Make South Africa ungovernable

The call to Make South Africa ungovernable was a political slogan of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. It is closely associated with mass mobilisation against apartheid in the latter half of the 1980s. The slogan originated in a series of speeches by African National Congress (ANC) leader Oliver Tambo in 1984 and 1985, but it was adopted inside South Africa by the supporters of the United Democratic Front and associated civic organisations.

The slogan conveyed a rhetorical rejection of illegitimate state authority and a strategic endorsement of mass mobilisation, which the ANC viewed as a prelude to democratic revolution. Critics of the campaign claimed that it legitimised political violence and vigilantism and permanently undermined acceptance of state authority in South Africa.

The desideratum of making South Africa ungovernable originated with Oliver Tambo, the exiled leader of the African National Congress (ANC). On 8 January 1984, delivering his annual January Eighth Statement from Lusaka, Zambia, Tambo told the ANC's supporters:

We must begin to use our accumulated strength to destroy the organs of government of the apartheid regime. We have to undermine and weaken its control over us, exactly by frustrating its attempts to control us. We should direct our collective might to rendering the enemy's instruments of authority unworkable. To march forward must mean that we advance against the regime's organs of state-power, creating conditions in which the country becomes increasingly ungovernable [emphasis added].

This sentiment was subsequently refined into the dual imperatives of making (or rendering) South Africa ungovernable and making apartheid unworkable. Tambo repeated the call to "make South Africa ungovernable" in other broadcasts on Radio Freedom, including on 10 October 1984, 8 January 1985, and 22 July 1985. It also appeared on ANC propaganda materials distributed inside South Africa. According to Mark Gevisser, the formulation was coined by Thabo Mbeki, who was Tambo's political secretary and speechwriter.

In global terms, it was in South Africa that "ungovernability" reached the height of its popularity as a political conceit, but it had been used elsewhere before 1984, most notably in the Northern Irish Troubles. In 1971 Irish republican Ruairí Ó Brádaigh argued that Sinn Féin must make Northern Ireland ungovernable as a prelude to achieving a United Ireland.

Our own tasks are very clear. To bring about the kind of society that is visualised in the Freedom Charter, we have to break down and destroy the old order. We have to make apartheid unworkable and our country ungovernable. The accomplishment of these tasks will create the situation for us to overthrow the apartheid regime and for power to pass into the hands of the people as a whole.

Both in ANC materials and in practice, the ungovernability campaign was associated with a continued rejection of black local authorities and other instruments of the apartheid state's authority, including through boycotts of rents and other municipal charges, boycotts of Bantu Education institutions, and ongoing mass demonstrations. Many of these tactics were the established methods of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and local civic organisations, and they were at the centre of the Vaal uprising, which began in September 1984 and spread to townships across the country. Ungovernability also encompassed labour organisation under the trade unions, which R. W. Johnson said were "used as a battering ram in the struggle to 'make South Africa ungovernable'".