On the 15th of July, the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee released its National Security Strategy (2024–2028) – a 35-page bureaucratic epic intended to chart South Africa’s path through an increasingly unstable world. True to South African policy form, it is an ambitious document. It’s also, in equal measure, vague, anxious, self-congratulatory, and confused.
Seeing as I was up in anycase, I read it over my morning cup of coffee so you don’t have to. And I came away wondering, is South Africa planning for national security or attempting to conduct a marathon group-therapy session about the ANC’s, uhm, legacy?
Seeing as scepticism gets us nowhere, I attempted a first reading in good faith: The document does recognise that South Africa faces serious and overlapping threats, domestic unrest, cybercrime, transnational networks, youth unemployment, energy insecurity, decaying infrastructure, and a global climate crisis. It accepts, at least in theory, that no one department or agency can handle these alone. That’s all well and good.
For all its talk of systems thinking and integrated responses, the real thrust of the strategy, however, lies elsewhere. What it seems to in actual fact achieve, between the jargon and the platitudes, is an attempt at reasserting the state’s moral authority. And it’s bizarrely trying to do that by cobbling together a new kind of patriotism in a policy document, one that merges development goals with security concerns, cultural pride with surveillance, and political nostalgia with policy vagueness.
To be fair this is an old Marxist trick, and one that the ANC has been advocating since at least the late 1980’s when Joe Slovo wrote his pamphlet introducing the National Democratic Revolution. A reading of Slovo’s ideas, especially those parts pertaining to culture, will most definitely serve the reader of the National Security Strategy with some important ideological context.
Whose Culture, Whose History?
One of the strategy’s central obsessions is “national identity.” The word appears nearly a dozen times, along with its cousins—“social cohesion,” “national pride,” “historical truth,” “cultural sovereignty.” The authors are at pains to remind us that a shared identity is the glue that holds a secure state together.
While we are increasingly a country of shared interests and experiences, in a country like South Africa, naturally and synthetically fragmented by colonial aggression and a plurality of cultures, the appeal to a singular cultural identity is doomed to fail, so too the forced creation thereof. What does it mean, for instance, to “protect our historical truth”? Which version? The TRC’s? The EFF’s? The Springbok Museum’s? And who decides what gets institutional backing under the banner of “national heritage”, the National Archives, Freedom Front Plus’ annual newsletter or Luthuli House? Will the same people be drafting this historical truth that drafted the invites to the so called National Dialogue (which is neither national nor a dialogue)?
I am not trying to be nihilistic or relativistic, but the document’s concern with “destructive information,” “foreign ideologies,” and the “commercialisation of religion” reads more like the nervous preoccupations of a ruling party out of intellectual steam than a genuine commitment to a liberal constitutional order. We should be careful with phrases like “ideological infiltration.” They’re the bread and butter of censorious states, not free ones. They also have no space in an era of free and universal information, meaning that they sound as if they come out of a Leningrad handbook that someone dusted off and read as if it can still be applied – a Green Book now gone pale on the outside and stale on the inside.
The Security State That Isn’t, But Is
To its credit, the strategy insists that this is not a blueprint for a security state. But then it proceeds to advocate for compulsory military training for youth, local security councils chaired by mayors, and the integration of defence policy into economic development planning. The contradiction is almost charming in its brazenness.
We don’t, in my estimation, have to be alarmed – the ANC, and by extension the GNU, is nowhere near competent enough to orchestrate a serious militarisation of South African society. It struggles to synchronise school feeding schemes. But that doesn’t mean bad ideas can’t become harmful policy. The blurring of civilian and security functions especially when framed as “patriotic duty” sets a tone that could easily be exploited by more authoritarian actors in the future.
Besides, the language matters. When economic problems are described in the same breath as threats to national sovereignty, it opens the door to securitising dissent, protest, or even policy disagreement.
Unity as a Mirage
Another favourite refrain in the document is the idea that all our problems—crime, unemployment, xenophobia, even climate change—can be mitigated through “national unity.” I wish it were so. But the truth is less poetic. South Africa doesn’t lack unity slogans. It lacks institutional trust but more importantly it lacks the basic act of getting things done.
When public health systems collapse, people don’t turn to “national values”, they look for clinics that work. When a young graduate can’t find work for five years, she doesn’t need an inspiring speech about social cohesion. She needs the SETA bursary she was promised, the job training she never received, and the water that stopped running last Tuesday. I believe that for a country to be peaceful, it must prosper. Unity, as the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville indicated, becomes very attractive when your neighbour is a potential client. Where stomachs are empty, unity will always be temporary. Unity has a place, but it is not a policy. It’s an outcome that is earned and not proclaimed.
A State as Both Victim and Saviour
One of the more interesting contradictions in the strategy is how it positions the South African state. On the one hand, it’s besieged by foreign misinformation campaigns, economic coercion, hybrid threats, and the slow violence of global finance. On the other hand, it is portrayed as the primary instrument of salvation capable of guiding its flock through geopolitical storms, internal disorder, and generational poverty.
What’s missing is any serious reckoning with the state’s own failures. Corruption is mentioned, but not explored. Cadre deployment doesn’t make an appearance. And despite repeated emphasis on youth unemployment and skills development, there’s no honest diagnosis of why so many public training bodies are dysfunctional, captured, or inert. You’d never guess, reading this document, that many South Africans experience the state not as a protector, but as a barrier.
Revalorising vocational education, as the document suggests, sounds nice. But until there’s credible reform in higher education and skills pipelines, it’s a wordy balm without many active ingredients flowing over a festering wound. And when it comes to the global economic system, the document lashes out at “untransformed financial institutions” but says little about how we’ll clean up our own house. It criticises the international order while failing to explain how South Africa, under its current leadership, can meaningfully shape it.
And now?
This strategy is not dangerous in the way Soviet doctrine was dangerous, nor is it novel in the way Chinese technocracy is novel. What it is, rather, is telling. It reveals a government that is increasingly insecure about its own legitimacy, uneasy about pluralism, and keen to recast itself as the indispensable guardian of national order even if that means conflating a litany of things. The outdated nature of its presumed solutions alludes to something that I wrote about a while back: In the absence of new and fresh ideas, the natural tendency of a body or party would be to grab back to what is known – the devil that you know. In the case of the ANC there is a refusal to recognise that the beloved NDR has failed drastically, meaning that there must necessarily be an enmity towards ideological renewal. The only consequence is grabbing back to the poisoned well that is socialist and centrist ideology. The old adage says that to a hammer, all problems look like nails.
We need a national security policy, yes, but not this one. We need a strategy that understands South Africa not through the lens of what some ideology wants it to be, but through clear lenses, that respects our differences, owns our failures, and doesn’t reach for easy slogans in the face of hard truths. Because if everything becomes a matter of security, soon enough, nothing will be secure.
