The Quiet Secession

South Africans are not waiting for the state to collapse. They are quietly building around it.

Photo by Bill Mead on Unsplash

Written By: Mukundi Budeli

There is a particular kind of political exit that does not show up in emigration statistics. It requires no passport or farewell. It happens quietly, one decision at a time, as households and businesses conclude that the state cannot be relied upon and make their own arrangements. South Africa is in the middle of this exit now, and it is accelerating.

The signs are visible in almost every suburb: solar panels on rooftops, inverters in garages, boreholes in gardens. Armed response vehicles on streets that are technically the responsibility of the South African Police Service. Children are registered at independent schools before they are born. Estate agents market properties on the strength of their water storage capacity and backup power. These are not luxury choices; they are rational responses to a state that has, by degrees, stopped delivering on its side of an implicit contract.

South Africa has the largest private security industry in the world. According to the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (PSIRA) there are 2,7 million registered private security personnel and 586,042 currently employed. With 185 196 South African Police Service officers, and 69 392 active members in the South African National Defence Force who are an average age of 39. There are more registered private security personnel in this country than there are members of the South African Police Service and the South African National Defence Force combined. That figure is not a point of pride. It is a measurement of the gap between what the state promises in the Constitution and what it delivers on the street.

In education, private school enrolments have doubled over the past decade. The Independent Examinations Board posted a 98.31 percent matric pass rate in 2025 against a public system that, despite absorbing the overwhelming majority of the education budget, continues to produce outcomes that prompt parents who can find any means to look elsewhere. Waiting lists at sought-after independent schools stretch years ahead. Some families register their children before birth. This is not snobbery; it is a verdict.

In energy, rooftop solar capacity installed privately has now overtaken the total capacity connected under the government’s own renewable energy procurement programme. Private producers added more than 4,000 megawatts of new capacity in the first half of 2025 alone. This happened not because of state planning but despite state obstruction: years of licensing requirements, grid connection delays, and regulatory inertia that the private sector eventually outpaced by sheer necessity.

The secession of the productive class is, on one level, a market success story. Private enterprise stepping in where the government has failed is precisely what a dynamic economy does. But there is a structural problem embedded in this success that has received almost no attention.

The households and businesses building this parallel economy are the same ones that fund the public system through taxes, rates, and levies. A household that generates its own power still pays municipal service charges. A family at an independent school still pays the taxes that fund public education. A business with private security still funds the SAPS through its tax bill. They are paying twice: once for public services they cannot use, and once for private alternatives they have been forced to build.

The more serious long-term question is what happens when the calculation shifts further. As private alternatives become cheaper and public services continue to deteriorate, the rational choice for more households will be to reduce their footprint in the formal tax system: to restructure, to emigrate, or simply to stop investing in an environment that extracts without reciprocating. The tax base does not collapse suddenly; it is eroded, one rational decision at a time.

What is striking about the parallel economy South Africans are building is that it is not ideological. The household installing solar is not making a political statement. The parent choosing independent schooling is not declaring war on public education. The business adding armed response to its security contract is not philosophising about the limits of the state. They are simply solving a problem in the most direct way available to them, which is what people in a functioning market always do.

The state should read this not as a threat but as a signal. When millions of people independently arrive at the same conclusion, that their water, their power, their children’s education, and their physical safety cannot be entrusted to public provision, that is not a communication failure or a perception problem. It is an accurate assessment of conditions on the ground. The appropriate response is not to regulate the parallel economy out of existence or to tax private alternatives into unaffordability. It is to ask, with genuine urgency, why the public system has failed to the point where this secession became rational, and what it would take to reverse it.

South Africa does not have a shortage of revenue; it has a shortage of delivery. The productive class is not asking for the state to do more. It is asking, through its behaviour, for the state to do what it already promised. Until that gap closes the quiet secession will continue, and with it, the slow narrowing of the base that makes any future closing of that gap possible at all.

Mukundi Budeli is a law graduate from the University of Witwatersrand and an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.