South Africa keeps relitigating 1994 while the world builds the next industrial order without it, writes economic commentator Itumeleng Mahabane.

South Africa is a country where the past smothers contemporary agency and accountability like the thick tear gas of its once brutal riot police. Roelf Meyer’s appointment as ambassador to the US has sparked the familiar, trite debate over who compromised, who betrayed whom and who was on the right or wrong side of history 30 years ago. It coincides, not unrelatedly, with furious anger over a legislator’s five-year sentence for an undisputed crime, enacted by a democratic Parliament in which he sits. The two controversies rhyme: both are arguments about accountability that sidestep the harder question of what the country is actually accountable for.

South Africa keeps relitigating the 1990s as if the answer to its future lies buried in that debate. It is a country that fundamentally fails to recognise that the world has moved on and keeps moving on. This obsession with what the country was, rather than what it needs to become, is a symptom of a deeper failure: South Africa still has no coherent answer to the most basic national question; what does it want for itself and from the world? It is a country that has lost the drive and imagination to organise collective ambition, and, to a degree, the ambassador appointment is indicative. Nonetheless, the choice made and the challenge now are to turn it into something generative and strategic.

South Africa needs to transform a negotiated settlement into a coherent political economy project, with clarity and commitment about how the country produces and distributes value. Without resolving this, it cannot articulate a credible strategic proposition to the world, whether in industrial policy or in external relations. It is reduced to an impulsive child, once precocious, now merely deluded.

That is not an entity capable of engaging strategically with a cantankerous US administration whose political project goes to the heart of South Africa’s unresolved question: is a nation’s wealth the wealth of society, or the wealth of select individuals? South Africa’s calls for unity and shared prosperity remain rhetorical because the country’s crisis of praxis regarding the economy’s structure continues to fragment rather than bind the nation.

Meyer and the past are distractions. As the country obsesses over his role 30 years ago, it ignores the real tension, one that, if viewed from the future rather than the past, would be much easier to navigate. South Africa’s binding constraint is not who gets to shape its “distribution of historic wealth”. The real constraint is how best to leverage its latent power and rebuild an energy and industrial base that serves its strategic interests. Without a larger, cleaner, energy-driven production base, that fight can only be a zero-sum war over a shrinking pie.

THE REAL CONSTRAINT
Modern geopolitics is ultimately about who can convert energy into industrial capacity at scale. Control over oil, gas, transit routes, and, more recently, critical minerals and renewables, has shaped alliances, wars, and the politics of sanctions for more than a century. Just as fossil fuels shaped the geopolitical map over the past 200 years, the shift to renewables and electrification will reshape who holds structural power. The countries that shape the global economy are those that can access, control, and deploy energy at scale.

South Africa is not short of texts that answer the question of what it wants to be. The constitutional preamble and Bill of Rights, and later the National Development Plan, sketch a country that improves the quality of life for all, protects its environment for future generations, and builds a more equal, productive society. What we lack is the translation of that settlement into an energy-industrial doctrine that treats renewables and re-industrialisation as constitutional work and, in this strategic moment of contested energy transitions and the re-shoring of value chains, as the only serious way to realise that settlement as a country of shared development and prosperity.

South Africa has an extraordinary strategic capability on the new energy frontier, on a par with its historic mineral reserves. Together, these two could be genuine game-changers for the production of wealth and the distribution of income, and a genuine strategic proposition for developed powers. Looked at more closely, that latent power sits at the intersection of three things the country rarely considers together: a constitutional order that promises both socio‑economic rights and environmental protection, a National Development Plan that explicitly adopts a low‑carbon, inclusive growth model, and a real economy that is deindustrialising while sitting on world‑class renewable resources. South Africa’s problem is not only that it lacks a doctrine; it is that it fails to appreciate that this nexus forms the core of its doctrine.

The Meyer debate is interrogating the wrong variable. The real question is whether South Africa has an industrial doctrine fit for the next 30 years, and whether any ambassador, can translate that doctrine into diplomacy on energy, minerals, and industry. This is also Washington’s language. It cares far more about this than about the debate over white genocide, which is simply a tactical weaponisation within a broader strategic tussle.

The country treats the global energy transition as something that is unfair, a cruel denial of its opportunity to prosper from something that built the apartheid economy. It fails to understand that coal is anti-transformational and contrary to the country’s Constitutional obligations, offering a vanishingly narrow corridor into the value chains where mass employment can actually be rebuilt.

South Africa needs to stop treating the global energy transition as a threat to be managed. Rather, it must recognise it as the first moment in a generation when the economy’s structure is in motion, and what gets built and for whom is genuinely up for contest. South Africa has the renewable endowment to be a maker of that new order. The question is whether it has the political will to claim that position without others setting the conditions.

