‘Promises and Peril’ : how corruption undermined the Liberation Project

DR Imraan Buccus has long been known as a political thinker with a deep interest in, and connection, to grassroots and working class struggles.

- ANNIE DORASAMY

DR IMRAAN Buccus launched his first book Promises and Peril: The South African Crisis on Friday. Buccus is an academic, political analyst, and public intellectual whose work focuses on participatory democracy, civil society, public participation, poverty, inequality, and the politics of liberation and social justice. I LEON LESTRADE Independent Newspapers

South Africa, Buccus argues, is living through a moment of profound reckoning. Yet for someone who has long been immersed in the country’s social movements and working-class struggles, this crisis is neither exceptional nor inexplicable.

It is part of a global and historical pattern where liberation movements that lose their moral compass, succumb to corruption, and ultimately betray the very people whose sacrifices enabled their rise.

This stark assessment lies at the heart of his new book, Promises and Peril: The South African Crisis, that was launched in Durban on Friday.

Buccus says the book was driven by an “urgent need to understand South Africa’s deepening crisis” within that wider arc. The timing, he insists, could not be more critical.

“The book argues that although the country faces corruption, violence, inequality, and political decay, there remains a powerful reservoir of democratic possibility rooted in grassroots organising and international solidarity.

“This moment, coming after the ANC’s electoral decline and amid rising fascism and mass disillusionment demands a sober but hopeful intervention that explains the crisis clearly while insisting that renewal is still possible if driven from below.”

At the centre of Buccus’ analysis is a single, uncompromising diagnosis: the corruption of the liberation project. While South Africa’s turmoil is influenced by many factors, from economic stagnation to high levels of violence, he argues that corruption has become the system's gravitational force.