Revolution: Chapter One

 

(Image: Ideogram)

Chapter 1 – The Gathering Storm

By the middle of 2026, South Africa had reached the edge of systemic failure. The optimism that had once accompanied the democratic transition had long since evaporated; the state had become a weary machine running on inertia, its parts grinding against one another without direction. The July 2021 unrest—remembered for the burning of malls, the looting of distribution warehouses, and the paralysis of the security forces—was widely recognised, in retrospect, as the first visible crack in the post-apartheid order. At the time it was treated as an aberration, a tragic spasm of poverty and politics; five years later it was understood as a warning that had gone unheeded.

The years that followed brought no recovery. Economic stagnation hardened into decline. By 2026, unemployment officially exceeded forty percent, with youth unemployment nearer to seventy. Factories that had once exported manufactured goods to the region stood silent. Mining companies had disinvested after years of policy uncertainty, load-shedding and labour militancy. The agricultural sector, starved of rural infrastructure and tormented by farm attacks, produced barely enough for domestic consumption. Every closed workshop or abandoned mine meant more job losses, more anger, more disillusionment.

The once-vibrant townships and small towns of the industrial heartland sank into despair. In Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, informal settlements multiplied on every patch of open ground. Basic services faltered; water systems collapsed; refuse lay uncollected. The state’s ability to enforce the law had eroded to the point where criminal syndicates operated openly, collecting protection fees, running illegal electricity connections, and controlling minibus routes. For millions of citizens, government existed only as an occasional announcement on television.

Business leaders, academics, and community organisers alike spoke privately of a country sliding toward chaos. The ANC government had become a monument to patronage. Cabinet posts were expanded to absorb factional demands, state-owned enterprises served as instruments of enrichment, and procurement contracts were traded like political currency. Affirmative-action and empowerment policies—originally conceived as instruments of justice—had degenerated into bureaucratic barriers that rewarded connections rather than competence. The result was not transformation but paralysis.

By 2025, rolling blackouts had entered their fifteenth year; municipalities owed Eskom hundreds of billions; railways were stripped of cables and stations; ports clogged with unshipped goods. Disinvestment became a torrent: manufacturing output fell to its lowest level in a century, and each factory closure produced another wave of the unemployed. A growing black middle class, frustrated by collapsing services and shrinking opportunity, began to turn openly against the government. In university common rooms and boardrooms alike, talk shifted from reform to survival.

It was in this atmosphere that a group of concerned citizens began meeting informally under the auspices of a civic foundation. What started as discussion groups soon evolved into something more deliberate. Participants included senior academics, business executives, civil-rights advocates, and retired officers of the police and military. Among them was Dr Harvey Jacobs, a respected political scientist and social commentator whose essays had long argued that South Africa was approaching a crisis of legitimacy. Jacobs was widely regarded as incorruptible, intellectually formidable, and—rare among public figures—both coloured and universally trusted.

Jacobs warned that the social fabric was unravelling faster than the government could respond. The unrest of 2021, he said, would look like a rehearsal for the conflagration to come if unemployment and hunger continued to rise. In his view, the country faced a binary choice: either the existing political order would collapse into violence, or a new leadership would have to emerge to impose order and initiate structural reform. His audience, initially sceptical, began to concede that conventional politics offered no path forward.

Over the next several months, discreet meetings multiplied. Representatives from Afriforum, business chambers, religious councils, and university faculties joined in. They called themselves, with cautious irony, the National Renewal Forum. Their discussions centred not on ideology but on survival: how to prevent South Africa from descending into a failed state. Members mapped the country’s power structure, identifying within the SANDF and police those officers who were professional rather than partisan, and who might act to protect the public if the civilian administration imploded.

Outside the Forum’s quiet deliberations, the national mood darkened. Protests over service delivery turned violent; municipal offices burned. The government, paralysed by factional rivalry, attempted to deflect blame onto “foreign agitators” and “racist elements.” Inflation eroded wages; the rand slid below twenty-five to the dollar. International lenders demanded austerity; the government responded with slogans. When, in August 2026, the Electoral Commission announced that municipal elections would likely be postponed for “logistical reasons,” the reaction was explosive. Opposition parties cried foul; the press warned of constitutional crisis. The Forum saw confirmation that the government was clinging to power by decree.