THE DOCTRINE SOUTH AFRICA NEEDS
South Africa behaves as if trade preferences and summit speeches are its main assets, when in fact a serious economic diplomacy doctrine should be organised around three interests: remaining a producer; securing access to markets, capital, and technology; and preserving enough policy autonomy to shape domestic agendas and outcomes. The levers of its international standing are not, in fact, its negotiated political settlement; they are energy and logistics, existing industrial capabilities, regional integration, and diplomatic coalitions. Those external interests do not float above domestic politics. A serious doctrine has to start at the intersection: using its renewable endowment and logistics to rebuild industrial capacity in a way that is consistent with its constitutional commitments and its own development plan. Only then do “markets, capital, and technology” become tools for a defined project rather than trophies of status diplomacy.

South Africa’s strategic doctrine should proceed in sequence: unlock cost-competitive, green (industrial) energy; rebuild and deepen industrial capabilities; then use that position to secure markets, capital, and technology to unlock the region’s green industrial capacity.

The chain is straightforward: energy and logistics reform enable industrial capability; industrial capability underpins external strategy; that strategy, if executed, secures markets, capital, and technology. Simple to state. Exceptionally difficult to execute, but the direction is indisputable; it is a matter of will.

THE CONTINENT FIRST, AND THE SOUTHERN ATLANTIC
Any serious industrial doctrine for South Africa must begin on the continent. While protecting and expanding key markets in developed countries is critical, the structural choice is stark: either Africa becomes the main market and production base for South African industry, or the country becomes a peripheral supplier to international trade blocs.

South Africa’s relatively sophisticated manufacturing and financial sectors, together with its infrastructure links to the Southern African Development Community, underpin the persistent narrative of the country as a gateway for trade and investment into the continent. But this position is not guaranteed. It requires South Africa to act as a regional citizen, something its domestic politics have yet to accept. If it treats the region as a captive market rather than a shared industrial project, that advantage will erode. Regional partners will diversify their alliances, and South Africa will be permanently displaced within its own economic hinterland.

There is another region South Africa pays insufficient attention to: Latin America. Economies such as Brazil and Mexico face analogous dilemmas — commodity dependence, contested manufacturing bases, and the need to reposition within value chains dominated by Asia and regulated by the North. Brazil is already using renewables, biofuels, and industrial energy efficiency to reposition within global value chains. These are not solidarity projects. They are the other theatres where producer states are looking to turn energy and minerals into industrial scale and bargaining power.

Importantly, Latin America is home to a cluster of middle powers that control critical energy, food, and mineral endowments that are increasingly central to the global economy and, more specifically, to the security of the European Union. This gives these countries potential leverage over a significant economy that has sway over the direction and pace of the energy transition.

Southern Atlantic middle powers need to view themselves as in strategic, not antagonistic, competition with resource-rich Western middle powers such as Canada and Australia in the race to become central to the value chains of the emerging energy and industrial transition.

WHAT MEYER CAN ACTUALLY DO
Meyer’s appointment is less about an individual than a test of whether South Africa has an industrial doctrine — and whether its diplomats are capable of executing it. He may neuter much of the noise around white genocide, but without a clear doctrine, he will quickly run aground. His usefulness in Washington must be understood through three concrete functions.

The defensive function: developing and articulating a narrative in which South Africa is a critical partner in helping the US access critical minerals, while positioning Southern Africa as a key hub for green manufacturing. The offensive function: creating or preserving concrete opportunities for South African production in automotive, machinery, mining inputs, and services. The relational function: connecting South Africa’s industrial story to US firms, states, financial institutions, and policy networks that outlast any one administration, so that the country remains on the radar for decisions on supply chains, standards, and investment long after today’s political noise has faded.

Meyer’s task is to align South African interests with American anxieties: to present a realistic picture of the country as a stable supplier of industrial inputs, a platform for African and South Atlantic markets, and a partner in specific projects where US firms benefit from its energy and manufacturing reforms. Done well, this can help Southern Africa become part of a broader European Union strategy for manufacturing diversification and de-risking.

South Africa’s core problem and constraint is that it continues to organise its external engagements around symbols and settled grievances rather than the hard geopolitics of energy, production, and market access. Until that changes, it will send ambassadors into a transactional world with little to trade.

The coal-gold industrial complex shaped old South Africa. Now the green industrial project must build a regenerative and just South Africa.

*Itumeleng Mahabane is a communications consultant and a storyteller working across essay, fiction and screen.