Despite its enormous internal dilemmas, regional hegemony allows South Africa to comfortably preserve its status as Africa’s industrial, technological, and financial epicenter — the unavoidable destination for those seeking Western standards of living without leaving African soil.
This exceptionalism, however, reveals a problem: the country’s difficulty in asserting itself as a replicable model of success. This is not about Pretoria aspiring to become an imperial power, nor about viewing the rest of the continent as its backyard. Rather, it is about projecting its soft power as a nation that works.
In a certain sense, South Africa is already that model. This is how millions of migrants who live there perceive it: as a reference they would like to see reproduced in their countries of origin. What is lacking, however, is the capacity — and above all the political will — to exercise influence in an institutional manner.
It is undeniable that, as the most audible African voice abroad, South Africa has promoted the continental agenda in global forums, in addition to consolidating itself as a gateway for foreign investment and the main interlocutor between Africa and emerging powers. Nevertheless, this international prominence does not compensate for its systematic omission in the continent’s internal crises.
South Africa can — and should — be more than the African spokesperson on foreign stages or a critic of global injustices while remaining silent in the face of neighboring crises. As a nation that deeply understands oppression, it would be the most reliable ally the continent’s afflicted peoples could count on to denounce tyranny and misery.
Pretoria should use the reach of its spotlight to condemn human rights violations, demand transparent elections, and exert the necessary diplomatic pressure on regimes that suffocate their own populations.
Just over a year ago, Mozambique plunged into a bloody post-electoral crisis that left a trail of hundreds dead and thousands of political prisoners. The scenario was repeated in Tanzania after the ballot of October 29 last year, where estimates from several institutions point to a tragic toll between 1,000 and 2,000 fatalities. Still in 2025, in July, it was Angola’s turn, where dozens of civilians were brutally executed by security forces during protests against the rise in public transport prices. More recently, we have witnessed the suffocation of the opposition in Uganda — a country ravaged by misery and hostage to an autocrat who, for four decades, has insisted on ignoring the aspirations of millions of Ugandans, presenting himself as the sole interpreter of the national destiny.
South Africa’s silence in the face of these and other cases weakens its political and moral weight and opens space for international organizations and external powers to fill the vacuum — some of them with agendas of a clearly neocolonial nature.
Perhaps it is necessary to remember that South Africa, besides being the best example of the rule of law on the continent, is one of the very few African states whose electoral processes do not require Western validation for its own political actors to consider them free, fair, and transparent.
In much of the African states, the official proclamation of electoral results rarely closes the political process. The winner — often the ruling party since independence — waits for validation from Washington and Brussels to feel fully legitimized. The defeated, in turn, waits for critical statements from the United States and the European Union to reinforce their accusations of fraud.
By affirming the self-sufficiency of its democracy, even in the most intense moments of its internal competition, South Africa positions itself as a beacon of freedom on the continent — a role comparable to that played by Western Europe within the European space.
Perhaps the South African elite believes that to lead by example it must first resolve its internal fractures. Perhaps South Africa simply wants to be a “normal” country, without moral pretensions toward its neighbors. The problem is that a relatively prosperous island surrounded by a sea of extreme suffering cannot afford not to lead.
With all its political and moral weight, being “normal” is a right South Africa cannot exercise, at least as long as regional inequality persists. South Africa needs to show the way, or at least explain to others its formula for success.
Assuming itself as a model, however, requires more than a consolidated democracy. It imposes strategic, technological, and political challenges.
On the strategic level, the country urgently needs to rethink its defense industry, weakened by years of mismanagement and systemic corruption — a scenario that not only caused a brain drain of elite engineers to global arms manufacturers, but also forced the migration of the sector’s protagonism from the state sphere to the private one. Today, much of South Africa’s productive capacity and intellectual property operates under the control or financing of foreign entities, subjecting national strategic autonomy to the logic of external capital.
In the short term, this weakening of the state in the defense industry may not represent a problem for the country’s autonomy. In the long term, however, there are no guarantees, especially because capital has no homeland nor loyalty to governments or national security. The hands that control capital do what the hands that control capital have always done: swear loyalty only to those who promote profit maximization, tax reduction, and the decrease of state bureaucracy.
Another fundamental challenge concerns the country’s technological base. One of the great disappointments for those who visit South Africa is not finding, on its roads, car brands of purely national production — conceived and genuinely developed by the country’s brilliant minds. There are global manufacturers producing locally, but large-scale indigenous brands are lacking.
There is in the country a niche engineering sector — racing cars, military vehicles, and replicas for collectors — which, however, needs to be re-signified and leveraged to respond to the mobility needs of broader segments of the population who cannot pay for luxury and extravagance.
