A while back, someone asked me whether I think South Africa has become an essentially conservative force in African politics. It’s an interesting question. Conservatism, at its most literal, is value-neutral, since it just means keeping things the way they are. In a Western liberal democracy, that makes conservatism a good thing: the vanguard against radical change that would tear society apart. But in Africa – a continent that plays home to the likes of Robert Mugabe and King Mswati of Swaziland – strict adherence to the goal of “stability” can simply reinforce existing tyrannies.

NEPAD, despite its promises, is not a force for radical change. It’s not designed to change regimes or force bad governments to mend their ways. If anything, NEPAD’s mild reforms will protect the status quo. A couple of years back, the ANC hosted a conference of former liberation movements (including Zanu-PF), in which they discussed ways to prevent these groups from losing power through the ballot box. That seems to be the ANC’s position on Africa in a nutshell: democracy and elections are good, but liberation movements are the only groups that actually have a right to govern countries, so they damn well better find a way to win those elections.

Is the conservative role a positive one for us to play? Well…. sort of. Look, one-party governance really sucks, but it’s still a lot better than the post-civilisational anarchy you see in places like the DRC and Burundi. Even Zimbabwe is better off than those countries. The Foreign Ministry seems to think that a strong central government dominated by a single party is the best insurance against that sort of anarchy, and they may be right. Still, at some point they’re going to need to get over their fetish for former liberation movements. Liberation movements don’t necessarily make good governments – though for some reason, I imagine the ANC might not want to preach that message too loudly.