No, it's not corruption, state capture, the collapse of infrastructure, record-breaking levels of crime, a failing public health system, a sluggish economy, mismanaged land reform, crippling municipalities or even breaking Eskom.
The ANC's biggest failure after almost 30 years of governing South Africa is a poor, under resourced and unionised education system that has condemned an entire generation of children to a future of unemployment, poverty and hardship.
Nelson Mandela championed nation-building and avoiding a civil war; Thabo Mbeki focused on economic growth and empowerment; Jacob Zuma enriched an Indian family and built a compound at Nkandla, and Cyril Ramaphosa spent five years trying to undo Zuma's damage.
Not one ANC administration has had a firm and dedicated focus on education and acknowledged, as Lee Kuan Yew did when he became prime minister of Singapore in 1959, that a solid education system underlies all other success.
Without a proper, world-class education you cannot grow the economy, create jobs, reduce poverty and remove social ills that breed crime.
There was one number that stood out from last week, and it did not come from Ramaphosa's seventh State of the Nation Address (SONA), delivered in Cape Town on Thursday.
It was from the opening address of former deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka's release of the annual Reading Panel report on the levels of literacy in our primary schools.
In 2022, only 18% of Grade 4 or 10-year-old children in our public schools could read for meaning. Eighteen percent. Which means 82% of 10-year-olds cannot read for meaning.
If there is one reason the ANC should not be re-elected into power next year, this is it. Despite promising in his 2019 SONA that all children would read for meaning by 2030, Ramaphosa's basic education minister has failed to even put up a reading plan four years later.
At the current trajectory, it will take another 85 years to reach Ramaphosa's goal.
I don't blame Mlambo-Ngcuka for not attending Thursday's SONA. How could she sit there with a straight face, knowing that Ramaphosa would fib his way through education and seek applause for a nonsense matric pass rate number, that ignores our massive dropout rate?
"There is a silent revolution taking place in our schools," said the president last week. Let's look at this "revolution" in more detail.
If he had asked her, Mlambo-Ngcuka, working with the country's best educationists and economists, would have told Ramaphosa that only 40% of children in poor, no-fee schools can read the letters of the alphabet by the end of Grade 1.
If he had asked her, the former deputy president would have told Ramaphosa that a decade of reading progress has been wiped out by Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga and her officials' inability to manage teaching during Covid-19.
Using a vivid metaphor, Mlambo-Ngcuka said the government was load shedding a generation of children through poor education. "We need a plan, we need a budget, and we need action… We should shift our focus from exclusively focusing on matric results to what happens before a child gets to matric. The concerns start in Grade 1, and only some make it to Grade 12. Those we lose along the way become tsotsis, they are unemployed and develop mental health problems."
A "silent revolution", Mr President? Rather a thunderous crisis.
It is no surprise that only the Western Cape and Gauteng, the two richest provinces, were running their own reading programmes. The Western Cape, the only province not under ANC control, has set aside R111 million of its own budget to fund the project, while Gauteng managed to get donor funding to pay for 80% of its R107 million plan.
It's hard to argue with the fact that Premier Alan Winde's DA administration seems much more interested in fixing education than the ANC.
On Wednesday evening, on the eve of the SONA, Defend our Democracy, an umbrella body for civil society organisations championing the Constitution, gathered at St George’s Cathedral to reflect on the real state of the nation.
It was painful to listen to teenagers, dressed in their school uniforms, taking to the stage, lamenting the state of education and the country at large, singing struggle songs in 2023. Why aren't they studying robotics and Singapore math?
Unlike the ANC, Lee managed to successfully straddle the world of a revolutionary struggling for independence, and was the leader of a progressive, developing economy that championed education and progress.
"We invested heavily in our younger generation since they were our most precious resource," Lee told the World Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce in 1978.
"Education was universal and was both academic and technical and from primary to tertiary levels. Because we had a trained and educated workforce ready, industries needing such a workforce came and set up operations in Singapore."
A no-brainer, not?
Whoever wants to be president in 2024 needs to present the country with a visionary road map, like that of Lee's, to liberate us from the ANC's destructive swamp.
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