Rethinking South Africa’s automotive heritage implies supporting, financing, and protecting low-volume companies such as Harper Sports Cars, Bailey Cars, Hi-Tech Automotive, Birkin, among others, with the aim of strengthening local capabilities and making the country a competitive actor in the global automotive industry.
The same applies to the rest of the technological sector. Despite being the most sophisticated on the continent — particularly in the areas of fintech and digital infrastructure — urgent challenges remain, especially in the production of advanced hardware and software. This does not invalidate the merit of certain efforts, such as the teaching of robotics and programming in public schools or the creation of the South African Institute of Artificial Intelligence. Even so, it is possible to do more and in a more consistent way so that the country can establish itself as a true regional center of innovation.
And now that technology is increasingly an instrument of national power, aimed at strengthening sovereignty, security, and competitiveness, promoting the country’s technological base is not fundamentally a challenge for the business community or the economic elite. In a world where the strength of countries no longer resides exclusively in traditional premises — territory, military power, and natural resources — but extensively in their dominance in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, 5G technology, biotechnology, cybersecurity, data, and quantum computing, techno-nationalism becomes a strategic imperative that must be led by the government and must involve all citizens.
‘‘And how can this be done?’’
It suffices to recall how China and Pakistan developed their first nuclear programs. In the name of the homeland, these states mobilized their best minds scattered around the world, making a patriotic appeal to their diasporas — an appeal that, in geopolitical contexts dominated by uncertainty, is almost irresistible.
Thus, in addition to internal competencies, the academic and professional diaspora constitutes a precious asset that South Africa can, should, and needs to mobilize. The remaining deficit will have to be filled by sending the best students to the world’s leading universities, as well as by attracting foreign professionals.
The persistent gap that cannot be filled through international partnerships should be covered through reverse engineering and industrial espionage. There is no other accessible path for acquiring critical technology that the country still does not master. Direct purchase, when possible, is done at premium prices — which, due to budgetary limitations, is not always feasible.
That said, the political challenge emerges — perhaps the most decisive. Understanding the relationship between dominant parties in Africa is central to deciphering not only the hesitation of South African diplomacy but the political dynamics of the entire continent. The so-called “solidarity among liberation movements” transcends symbolism; it is the pillar of a diplomacy of complacency, where regional governments operate a pact of mutual protection.
This informal network of protection among elites that prioritizes historical loyalties over contemporary democratic demands, contrary to the spirit of pan-African cohesion, explains episodes such as that of March 13, 2025, when the Angolan government prevented figures such as Venâncio Mondlane and Bobi Wine, opposition leaders from Mozambique and Uganda respectively, as well as senators linked to the opposition in Tanzania and Kenya and the former president of Botswana, Ian Khama, from entering the country to participate in a conference organized by Angola’s main opposition party, UNITA.
This type of personal, historical, and ideological relationship that functions as a political “cartel” aimed at suffocating opposition throughout the region also explains the resistance of certain countries to re-establish ties with the current governments of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. In other words, the distancing of nations such as South Africa itself, Namibia, and Cape Verde from the Sahel is not a sincere pressure for constitutional normality or a fear of coup precedents. Although these countries claim to defend the well-being of the “African man,” for parties such as the ANC, SWAPO, and PAICV, loyalty to historical elites overrides any transformative pan-African solidarity.
However, this complicity among elites, which validates highly contested elections, is paradoxically fueling the instability it seeks to avoid, as the historical legitimacy of liberation movements becomes increasingly pressured by generational change demanding democratic legitimacy.
Although Pretoria is reluctant to acknowledge it, the wave of military coups that has swept across Africa over the past five years makes it clear that protecting insane regimes delays reforms and makes future crises even more explosive.
For the elites of Windhoek or Praia, complacency toward authoritarian regimes, at the expense of popular will, may still seem sustainable. But for Pretoria, the cost is direct: it is its own elite that must explain to the electorate that its soft diplomacy ultimately fuels the disorderly migratory flows that pressure public services and the national labor market.
At this inflection point, South Africa’s old guard faces a great dilemma: maintain condescension and continue paying the price at the borders, or revisit the principles of pan-Africanism and recognize that no party alliance should override the commitment to African peoples. And while these reforms do not occur, the continent’s citizens — especially the young — will continue to expect more from Washington or the former metropolises than from Pretoria, rightly questioning the relevance of the continent’s greatest power.
Manuel Marques Carlos
References
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Heywood, M. (2020, October 30). Resisting State Capture: ‘We were cheeky,’ says former Denel subsidiary legal head. Daily Maverick. www.dailymaverick.co.za
Parliamentary Monitoring Group. (2020, October 20). Denel: 2019/20 Annual Report; Progress on Turnaround Plan & Impact of Covid-19. PMG. pmg.org.za
State Security Agency (SSA). (n.d.). About the State Security Agency. Republic of South Africa. www.ssa.gov.za
