South Africa Needs A Party Of The Basics
A party that truly focused on the basics would not need to promise paradise. It would promise something far more radical in modern South Africa. A country where honest people can work...
South Africa does not lack political parties – it lacks political seriousness.
As the 2026 local government elections approach, voters will once again be asked to choose between parties promising everything, understanding little, and delivering even less. Every party will claim to represent “the people”. Every manifesto will pretend to solve unemployment, crime, corruption, housing, electricity, water, inequality, potholes, education, healthcare, land, dignity, transformation, and whatever else sounds good on a poster.
This is not politics. It is wish-list writing.
The tragedy is that South Africa’s core problems are not mysterious. They do not require a new ideological vocabulary, a twenty-point framework, or another social compact. They require government to do the few things it is meant to do.
Let people work. Stop criminals.
Everything else depends on those two foundations.
This is why the Democratic Alliance (DA) remains such a frustrating political force. Like it or not, the DA is still the best shot South Africa has at replacing ANC misrule in enough municipalities to show that decline is not inevitable. It has the scale. It has the structures. It has the voters. It has the donor base, councillors, administrators, institutional memory, and entrenched support that most smaller parties can only pretend to possess.
This does not mean the DA is perfect; it means political reality matters.
Many opposition parties are personality cults, protest movements, ideological hobby clubs, or coalition bargaining chips pretending to be governments-in-waiting. The DA, for all its faults, is a serious electoral machine. It governs the Western Cape better than the ANC governs anywhere. It has shown that competent administration is possible in South Africa.
That is exactly why its failures are so maddening.
The DA should be entering these local elections with a simple message: where we govern, things work better. Give us more municipalities, and we will fix what the ANC broke.
Instead, it too often finds ways to complicate the obvious. It gets swallowed by internal drama. It scores own goals. It speaks like a policy conference when voters need plain English. It allows its opponents to drag it into arguments about personalities, race, factionalism, and whatever social media controversy happens to dominate the week.
This is political malpractice.
When people are sitting without water, dodging potholes, living behind burglar bars, and watching their towns collapse, they are not looking for cleverness. They are looking for competence.
The DA should understand this better than anyone. Its strongest argument has never been ideological poetry. It is that it can govern.
But perhaps South Africa needs the thought experiment of a new party to clarify what all the existing parties have forgotten.
If one were to build a party from scratch, it should not try to appeal to everyone. That is how parties become vague, cowardly, and useless. A political party must know its constituency, its principles, and its purpose. It must be honest about what it believes, whom it represents, and what it is trying to achieve.
A serious new party should be a two-issue party.
Jobs and safety.
That’s it.
On jobs, it should be unapologetically free market. South Africa does not need more state-led employment schemes, master plans, ministerial summits, empowerment rackets, or politically connected development funds. It needs to make it easier for ordinary people to work, hire, trade, build, transport, sell, and start businesses.
A job is not created because a politician announces a target. A job is created when someone believes it is worth risking money, time, energy, and reputation to employ another human being.
Government’s role should be to stop punishing that decision.
That means cutting red tape. It means exempting small and new businesses from destructive labour laws that make hiring too risky. It means ending municipal harassment of informal traders. It means speeding up permits, protecting property rights, reducing compliance costs, and allowing entrepreneurs to operate without being treated as enemies of society.
The spaza shop owner, mechanic, plumber, hairdresser, hawker, small manufacturer, delivery driver, construction subcontractor, and young freelancer do not need speeches about inclusion. They need government to get out of the way.
On crime, the party should be equally blunt. South Africans are tired of hearing theories about crime from people protected by bodyguards. Poverty may help explain the conditions in which crime grows. It does not excuse criminals. And it does not comfort the victim of a hijacking, robbery, rape, murder, assault, or home invasion.
A state that cannot protect peaceful people from violent criminals has failed at its most basic duty.
Solving crime does not require fashionable slogans. It requires common sense policing. More visible policing in high-crime areas. Better detectives. Functional forensic capacity. Proper case management. Serious investigations into syndicates. Cooperation between SAPS, municipal law enforcement, prosecutors, private security, neighbourhood watches, and communities. Consequences for corruption inside the police. Fast prosecution for violent crimes.
The point of policing is not public relations – it is to make crime risky again.
At present, South Africa too often does the opposite. The peaceful are regulated while the violent are tolerated. The trader is harassed over a permit while the extortionist shuts down a construction site. The homeowner pays rates, taxes, insurance, private security, and armed response while the burglar treats arrest as a temporary inconvenience.
This is backwards.
The state must stop being powerful against the peaceful and weak against the violent.
Jobs and safety are not separate issues. Businesses do not invest where trucks are burned, shops are looted, staff are robbed, and construction sites are invaded. Workers cannot take opportunities if trains are unsafe, roads are dangerous, and communities are controlled by gangs. Parents cannot build stable lives while their children must navigate violence on the way to school.
Crime is an economic tax. Unemployment is a social time bomb.
That is why “the basics” is not a small agenda. It is the foundation of every other agenda. You cannot fix housing, education, healthcare, infrastructure, or service delivery while the economy is strangled and communities are terrorised.
South Africa does not need more parties trying to sound profound. It needs parties willing to sound clear.
The DA remains the most viable vehicle for opposition success. Smaller parties should be honest about that. But the DA should also be honest with itself. Scale is not enough. Good governance is not enough if voters are forced to peer through layers of confusion, internal drama, and avoidable own-goals to see it.
The coming local elections should not be a competition to produce the thickest manifesto. They should be a test of seriousness.
Who will make it easier for South Africans to work? Who will make it harder for criminals to operate? Who will govern municipalities as service institutions rather than ideological playgrounds?
A party that truly focused on the basics would not need to promise paradise. It would promise something far more radical in modern South Africa. A country where honest people can work, and criminals are afraid.
Nicholas Woode-Smith is Managing Editor of the Rational Standard and a Senior Associate of the Free Market Foundation. He writes in his personal capacity.