Promises and Peril: How corruption undermined the Liberation Project and where hope still lies

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

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 organizing 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’s 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.

Rather than treating graft as a matter of rogue individuals or isolated scandals, Promises and Peril traces a structural rot that has hollowed out state capacity, and facilitated political gangsterism.

Buccus draws a direct line back to the compromises of the transition era and the gradual betrayal of the Freedom Charter’s egalitarian ideals. In his telling, today’s crisis is the  consequence of a liberation movement that strayed from its founding values.

Yet the book’s power lies in more than political critique. He anchors his analysis in the lives of ordinary South Africans, people whose stories rarely make it into policy reports or parliamentary debates.

Years spent connected to trade unions, and working-class communities have given him what he calls an “ethical analytical anchor.” 

“Grassroots experiences are central to the book because they reveal the lived reality of inequality  and political abandonment that cannot be captured through elite discourse alone.” 

With so many citizens disillusioned by formal politics, Buccus is aware that diagnosis alone is not enough. Promises and Peril, he says, charts pathways toward rebuilding democratic trust.

“The book argues that rebuilding trust requires returning to people’s politics, where democracy is lived in communities rather than merely performed in Parliament. It calls for strengthening grassroots movements, protecting activists from targeted violence, and creating real participatory structures that allow ordinary people to shape decisions about land, services, safety, and local development.” 

Drawing on case studies from Latin America to postcolonial Africa, Buccus shows that trust is restored only when institutions genuinely serve the majority and when political actors recover the moral clarity and humility that once defined the liberation struggle.

If policymakers were to take away just one idea from the book, he says it should be that real transformation begins from below. 

Buccus’s conviction in bottom-up democracy is deeply personal. His journey into academia and political analysis began in a working-class home and was shaped by teachers who quietly introduced liberation ideas into the classroom during fraught political times.

Later years spent in trade union education, community organising and extensive travel across the African continent sharpened his understanding of class struggle and offered a comparative view of how different liberation movements rose, governed and—in many cases—lost their way.

Among his most defining moments, Buccus points to transformative encounters with grassroots movements such as Abahlali baseMjondolo, which has faced repeated evictions, repression and violence.

“These engagements reshaped my understanding of state violence and grassroots democracy,” he says. International solidarity work only sharpened that sense of interconnected struggle. Together, these experiences forged his commitment to writing and teaching that is “grounded in justice and lived struggle.”

It is from this rich tapestry of experience that Promises and Peril: The South African Crisis emerges—a work that refuses despair even as it documents the decline. Buccus acknowledges South Africa’s fractures with clarity, but he is equally adamant that the country retains a “powerful reservoir of democratic possibility.” 

That potential lies not in the corridors of power but in the hands of those who have sustained the dream of freedom long after the liberation movement lost its way.

In the end, Buccus offers neither false optimism nor resignation. Instead, he issues an invitation to recognise the peril, reclaim the promise, and rebuild democracy from the ground up.

Promises and Peril: The South African Crisis retails for R300 and is available at Exclusive Books and Ikes Bookstore in Durban.