grounding renewal not in slogans but in action; not in nostalgia but in a deep recommitment to the Freedom Charter’s unfinished tasks. And it is whether South Africans will recognise that in a fragmented political landscape where parties splinter, retreat into identity or shrink into narrow interest groups, only the NDR offers a path towards rebuilding a shared national project.
South Africa stands at a point of rupture. We face economic stagnation, social disintegration, gendered violence, untransformed ownership structures, a hollowed-out state and the rise of anti-democratic forces feeding on disillusionment. These are not signs that the NDR has failed; they are signs that it has not yet been fulfilled.
The base document calls us to renew the NDR not as a romantic memory but as the only roadmap capable of unifying the nation, transforming its material foundations and restoring hope. The task ahead is steep, but it is unavoidable. Our responsibility now is to sharpen this revolutionary project, mobilise society behind its ideals and drive forward with the conviction that South Africa’s democratic promise can still be realised – but only if we pursue the NDR with discipline, imagination and unwavering resolve. DM
Buti Manamela is Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Training, and an ANC National Executive Committee and SACP Central Committee member.