OPINION| South Africa’s year of permanent negotiation 

By Desiree Erasmus 

If 2024 was the election that ended an era, 2025 was the year South Africans learned what comes next.

It was the theatre of consultation, featuring more haggling than a community Christmas market, and about the same respect for the customer.

Thus continued the second Government of National Unity, not so much conceived as constructed, and not so much constructed as painfully welded together after the ANC, in a rare fit of democratic honesty, discovered it could no longer govern alone. 

The new arrangement spent the year insisting, with the strained smile of a man selling one a second-hand car with no engine, that compromise is a form of statesmanship rather than a way of postponing the inevitable collision.

What citizens learned is that South Africa’s evergreen questions — redistribution, growth, the chronic incompetence of the state and the equally chronic competence of those who loot it