For many of its members the idea of intervention—once unthinkable—began to seem unavoidable. They reasoned that the constitution’s mechanisms had been captured, that the courts were intimidated, and that the police no longer served the people. If South Africa were to survive, the corrupt edifice would have to be dismantled from outside the political system itself.

Jacobs, though cautious, concluded that moral responsibility demanded action. He believed that a temporary assumption of authority, carried out with restraint and directed toward restoration rather than domination, could avert civil war. “If we fail to act,” he told his colleagues, “the streets will act for us—and they will not act rationally.”

Thus, as winter turned to spring in 2026, the first outlines of what would later be called the September Intervention began to take shape—a coup conceived not as conquest but as rescue, born from despair and the conviction that a nation on the brink could still be saved from itself.

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(Written with help from ChatGPT)

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Revolution

 

Revolution is a gripping political chronicle of South Africa’s rebirth after a 2026 coup that topples a failing government and sparks an age of reform. Led by the principled academic Harvey Jacobs, a coalition of soldiers, scholars, and civil rights leaders rebuild the nation on fairness, discipline, and Ubuntu.

From collapsing institutions and mass unemployment arises a technocratic government that dares to do what others feared: print money to create jobs, merge ministries to end corruption, and replace chaos with competence. As industries revive and crime falls, new schools, hospitals, and homes rise across the land.

Through Jacobs’s televised addresses and the Council’s policy debates, Revolution traces how moral leadership, economic imagination, and social renewal turn a country from despair to dignity. Five years later, with growth surging and democracy beckoning, Jacobs faces his final test — to relinquish power or extend reform.

Told as a historical chronicle, Revolution is both cautionary and inspiring — a vision of how nations may rebuild themselves through courage, reason, and moral conviction.

Misadventure on the Mountain

 

This is a largely true account, devoid of embellishment. It is about a hike undertaken in the Kogelberg Biosphere by an elderly man and a not so elderly woman. The events were related to me by the man, who I have known for over half a century, and I can vouch for the veracity of his words concerning recent events, not enough time having elapsed for him to edit his memory.

At the age of 74 he is driven by the dread of physical decline to set himself challenges that test his strength, athleticism and endurance. He surfs, cycles, kayaks, and recently completed a one-mile swim in Fals Bay. Admittedly, he needs to swallow anti-inflammatory medication prior to any of these events.  This enables him to dismiss complaints from his overworked joints.

Casting about for another opportunity to defy the relentless advances being made by osteoporosis, spondylosis of the lumbar spine and sarcopenia, he learned of a mountain hike in the Kogelberg Biosphere that sounded like it was not for sissies. Twenty-five kilometres in length, it started at the Palmiet River and climbed over the intervening range to Rooi Els. When he suggested the walk to his wife, she said that this was a two-day hike that was too long to complete in a single outing. He could count her out on this one.

He knew a couple who were keen hikers, and when he suggested they accompany him the man shook his head, judging the distance in twelve hours to be beyond his capability. His wife, however, agreed to take up the offer. A strong-willed woman in her sixties, she was physically fit and had the assertive self-assurance of a successful business person.

It was 7.30 and getting light when they set off after being dropped at the start of the trail. The old fellow was feeling confident and full of vigour, having popped an Arcoxia and two Tramacet half an hour earlier. The late winter vegetation was in prime condition and they made their way through a variety of proteas, ericas, restios, pelargoniums, salvias and heath. The woman led the way, hardly bothering to use her walking pole, while he followed close behind, wielding his two sticks for stability and leverage. The path was clear but narrow and not well-worn. They gained height at a steady rate, the gradient being undemanding, and the views on both sides were increasingly rewarding.

When, after three hours, they stopped for a drink of water and a snack on energy bars, he was grateful for the chance to take the weight off his feet and rest on a shelf of rock. The respite was brief, however, for she soon shouldered her backpack and urged him to do likewise. There was still a long way to go.

