Precarious Power is about how South African politics revolves around a powerful but contradictory main character, the African National Congress (ANC), in the time of Cyril Ramaphosa.

It delves into politics in a way that helps us to understand the unspoken texts, the often near-imperceptible rules. It leads us to see how ‘the system’ of ANC dominance flounders yet survives. This story of South African politics pieces together and reinterprets the trends we think we have seen and know – but we don’t always see them for what they are. My study connects the dots and draws the lines. It reveals the rules and laws of an ANC intermingled (if not fused) with South African politics. It is a bottom-up case study of how a mammoth but meandering former monolith created more layers of politics while the people forged alternative politics rather than trade their ANC for another party. It is a politics that rewrites the textbooks.

The process of writing this book was like a rollercoaster of political despair and hope, and the story remains incomplete. It started with a coincidental meeting at a Sophiatown jazz club when my publisher Veronica Klipp and I reflected on ANC politics. Jacob Zuma’s fall was gathering momentum, a mere few months after I had completed Dominance and Decline and five years after I had set out the fundamentals in The ANC and the Regeneration of Political Power. The story was continuing, the plot gaining character and the finale uncertain. I had to continue analysing the saga. The narrative of the immediate events kept on changing – dramatic scenes moved from the Nasrec cliff-hanger to the recall and continuous fall of Zuma; Ramaphoria as the new panacea; elections that were ambiguous at best; the disillusionment and reality checks that followed, aggravated by the complex Covid-19 moment while the curse of corruption throttled Ramaphosa’s ‘new’ ANC. But the otherworld of South African politics, of ANC and of popular creation, continued opening in the wings, and the ANC lived and lives to see another political day.

The more the narrative ran on, the more the trends cohered and painted a curious picture of ‘the system’ in which the ANC ruled.