8 July 2026
South African community organiser, human-rights activist and anti-corruption campaigner Mokoena Letsie was brutally gunned down outside his home in the Ikageng settlement near Potchefstroom on 27 May. While those responsible for Letsie’s murder remain at large, there can be little doubt that this was a targeted political assassination by those fearful of his leadership and popularity as a militant defender of township residents and the working poor. Sixteen bullets fired at close range into Letsie’s chest and midriff ended his life, but the fight for the liberation of the working class to which he had dedicated his political activity continues.
This was not the first attempt on Letsie’s life. When IBT supporters met him last September, he showed us the bullet scars on his face and the walls of his corrugated-iron shack from an earlier attack. Outside his home, he introduced us to his community, proudly highlighting the electricity lines residents had installed themselves, and we discussed politics with a group of dedicated militants led by Letsie. While we did not agree on every point, it was clear that they understood well the need to organise the working poor separate from the ANC-led Government of National Unity and all those who would conciliate with it.
Killings linked to politics have become notorious during the decades of rule under the Tripartite Alliance. Conditions are worsening, and the governing black nationalists increasingly find themselves in conflict with poor and working-class communities over scarce resources. It is no surprise that violence is spreading to new areas as the ANC loses support within its traditional base among the black working poor. As the neo-apartheid order undergoes political decomposition, the contradictions of bourgeois-nationalist rule sharpen.
Following Letsie’s assassination, tensions and sporadic unrest escalated in Ikageng, with the community staging protests demanding improved service delivery, electrification and accountability. In retaliation, local government cut off electricity supply to the area. These are not simply local grievances confined to Ikageng or Potchefstroom. Similar struggles have erupted across South Africa, from Soweto to Soshanguve, KwaMashu to Crossroads.
Struggles for water have recently erupted in Ratanda, Heidelberg, where police have killed two and injured one person after at least six weeks of residents requesting that the ANC local government meet with their representatives to discuss water supplies being cut off. Instead, in an act of deliberate provocation, water cannons were used on 3 July to disperse the crowd.
The ANC once promised free water and electricity as part of its broader strategy to address the social and economic problems of apartheid, but in government, they have become the rent collectors for the same capitalist class. They are keenly aware of the potential for this crisis to spread and deepen. As long as the core causes remain unresolved, protests will continue.
The roots of South Africa’s electricity crisis stretch back decades. In a 1998 report, analysts within Eskom (Electricity Supply Commission) and the South African government had already warned that electricity reserves would run out by 2007 unless action was taken to prevent it. Delays in improving power supply and reliability, debates over restructuring and privatisation, along with chronic underinvestment and inaction by the ANC-led government, combined to create conditions for recurring shortages and instability.
At the same time, electricity distribution itself became increasingly fragile. Municipal systems serving millions of households and small businesses suffer from poor maintenance, technical failures and aging infrastructure. Even where national generation capacity exists, many communities, from black rural poor to major urban centers, continue to face unreliable power supply and rationing via load shedding.
Unsurprisingly, the burden of this crisis has fallen most heavily on poor and working-class communities. Temporary reductions in power cuts and load shedding have occurred, but breakdowns, ageing power stations and infrastructure failures continue to threaten any temporary improvements. For township residents, the struggle for electricity is not simply a technical question but a social one, rooted in the broader inequalities of post-apartheid South African capitalism.
More than three decades after the end of apartheid, extreme concentrations of wealth co-exist alongside mass unemployment, poverty and inadequate access to basic services. The promises that the post-apartheid system would end exploitation and oppression have remained unfulfilled for millions of working-class and poor South Africans, as nothing was done to uproot the social system on which this oppression was based (i.e., capitalism). In South Africa today, the richest 10 percent of the population receives 70 percent of the income. Racial disparities between blacks and whites have declined somewhat over the past two decades, but about half of that decline is accounted for by the rise of the top 10 percent of the black population. While a small stratum has been allowed to rise to the top, the mass of the population (disproportionately black and working-class) remains very poor, making South Africa “one of the most unequal countries in the world” according to the World Inequality Lab.
These conditions increasingly expose the limits of the ANC bourgeois-nationalist project. The ANC’s Alliance, which long presented itself as the political representative of the oppressed black majority, serves instead the interests of the black bourgeoisie that has been given a small share of the profits from the exploitation of the working class. The Alliance is increasingly torn by internal divisions and factional struggles as different political currents compete for influence within the state apparatus and access to resources, while declining support among sections of the working poor has weakened the authority that the organisation once possessed.
This process is not simply the result of corruption or failures of individual leaders, though there has been no shortage of either. From Nelson Mandela to Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa, successive ANC administrations have presided over a social order in which formal democracy was not accompanied by fundamental economic and social change. While apartheid formally ended, control of wealth and ownership of the commanding heights of the economy remained concentrated in the hands of the predominantly white capitalist ruling class.
As a result, the class contradictions of post-apartheid South Africa continue to sharpen. The struggle over service delivery, employment, housing and public resources cannot be divorced from broader class conflict. And the decades-long subordination of working-class interests to bourgeois nationalism has prevented the resolution of these contradictions.
The first step towards achieving genuine social liberation is the independent organisation of the working class—not merely separate from bourgeois nationalism, but in irreconcilable political opposition to it. The South African working class can avenge the criminal murder of Mokoena Letsie only by continuing and extending the work to which he dedicated his life: organising among black working-class and poor communities.
We call for building popular-based area committees in the traditions of the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s, through which local groups and communities can elect representatives and raise demands on issues ranging from electrification and housing to state violence and defence of immigrant workers. In conditions of intensified class struggle, such committees could begin developing into organs of working-class power, capable of cohering collective resistance against the capitalist ruling class and their bourgeois-nationalist frontmen in the ANC.
Alongside and within these committees, revolutionaries must fight to build a multi-ethnic revolutionary party capable of overthrowing South African capitalism and placing the country’s immense wealth in the hands of the working-class majority.
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