Starmer and Ramaphosa are becoming the problem they promised to fix

When is it time to go? There is a specific type of political limbo that afflicts leaders who have long spent their political capital but cannot bring themselves to leave. They remain, stubbornly, sapping institutional energy, emboldening opponents and foreclosing any chance at renewal.

Sir Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, and Cyril Ramaphosa have both arrived at this depressing predicament; one through diffidence, and the other through drift. The question is no longer whether either has the authority to govern effectively. It is whether they recognise that their own continued presence has itself become the problem.

In Britain, last week’s local and devolved elections delivered results that even sympathetic observers struggled to describe as anything other than a rout for Starmer’s Labour Party. Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s nationalist insurgency, displaced the Conservative Party as the dominant force on the right across large swathes of England. The Scottish National Party extended its grip on Holyrood. In Wales, nationalists Plaid Cymru overtook Labour for the first time since devolution. In three of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom, governing parties now harbour ambitions to tear the country apart. This is not an outlier or a once-off; it is structural disintegration.

Labour’s humiliation

The scale of Labour’s humiliation matters less than what it reveals. Two years after Starmer himself won a landslide, promising competence over chaos, his government has delivered neither political stability nor economic growth. Inflation has been tamed – for the moment – but productivity remains stubbornly low. The fiscal outlook is terrifying; the UK’s debt to GDP is now above 95% with the Office for Budget Responsibility projecting it could reach 275% by the 2070s on current trajectories.

Britain now spends twice as much on interest costs as it does on defence. Meanwhile, taxes on average workers rose faster last year than in any other country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Ambitious professionals are abandoning the country in droves.

The structural explanations are self-evident. Brexit was always going to be a catastrophe. The delusion that a medium sized, post-industrial economy could easily replace access to the world’s second-largest common market with bespoke trade deals was hallucinatory. Add to this a planning system that emboldens NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) to block housing, regulators who can delay critical infrastructure for years on grounds to save a few newts, a welfare state promising Scandinavian level social services on US level tax revenues, and the picture is of a country that consistently overpromises and under-delivers.

Yet structural constraints do not excuse a government that has failed to articulate, let alone execute, anything like a set of credible solutions. Starmer’s Labour is now caught between insurgencies from the right – Reform – and an emboldened left flank – the Greens, under new eco-populist leadership. His dithering on Gaza has reinvigorated them, while dividing Labour. Starmer has achieved the remarkable feat of running out of road without ever choosing a direction.

Ramaphosa is similar, but different

In SA, Ramaphosa faces a similar predicament. Elected in 2018 on a surge of cautious optimism – here, supposedly, was a capable administrator relatively untainted by the Jacob Zuma years of industrial level kleptocracy – he has governed with all the decisiveness of a man permanently awaiting a consensus.

It is true that the macro-fiscal outlook has improved and that the SA Reserve Bank retains its credibility. Yet unemployment has remained near a third of the workforce throughout his tenure, regardless of what some in business circles might say about the counting methodology. Economic growth has barely cleared 1% in most years he has been in power. Successive commissions of enquiry have confirmed that corruption and organised crime have become more, not less, entrenched. Load shedding has eased, but the critical structural reforms needed to attract investment have been painfully slow, despite the much vaunted Operation Vulindlela.

The ANC’s loss of parliamentary majority in last year’s election, and its subsequent dependence on a Government of National Unity, was supposed to concentrate minds in the ANC. Instead it has complicated and slowed up decision-making further, providing a blame-game excuse for inaction. The return of “Sofagate” is the last straw. Last week’s ruling by the Constitutional Court, and victory by arch-nemesis Julius Malema, is a reminder of how trust, once eroded, does not simply repair itself.

Everything must change for things to stay the same

The comparison between the two leaders is revealing not because their circumstances are similar, but because the ways in which they have failed resonate. Both came to power as antidotes to predecessors who had left their country worse off; Starmer after post-Brexit Tory chaos, Ramaphosa after Zuma’s State Capture. Both defined themselves largely by what their forerunners were not. Neither has found a compelling answer to the harder question of what they actually are. In both cases, the vacuum has simply been filled by those who offer simpler, angrier explanations for national disappointment and disillusionment.

The danger, as populist challengers gather momentum, is not merely electoral. Reform’s local council gains give Farage organisational infrastructure to make a coordinated run for power at the next general elections, against a political lame duck. In SA, however Sofagate now plays out, if Ramaphosa does not fall on his sword it will simply give more impetus to the EFF and MK, as well as the anti-Ramaphosa corrente of the ANC. To quote Il Gattopardo: everything must change for things to stay the same. The longer Starmer and Ramaphosa remain as symbols of stalled reform, the more oxygen they provide to forces that would do far greater damage.

There are occasions when quitting is cowardly. When David Cameron threw in the towel the morning after the Brexit referendum – cheerfully humming a tune – his swift departure left a political vacuum that took years to fill and scarred British governance in ways still felt today. Yet overstaying is not always more responsible than leaving. The argument for departure is not about personal failure alone; it is about the institutional cost of bloody-minded persistence without purpose.

Delaying the inevitable

There will be those who say this is madness, that at least Ramaphosa preserves some semblance of normality, and that quitting now would plunge the country into crisis. But this is delaying the inevitable. Both men should go. And not because politics is a meritocracy in which underperformance triggers automatic consequences; it clearly is not. But because the gap between what their countries need and what they are capable of providing has grown too wide to ignore.

The longer they remain, the more they risk confirming the populist diagnosis: that mainstream, centrist, rules-based politics is simply incapable of governing competently.

In Britain and SA alike, the cost of giving in to that lie would be very high indeed. DM