Around one o’clock they stopped for a fifteen-minute lunch break before pressing on. They had reached the highest point of the trail and now it was mostly downhill, which was good for muscle fatigue but jarring on his knees and hips. The afternoon wore on and it seemed to him she was quickening her pace. He knew that without the support of his walking poles he would have been stumbling and unable to keep up.

It was midafternoon when she slowed and then came to a halt. For a while the track had been fading, and now there was no trace of it at all. Continuing in the general direction they had been on, they pressed on until she spotted a cairn of stones off to the left. Reaching it, they were relieved to find themselves on a path again. It led to another cairn, and then another, before abruptly disappearing. It was gone four and, although they could see the sea in the distance where Rooi Els lay, the woman estimated there was at least another five kilometres between them and their destination. And it would soon be getting dark.

Below them to their right they could see a gorge running towards the sea. Hoping they would be able to follow it, they made their way diagonally  through thick brush down the hillside until, no longer able to stand, they took to sliding crab like, holding on to bushes to slow their descent. At a rocky outcrop the woman stopped, and when he joined her, they looked down into the gorge and agreed that to descend any further was too dangerous. They would have to retrace their steps. He looked up at the almost vertical hillside, and it was at this point in his story that I asked him if he was starting to panic.

“Panic? Yes, I was more than worried. You could say I was beginning to shat myself. I don’t know how I found the strength to claw my way back up that precipitous slope.”

When he reached his companion, who was waiting for him on more or less level ground, he collapsed with exhaustion and relief. The light dwindling, they agreed they were in serious trouble, and it was at this point that she made her executive decision. If there was cell phone reception up there they would have to call for help.

Fortunately for them, the signal was strong, and she was soon making contact with the Wilderness Search and Rescue hotline. The operator told her to pin their location and remain where they were until help arrived, which would be in about three hours’ time.

The evening was cool but the wind was light, and they made themselves as comfortable as they could in the lee of some tall sugar bushes. It grew dark and the stars shone with intensity in a moonless black sky. Some two and a half hours later he was jolted from a semi-doze by his hiking companion. Not far off two lights were bobbing in the dark. She got to her feet and started shouting to attract the attention of their rescuers.

Members of the Mountain Club of South Africa, they first assessed the condition of their charges, and it was agreed that it would be possible to guide them down to safety without having to call for additional backup. Inexplicably, they had brought only one extra headlamp and , in a show of foolish gallantry, the old man forfeited it to the lady, and had to grope his way in the light from one of the mountaineers walking close behind him. Again, it was thanks to his trusty walking poles that he was saved from missing his footing, falling and breaking an ankle.

Well past midnight, they finally reached the end of the trail and found a reception committee awaiting their arrival. Apart from the main rescue vehicle, which looked like an ambulance, there were two emergency services bakkies loaded with all manner of gear. Eight personnel, plus the two mountaineers, had responded to their SOS. A paramedic gave them a thorough examination, declared them unscathed bar some minor cuts, scratches and bruises, and then they were transported back to a meeting point in Rooi Els. There they were reunited with their spouses, who had been waiting in a state of extreme anxiety. Thus ended their ordeal.

*

When I recounted this story to my son, who has met and interacted with his father’s old mate on a number of occasions, he listened with interest before commenting.

“So, they had cell phone reception?”

“Yes, lucky for them.”

“And they didn’t think of using Google Maps when they lost the path?”

I could tell from the tone of his voice his eyebrows were raised and he was shaking his head.

“I don’t know. How would that have helped?”

“They could have used the satellite option and zoomed in to find their way. Dead easy. I use it when I go hiking or exploring coastal and mountain tracks on my scrambler. Could have saved themselves and the rescue team a whole lot of sweat.”

“It’s all very well for you to be disparaging. They are not millennials like you. Not everybody is familiar with all this stuff.”

“That’s for sure. Anyway, it all ended happily. But he must have felt a bit of a fool, getting lost like that? Somewhat embarrassing.”

“He didn’t sound embarrassed. Totally unabashed, in fact. I think he sees it as another accomplishment, being successfully rescued.”

“And it hasn’t knocked his confidence? Maybe he will slow down and start acting like  an old man?”

“I seriously doubt it. Even now he is probably planning his next escapade.”